One hundred years ago was discovered a city that lived 5000 years ago, below are a few excerpts from the account of my journey to decipher its story encrypted in symbols.
My first visit to Mohen jo Daro was during my early college days in the mid-sixties. I had enjoyed the long train journey from Karachi and the weekend stay-over at the guest house of the site. We reached when the sun was about to set, the rooms were comfortable, I shared with three girls.
Prior to the visit, having heard of Sir John Marshall as the discoverer of the site, I browsed through his book Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization. Drawing inspiration from whatever little I understood, I enjoyed walking through the ancient streets.
The archaeological value of the site of Mohen jo Daro was realized only in the early twentieth century when it came to the notice of the officials of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). It was the tailend of the British colonial rule, only about three decades before they quit India and created Pakistan. Sindh, was in the northwest of their Indian empire and was a part of the Bombay Presidency, hence, its archaeological sites fell under the jurisdiction of the Western Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India. Rakhal Das Banerji was the superintendent of the Circle, who realized the pre-historic value of the site as early as in 1919. Soon after Mohen jo Daro was formally surveyed and recorded in his words, ‘The ruins consist of vast mounds of burnt bricks surrounded by smaller ones. In the centre of this area is a very high mound about 80 or 90 feet above the level of the surrounding country. This is called Muhen-ju-daro.’ Mohen jo Daro or more accurately Muan jo Daro means the ‘mound of the dead’ in Sindhi language, however, it is now spelled Mohenjo Daro which has completely changed the meaning and the original name of the site. This version of the name has led to a few hypotheses such as the one that the city is named after Mohannas, the most common word used for the fishermen in Sindh; someone even went as far as suggesting that the city was named after a certain Mohan, a common name.
Banerji had spotted the fringes of the walls of an abandoned Buddhist stupa that crowned the highest mound and he had hoped to recover the precious relic casket containing Buddha’s ashes which was rumored to be buried in the ‘drum of the stupa.’ He had absolutely no idea of a sprawling city buried under its foundations.
One of the reasons why archaeologists were unaware of the existence of Mohen jo Daro was that unlike its contemporaneous Mesopotamian and Egyptian cities it was not recorded in the later texts. The four Vedas, the earliest known sacred books of the Indian subcontinent, compiled in 1500 BCE on the very banks of the Indus, do not shed any light on the Civilization. Rig Veda, the oldest of the four, refers to Sapta Sindhu, the Land of Seven Rivers, but mentions no such civilization. The Mahabharata epic, while describing the war between Kurus and Pandavas, which was most likely fought in the plains of Punjab, does not even hint at the existence of an extinct Civilization. The Persian records refer to Sapta-Sindhu as Hapta-Hindu but are silent on the existence of a civilization and so are the Greek chronicles. This lack of reference has been one of the problems in reconstructing the proper picture of Indus Civilization. Even a simple task of establishing its age was achieved by cross dating some of its objects discovered in distant Sumer.
Mohen jo Daro was discovered at a time when the British Museum in collaboration with the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania had undertaken the excavations of Ur of the Chaldees, one of the largest cities of the Mesopotamian Civilization. It was easy to locate ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian cities as these had clues in the Bible. After all there is some truth about the image of the archaeologists surveying these regions with spade in one hand and Bible in another. In the case of Ur even the Islamic tradition could have served as a source, perhaps, this was the city where Nimrod’s fire to burn Abraham alive had turned into flowers. Before the excavations, Ur too, like Mohen jo Daro, was conspicuous due to the high mound which covered its ziggurat, Arabs called it ‘Tell al Muqayyar’ The Mound of Pitch.’ The archaeologists identified the land around it with the plains of Biblical Shinar where people coming from the east had settled.
When I first saw a picture of the Hollywood famed T.E Lawrence standing in the ruins of Ur, I thought he had excavated the site. Only later did I discover that it was Sir Leonard Woolley, standing next to him, who had the honor to excavate the grand city, the birthplace of Abraham. Sir Leonard may not have discovered Islamic relics but he did unearth the Great Ziggurat and the famous Royal Tombs loaded with treasures and skeletons – apart from royalty a majority of these were the remains of high officials who were buried alive to serve kings and the ‘court ladies’ in their afterlife. He even discovered the statuette of a ram and identified it with the Biblical ‘Ram caught in a thicket.’ And amidst all his spectacular discoveries were ‘certain elements’ which were common to the ones found in the Indus civilization.
What is more interesting is that Woolley found about eight feet below the Sumerian culture of Ur a mixed culture which was destroyed by a deluge. Woolley in his book Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavations (1929) states that this flood of Sumerian history and legend was the flood on which is based the story of Noah. Furthermore, in that older level of culture he found a baked brick which looked older to the other bricks. This led him to surmise that the pre-flood period habitations were not limited to mud and reed huts but had solid brick houses also. This suggests a possible connection between Mohen jo Daro and Ur.
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