their contents, could be positively dated by archaeological evidence, in India there was no city which could be proved to have existed before about 500 B.C. In fact, Sir John Marshall, writing in 1922 of the monuments of ancient India commented that: "Before the rise of the Maurya Empire a well developed and flourishing civilization had existed in India for at least a thousand years; yet, of the structural monuments erected during those ages not one example survived save the Cyclopean walls of Rajagriha." The Maurya Dynasty began in 321 B.C., and Rajagriha dates from the sixth century B.C. And yet, a year before those words were published, one of Sir John's staff. Rai Bahadur Daya Sahni, had already made them out of date. For in 1921 he had made trial excavations in the ancient city-mound of Harappƒ, in the Punjab, where seal-stones with animal designs and a strange, undeciphered form of picture-writing had been found. These excavations quickly established that heneath the mound of Harappa, were unmistakable evidences of an earlier city which had been occupied by a people who had lived during the chalcolithic period. Archaeologists used this word to indicate an intermediate stage between the New Stone Age (neolithic) and the Bronze Age. In Asia Minor chalcolithic cultures begin roughly at about 2500 B.C., and in Mesopotamia somewhat earlier; but, of course, it did not follow that the Indus Valley peoples had reached a comparable state of civilization at the same time. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, in his book The Indus Age, writes : 'What that implied in terms of absolute chronology was still undetermined, but it was clear enough that an urban culture appreciably earlier than the Maurya Empire, or indeed than Rajagriha, had now been identified. And in 1922 another member of Sir John's staff, Mr. R. D. Banerji, was already finding similar remains beneath a Buddhist stupa which crowned the highest of a large group of mounds known as Mohenjo-daro (possibly='the hill of the dead') nearly 400 miles away the Larkarna district of Sind. Within a few weeks of publication it was abundantly clear that a new chapter would have to be added to the prehistory of India and to the record of civilization".1 Within the past thirty years, as Sir Mortimer's "new chapter" has begun to be written, it has been established that there existed, in ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Wheeler, Sir Mortimer: The Indus Age, Cambridge University Press, 1953. |