In previous articles I mentioned my relative ignorance in regards to the Indus Valley civilization and its subcontinental successors. I’ve been attempting to remedy that, but ran into two issues. First was the ignorance of the archaeological community at large given the small amount of collected data. Second was the ignorance of the archaeological community at large due to fanciful projection of utopian ideas on the gaps in the collected data. Because of the additional sites south and east of the Indus valley, the name Harappan civilization is starting to supplant the older Indus Valley civilization. Some have suggested longer, clunkier names to cover more river valleys rather than refer to the city where the civilization was first identified. But these are long and clunky, and not very useful as a quick identifier.

The problem is, the area that the civilization in question resided in – Modern Pakistan and Northern India – was wet at the time the time and still gets annual monsoon rains. This means that pretty much all of the wood, textile, and leather artifacts of the Harappans have rotted away, leaving us with finds of stone, brick, and bone. Most of the bone found was from trash heaps where it gave an indication of their diet. So at the very least, the fabulists can’t claim that the Harappans were vegan, we know better. The bones we don’t have many of are human.

So, before I start on my hypothesis based upon literal minutes of thought, what is it I am proposing is wrong? Academics and armchair archaeologists have looked at what we do have – cities built to precise ratios and mathematic progressions, uniform brick houses with indoor plumbing, no positively identified palaces – and gone off the deep end. They have made assertions that these people were peaceful and egalitarian to downright pacifist or socialist. In short, they are taking absence of evidence as evidence of absence. They see a shortage of weapons and armor and go “they must not have had warriors”. They see uniform brick houses and infer egalitarianism. They cite the fact that we have not yet found palaces or slums as meaning a lack of social classes or central authorities.

Quite frankly, all these assertions strike me as absurd. Not just from an understanding of human nature, but because of the world in which the Harappans lived. They were contemporaneous to the Sumerians, the Elamites and a civilization along the Oxus. Not only that but have been shown to trade with these. If any of their neighbors saw a large, prosperous area with neither arms nor central organization, they’d go “Jackpot” and invade, looting, plundering, and conquering. After all, well-armed and organized enemies didn’t deter them from the same activity on their other borders.

So how do I propose to account for these gaps in the archaeological record? Overlooking the fact that less than five percent of all Harappan sites have been excavated, and the largest excavations have never scoured more than twenty percent of those where focus was concentrated, I have a simple hypothesis. I propose the Harappans practiced cremation.

Why would this explain away all the oddities in one fell swoop? It wouldn’t, but it covers a lot of them. Much of what we know about the culture and military exploits of other civilizations comes from two sources – the written record, and grave goods. We haven’t translated the Harappan script, so we have no written records, and we don’t seem to be able to find Harappan tombs or graveyards. True, these could be hiding in the massive unexcavated portion of their sites, but so could the palaces and armories. But, if the dead were burned and the ashes scattered in the sacred rivers, you find fewer human remains, and there would be no such thing as grave goods due to a lack of graves. Instead of being buried for future archaeologists to find, weapons and armor would get passed down, reused or even melted down to make other goods. They would simply walk off when the sites are eventually abandoned, carried to new areas to continue in the purpose generations of Harappans had put them to.

The handful of spear points that have been found were dismissed offhand as weapons of war due to a lack of a medial ridge. But you don’t need that feature for it to work as a weapon. In a bronze speartip, a medial ridge is there to aid in piercing armor. You can slay enemy foot soldiers without it, as wicker or wooden shields are the extent of the armor most footsloggers had in this era.

What about the supposed egalitarian nature of this society?

This is based entirely on inference from extremely planned settlements. The defining character of the sites studied is that they were built on ground that had been razed flat and done to exacting proportions with a grid of streets whose widths were exact multiples of the narrowest type of street. The houses were all near-identical square courtyarded sites with terra cotta pipes bringing in water. This reeks of a centrally planned city built to the aggrandizement of… something or someone. In fact, in some sites they have found the older settlement underneath the mature site. It is identifiable by using a different size and proportion of brick, and in having been flattened when the new city was built right on top of it.

This is the sort of architecture and urban renewal you get when someone with a strong sense of order is given a great deal of authority. Sure, whoever was billeted in those houses was probably on par with their neighbors, but it could easily be the warrior elite being rewarded by their king. The slums, if not hiding in the unexcavated area, could just as easily have been made of wood, cob, or wattle and daub style architecture, getting washed away by the elements down to easily missed post holes in the soil.

This certainly doesn’t imply such a severe aberration from the broad strokes of other cultures.

I can’t say for certain that my hypothesis is correct, since I do remember that we simply don’t have all the data needed.