claims that "to the Harappā Civilization we must presumably attribute the first really organized industry in Western Asia".3 The arts and crafts were the typical products manufactured for the use of mercantile classes, essentially utilitarian, without real artistic value, the typical products of a Civilization as opposed to the aesthetic, spontaneous products of a living Culture in full growth. In the words of an archaeologist, they were on the "dead level of bourgeois mediocrity"; and he adds: "The dead hand of conservatism in design, rather than in technique, lies heavily on all the Harappā products. Complex technical processes were known, well understood, and admirably organized for production, but the output suffered from standardization and an almost puritanical utilitarianism”4 It is highly probable that "sterll would be a better adjective than "puritanical". Little is known about the Harappā religion although archaeological research suggests the widespread cult of a Mother Goddess-undoubtedly the direct ancestor of the Grāma-Devatās who are still worshipped in countless Indian villages to this day and whose priests are outcastes, remnants of the pre-Aryan populations of India. Archaeological excavations have also prototypes of the future god Śiva seated in the position of a yogi, as well as evidence of phallic worship. And, most important of all, the Harappā, people buried their dead, the symbolic gesture of men concerned with duration, like the Chinese or the Pharaonic Egyptians-and in sharp contrast to the succeeding Aryans. And so, for almost a thousand years, more or less from 2700 B.C. to 1700 B.C., this great Civilization flourished in relative peace. But like all Civilizations, it seems to have become completely sterile and ossified as time streamed by. Even technologically, it became backward. Although Harappā men were at the time the sole inventors and users of saws with undulating teeth, although they mae!e ample use of copper and bronze, they did not know iron; and whereas from the third millennium onward Mesopotamians knew how to fashion tools with sockets for handles, Harappā ignored this technical revolution. Harappā, it seems, had not domesticated the horse. Inevitably, this great Civilization was at the mercy of barbarians who were technologically more advanced. When those barbarians appeared, some time in the first half of the second millennium B.C., on the northwest passes of Lak Phusi, the Bolan and the Gaj Valley, the great Civilization of Harappā collapsed for all time and faded ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3 Ibid., p. 170. 4 Ibid., p. 200. |