The Indus Enigma and Elam

Along the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India, a third great civilization arose in the same window of deep antiquity, and almost everything about it runs against the grain of the story we have just told. The Harappan civilization, named for one of its cities, built from around 2600 BCE the largest urban world of its age, the cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa and more than a thousand smaller settlements, spread across a territory larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia put together. And it built them with a cool, almost modern rationality that still astonishes the archaeologists who walk their streets. The great Harappan cities were laid out on planned grids oriented to the compass. They had covered brick sewers running beneath the streets, private bathrooms in ordinary houses, public wells, and elaborate drainage, a standard of urban sanitation that much of the world would not see again until the nineteenth century of our own era. Their fired bricks were standardized to a fixed ratio and produced to the same dimensions across hundreds of miles, as though a single building code governed a whole subcontinent.

And here the strangeness begins, because for all this scale and sophistication, the Indus cities are missing almost everything we have come to expect of a first civilization. We have found no great temples we can identify as such, no unmistakable palaces, no royal tombs stuffed with gold, no monuments to boastful god-kings, and, most striking of all, remarkably little evidence of warfare, few weapons, few fortifications built for battle, no triumphant art of conquest. What they built instead of a pyramid or a ziggurat was, at Mohenjo-daro, a Great Bath, a large, carefully waterproofed public pool at the heart of the city, whose purpose we can only guess was some kind of ritual cleansing. This was a civilization, it seems, that poured its collective genius not into glorifying a ruler or overawing a god but into water, cleanliness, order, and trade, and that may have been governed in some way we do not recognize because it left no throne.

We say "it seems" and "may have been" because the Indus keeps its deepest counsel still, and this is the honest heart of the chapter. The Harappans wrote. They left behind some four thousand short inscriptions, mostly on small carved seals, in a script of a few hundred signs. And no one has ever read a word of it. Despite more than a century of effort and every tool of modern computation, the Indus script remains undeciphered, and because the inscriptions are so brief and no bilingual key like the Rosetta Stone has ever surfaced, it may remain unreadable forever. So this great, orderly, seemingly peaceable civilization, which at its height may have held more than a million people, is almost entirely silent to us. We can read the trash of a Sumerian household and the funeral wishes of an Egyptian clerk, but we cannot read a single sentence the Indus people wrote about themselves. We do not know what language they spoke, what they called their gods or their cities or themselves, how they governed, or what they believed. One tantalizing seal shows a horned figure seated in what looks like a yogic posture, surrounded by animals, and it is tempting to see in it a distant ancestor of later Indian tradition, but honestly, we are reading a picture because we cannot read the words. This book has promised to be clear about the limits of what we know, and the Indus is one of the great humbling limits: an entire founding civilization that we can see in exquisite material detail and cannot hear at all.

Even its ending is a puzzle we cannot fully solve. Around 1900 BCE the great cities were gradually abandoned, and the old dramatic story of a violent Aryan invasion sweeping in to destroy them has largely collapsed under the evidence; the picture now looks more like a slow unraveling driven by a shifting, drying climate and the migration or failure of the rivers the cities depended on, perhaps the same broad climate stress we will see topple other Bronze Age worlds. The people did not vanish; they dispersed, and their heritage flowed on into the later cultures of India. But their cities fell silent, and their script fell silent with them.

Beside the Indus we should set its smaller western neighbor, Elam, in the highlands of what is now southwestern Iran, if only because it makes the same point twice. Elam was an early and durable civilization in its own right, centered on the city of Susa, a cultural and commercial bridge between Mesopotamia and the East. And the Elamites, too, developed an early writing system, the so-called Proto-Elamite script, among the oldest writing anywhere. And it, too, is undeciphered. Two of the founding civilizations of the human story, side by side, have left us records we simply cannot read. It is a useful corrective to any sense that the deep past is a solved problem. Some of the first chapters of the human story were written in inks we have lost the power to see, and the people who wrote them are waiting, patiently and perhaps permanently, on the far side of a silence we have not yet learned to cross.

The river civilizations were the loud and the quiet founders of the world we know. But civilization was not, it turns out, a single invention that spread from one Near Eastern hearth. The same deep human impulses, to build in stone, to align with the heavens, to organize many hands toward one vision, were stirring at the very same time in places that had never heard of Sumer, on lands the river peoples did not know existed.