It was an architectural culture, carrying out prodigious feats of civil engineering and building its gigantic cities out of bricks so strong, so uniform and so well made that even after thousands of years they could safely be reused on modern construction projects (something that happened frequently in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before Harappa and Mohenjodaro were recognized as archaeological sites). The Indus-Sarasvati civilization was also the first in the world to experiment with ‘New Towns’ – towns literally planned and built from scratch, according to a blueprint – the first to institute scientifically designed urban sanitation systems and the first to build an efficient tidal dock.
It was a literate culture. Altogether, some 4200 objects – mainly pottery and seals made from steatite and terracotta – have been found bearing the Indus-Sarasvati script. Many of the seals are inscribed in ‘mirror image’ (so as to produce a positive impression when stamped, for example, into damp clay) and are thought to have been used by merchants to brand-mark their goods. The earliest inscribed seal (excavated in Harappa) dates to 2600 BC while the pottery is a little older. The average inscription contains five signs, the longest twenty-six, and there are many with just one sign. Despite the best efforts of the world’s leading linguists, it has not proved possible to translate any of inscriptions (although quite a number of translations have been attempted and then rejected by the academic community). There is, however, a general consensus that the script, as presently known ‘emerged as a fully-formed system of abstract signs called graphemes … After careful comparison of all the signs, most scholars agree that there are between 400 and 450 different signs or graphemes.’1 The mature form of the script, in other words, appears suddenly in the archaeological record some time before 2600 BC. There are no indications of evolution or development. One day it wasn’t there, next day it was.
How is this to be explained?
A missing literature
It could simply be because the traces of the script’s evolution exist but have not yet been found by archaeologists, or that such traces once existed but have now all been destroyed. It could be that the script did not ‘evolve’. Perhaps it was invented and introduced all at once, a bit like the script for the previously unwritten Somali language that was invented in the 1960s and introduced in the Horn of Africa in 1972.2 Or it could be that the Indus-Sarasvati civilization did not regard written documents as a suitable medium in which to preserve its great literary and religious compositions. What I mean to suggest by this is the possibility that the Indus-Sarasvati script might have been devised to serve strictly limited commercial and bureaucratic functions such as labelling merchandise, naming the owners of goods, naming the contents of pots, etc. It could be that the nature of the society was such that it would have been regarded as a desecration to use the script to write down anything that was revered or sacred like a wonderful story from antiquity or the prayers, hymns and recitations used in religious services.
To live in the twenty-first century is to live in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to imagine how any kind of civilization could exist without large-scale written communications. We regard writing as an essential intellectual skill, as well as the only way to preserve proper long-term records. In our society to call someone ‘illiterate’ is therefore an insult; people who do not read and write fluently often have feelings of inadequacy; and there is widespread unstated agreement that the written word is in itself a virtue, that’s its absence is a curse, and that no high civilization could possibly develop without it. This great, universally accepted ‘given’, as unimpeachable as motherhood, is one of the reasons why historians and archaeologists regard evidence of the introduction and extensive use of writing as amongst the defining characteristics of a ‘civilization’ – to such an extent that ‘preliterate’ cultures are automatically regarded as much less civilized than literate ones.
But isn’t this exactly the perspective that one would expect of a highly literate technical society looking at the past? Wouldn’t it tend to seek out its own image there, in however early a form, and define that as ‘civilization’?
I believe that this may be what has happened with the vexed issue of the indecipherable Indus-Sarasvati script. The very brevity of the inscriptions (which is part of what makes them so difficult to decipher) means that they cannot have been used to tell complex stories containing numerous details and large quantities of information – and I do not think any scholar would disagree with me on that point.3 Yet, to my mind, it is inconceivable that a society so large, so complex, so well ordered and so intelligently run as the Indus-Sarasvati civilization did not possess a literature, did not possess religious and spiritual compositions, did not have vital sacred records that it wanted to preserve. I am certain that it had all these things, and since I know that this society understood the principle of writing, and indeed had developed a writing system with more than 400 different signs, I am not at all inclined to conclude that it did not possess any information of great cultural importance but rather that it must have made a deliberate choice not to use its script to convey such information.
A potion for remembering …
A clue as to why a civilization might not regard writing as an automatic virtue, and why its leaders might even take an ethical decision to restrict the use of writing, has been passed down to us by Plato. In Phaedrus he has Socrates pose a rhetorical question: ‘What feature makes writing good, and what inept?’ He then declines to give an immediate answer to this question but instead continues:
I can tell you what I’ve heard the ancients said … Among the ancient gods … in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth [Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom], and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing.4
What the ancients said about Thoth, Socrates reports, was that having invented writing he had gone to the god Amon, ‘the King of all Egypt at that time’, and urged him to introduce it amongst the populace, with these words: ‘O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory or wisdom.’ But Amon replied:
O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practise using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.
Later in the discussion Socrates makes it clear that he feels there are certain matters and certain kinds of information that should not be available to all but should be limited to ‘those with understanding’:
Once it has been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not …5
These passages in the Phaedrus may be interpreted in many different ways, but one of the things they definitely are is a sturdy defence of the oral tradition and a clear statement that scripts may not, ultimately, be the best way to preserve precious cultural documents. Because a script depends on signs there is always the possibility that a time will come when those signs will no longer be understood (as has indeed happened with the Indus-Sarasvati script today
). In such a case any knowledge consigned to the future exclusively in the ‘ark’ of that script will have been utterly and irredeemably lost. Because a script is accessible to anybody who reads it means there is no guarantee that compositions expressed in it will be delivered only to those whom they are intended for. If the compositions contain sacred material that is aimed exclusively at initiates within a cult, for example, and cannot be properly understood without specific information possessed by those initiates, then it is probable that such compositions – even if they can be ‘translated’ in a literal sense – will appear meaningless, nonsensical or absurd to outsiders. Last but not least, because a script eliminates much of the need for memory its introduction in any society will inevitably lead to a reduction in the value of the science of memory and in due course that science will be forgotten. Memorization is not a highly regarded skill in our society today (and increasingly less so as the years go by), yet it is possible that a powerful memory, developed through discipline and training, could operate as a catalyst to other intellectual and perhaps even spiritual skills which would otherwise lie dormant.
By keeping communications within a strictly oral tradition all of these problems can be avoided. From generation to generation, from initiate to initiate directly, the sacred archives (or hymns, or utterances) can be passed down and their obscurities explained where necessary, no doubt evolving to some extent as the language in which they are carried evolves, perhaps even being translated into other languages – but always strictly through the medium of the spoken and memorized word, with suitable interpretation and explanation by a wise practitioner at hand, never, never, never through the medium of the written word.
Consider sacred texts that are valuable to ‘advanced’ technological societies such as Japan and the United States. In Japan the Nihongi and the Kojiki are revered for the antiquity and wisdom of the traditions they contain. In the United States the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible are equally revered amongst Christians. But in neither country does more than a tiny handful of people (if indeed any at all) have these enormous and complicated texts off by heart. In consequence, although they may be found in many household libraries, they are not often discussed or consulted by the majority of Japanese or Americans today.
Now, by contrast, consider the case of India with its population of one billion.
Almost supernatural feats of memory
Unlike in other big modern industrial nations that have long ago lost all sense of the sacred and all respect for ‘what the ancients said’, the sacred life still permeates India through and through to such an extent that an appeal to the authority of scripture can still settle all disputes. And unlike the cultures of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and the Americas, where only spectacular fossils of architecture and language remain, the culture of ancient India is still vibrantly alive today in the subcontinent and offers as its gift to the present a vast library of archaic rituals, dances, games, ceremonies, festivals and customs as well as an immense oral literature that has not only been preserved and continuously passed on in the memory of sadhus and rishis (sages, wise men) for thousands of years but that is also celebrated, rehearsed, admired and relished in hundreds of thousands of Hindu villages from the Himalayas to the sea.
The oldest elements of India’s oral tradition are the Vedas (the word veda means ‘knowledge’), consisting of four major samhitas (compilations of hymns): the Rig Veda (the most ancient and the most revered), the Sama Veda, the Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda. The language used is a very archaic form of Sanskrit, and there is a great deal of it! The Rig alone has an extent of around 450,000 words (about twice as long as this book) expressed in 1028 hymns made up of 10,589 verses.6 The total compendium of the four samhitas probably runs to almost double that. But what is most amazing about these hymnodies is not so much their overall length, which is awesome, but that for most of their history it is probable that no written versions of them ever existed – and not because they could not be written down but because the priests of the Vedic religion that evolved into Hinduism believed that they should not be written down but should be kept alive instead in human memory.7
The Vedic texts were originally part of an oral literature. They are sruti, or ‘Heard’, and Brahmins [the priestly caste in Hinduism] were expected to memorize all four books, some parts of which were clearly composed and arranged to assist in this learning process. It can be surmised then that there was a period of composition, when new material was added and older verses were edited and changed. But at some point this flexibility in composition stopped and the priests defined their text as immutable, not to be changed by one word or even one syllable, and the slightest mispronunciation or deviation from the canon was believed to be a sacrilege.8
Significantly there is no mention of writing in the Rig Veda. Moreover, even when writing had become widespread in ancient Indian society for other purposes, strict proscriptions continued to be enforced against writing the Vedas down. This ban was respected until about 1000 years ago, from which period the earliest surviving written versions have reached us.9
Gregory Possehl, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the world’s leading experts on ancient India and the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, comments:
The Indian Brahmins took the memorization of the Vedas very seriously, and developed means to ensure accuracy and the careful reproduction of the same words and sounds from generation to generation. Careful, even exact oral replication of the Vedas was part of the Hindu faith, institutionalized during the learning process and maintained through peer observation and pressure through the life of a Brahmin. This community of faithful Brahmins was large and they all went through the same learning process, which was standardized to some degree. Deviation from the … path of exact replication would have brought powerful forces of censure to bear on the offender …
There is also good agreement between the written Vedas that exist from Medieval times on, and the oral versions. It is thought that the oral tradition may not have been contaminated by the literate, but we cannot really know for sure. Still, the writing down of the Vedas was not favoured, nor widespread …
The noted Sanskritist J. A. B van Buitenen told me that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Europeans who were learning Sanskrit were impressed by the fact that no matter where they went in the subcontinent, when they heard Brahmins recite the Vedas they heard the exact same thing. From Peshawar to Pondicherry, or Calcutta to Cape Comorin, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Brahmins who had no direct contact knew these texts in precisely the same way …
[There are therefore] some reasons to believe that this oral tradition is different from most, and that what we have today as texts may be remarkably close to those of deep antiquity.10
The problem of the Aryas
How deep? How ancient is the content of the Vedas really? And from what wellspring of philosophy, insight and religious speculation do they flow?
Scholars like Gregory Possehl, with the (almost) unanimous backing of non-Indian Indologists and Sanskritists, believe that the Vedic hymns were ‘codified’ at around 1200 BC. They admit that the actual compositions must be older than that but it is clear that they would be unlikely to accept a date – even for composition – that is earlier than about 1500 BC, perhaps begrudgingly 1800 BC in some rare cases.11 Why should this be so when the archaeological record makes it is clear that the second millennium BC in India, if not a time of total decay and collapse as it has sometimes been painted, was certainly not a time that was magnificently fruitful intellectually and does not look like the sort of epoch that would have produced a sublime intellectual creation like the Rig Veda? On commonsense grounds alone, isn’t this enigmatic text, which we will explore in chapter 6, at least as likely to have been the work of the equally enigmatic Indus-Sarasvati civilization? And why is it only now that such a possibility is beginning to be tentatively explored by some scholars while the
majority still won’t even consider it?
The answer is that the Vedic peoples are referred to repeatedly in the Rig as the ‘Aryas’ and that from this a great and sustained error of orthodox historical scholarship was spawned. Even though the adjective ‘Aryan’ in ancient Sanskrit actually means ‘noble’ or ‘cultured’ – and therefore the Aryas are essentially ‘the “noble” or “cultured” folk’, and thus as easily a religious cult as an ethnic group – it was assumed by historians and archaeologists that they were a race and that they had invaded India around 1500 BC. Known as the ‘Aryan invasion theory’, this error was only brought to light and dropped from official curricula during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Because it has far-reaching implications, and requires the wholesale rewriting of canonical academic texts and standard works of reference, it is the kind of error that historians are not normally eager to admit. Yet in this case, to their credit, it is the orthodox scholars themselves who have exposed it.
It is not an error that has ever made the headlines. But since the early 1990s it has been increasingly widely discussed in academic journals and books and taken into account, more or less completely, in all new thinking and teaching on the subject. So there is no question at all of a cover-up or even of significant denial by those whose specialisms have been most directly affected or whose publications in scientific journals are now out of date.
The Aryan invasion of India
The attribution of the Vedas to ‘Aryan invaders’, the date of 1200 BC for the codification of the Vedas, and the Aryan invasion theory itself can all be traced back to an idea that had already planted roots by the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was then that a number of Western scholars began to notice that Sanskrit, the classical language in which the Vedas are written, and its modern relatives in north India such as Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujerati and Sindhi, have extremely close affinities with modern and ancient European languages such as Latin, Greek, English, Norwegian and German. How, the scholars asked themselves, had this amazingly widespread distribution of what are now known as the ‘Indo-European’ family of languages come about?