A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [36]
For the Iraqis, we think of it as part of the oldest civilization – which is in our country and we are descendants of it. We identify with quite a lot of the objects from the Sumerian period that have survived until now … so ancient history is really the unifying piece of Iraq today.
So Mesopotamia’s past is a key part of Iraq’s future. Archaeology and politics, like cities and warfare, seem set to remain closely connected.
The seal mould (top) and an impression from it
13
Indus Seal
Stone stamp, from Harappa, the Indus Valley (Punjab) Pakistan
2500–2000 BC
In the last two objects we have seen the rise of the city and the state. But cities and states can also fall. I want to take you now not just to a city that was lost, but to an entire civilization that collapsed and then vanished from human memory for more than 3,500 years, largely due to climate change. Its rediscovery in Pakistan and north-west India was one of the great archaeological stories of the twentieth century; in the twenty-first we are still piecing the evidence together. This lost world was the civilization of the Indus Valley, and the story of its rediscovery begins with a small carved stone, used as a seal to stamp wet clay.
We have been exploring how the first cities and states grew up along the great rivers of the world, and how these new concentrations of people and of wealth were controlled. Around 5,000 years ago the Indus River flowed, as it still does today, down from the Tibetan Plateau into the Arabian Sea. The Indus civilization, which at its height encompassed nearly 200,000 square miles, grew up in the rich, fertile floodplains.
Excavations there have revealed plans of entire cities, as well as vigorous patterns of extensive international trade. Stone seals from the Indus Valley have been found as far afield as the Middle East and central Asia, but the seals in this chapter were found in the Indus Valley itself.
In the British Museum there is a small collection of stone seals, made to press into wax or clay in order to claim ownership, to sign a document or to mark a package. They were made between 2500 and 2000 BC. They are all approximately square, about the size of a modern postage stamp, and they’re made of soapstone, so they were easy to carve. And they have been beautifully carved, with wonderfully incised images of animals. There’s an elephant, an ox, a kind of cross between a cow and a unicorn and, my favourite, a very skippy rhinoceros. In historical terms, the most important of them is, without question, the seal that shows a cow that looks a bit like a unicorn; it was this seal that stimulated the discovery of the entire Indus civilization.
The seal itself was discovered in the 1850s, near the town of Harappa, in what was then British India, about 150 miles south of Lahore in modern Pakistan. Over the next fifty years three more seals like it arrived in the British Museum, but no one had any idea what they were, or when and where they’d been made. But in 1906 they caught the attention of the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall. He ordered the excavation of the ruins at Harappa, where the first seal had been found. What was discovered there led to the rewriting of world history.
Marshall’s team found at Harappa the remains of an enormous city and went on to find many others nearby, all dating to between 3000 and 2000 BC. This took Indian civilization much further back in time than anyone had previously thought. It became clear that this was a land of sophisticated urban centres, trade and industry,