Indus Valley Civilization

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The Indus Valley Civilization — also called the Harappan civilization, after the first of its cities to be excavated — was the Bronze Age urban culture that flourished across the Indus basin, in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India, at its height roughly between 2600 and 1900 BCE. It was one of the three great river-valley civilizations of the ancient world, contemporary with Old Kingdom Egypt and Sumer, and the largest of the three in extent.

What archaeology has established is substantial and impressive. The Harappans built planned cities — Mohenjo-daro and Harappa the greatest among them — laid out on grids, with standardized fired brick, covered drains, public wells, and the structure at Mohenjo-daro known as the Great Bath. They used a uniform system of weights, worked copper and bronze, and traded with Mesopotamia, where their goods and seals turn up in datable contexts. Around 1900 BCE the cities were gradually abandoned; the causes are debated, with shifting river courses and climate change now favored over the older idea of sudden invasion.

What remains out of reach is almost everything the Harappans might have said about themselves. Their writing survives only as short inscriptions, most of them on small carved seals, and the Indus script has never been deciphered; scholars do not agree on what language it recorded, or whether the signs encode a language at all. Without readable texts, the civilization’s religion can be approached only through objects, and inference here is unusually fragile. Excavators have pointed to female figurines, to motifs that may be sacred trees or animals, and to a recurring horned figure seated in what looks like a cross-legged posture, surrounded by beasts. The early excavator John Marshall identified this last as a “proto-Śiva,” a forerunner of the later Hindu god in his aspect as lord of creatures, and read it as evidence of yoga and Śaiva devotion already present in the third millennium BCE.

That reading has had a long life and remains widely contested. It rests on a resemblance between an undeciphered image and a deity attested only much later, in Vedic and post-Vedic texts whose relation to the Indus world is itself disputed; critics note that the seated horned figure may be a bull or a wholly different being, and that “yoga” reads a thousand years of subsequent practice back into a posture. The claim sits at the center of a larger and politically charged argument over continuity — whether Harappan religion flows directly into historical Hinduism, or whether the Vedic tradition arrived later and overlaid it. The honest position is that the seals show something carefully made and evidently meaningful, and that what it meant to the people who cut it is, for now, unrecovered.

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