Evidence That Foundations of Indus Civilization Older Than Thought

Indus Valley 2,000 years older than thought

By Nivedita Khandekar | Hindustan Times – Sun 4 Nov, 2012

New Delhi, Nov. 4 -- The beginning of India's history has been pushed back by more than 2,000 years, making it older than that of Egypt and Babylon. Latest research has put the date of the origin of the Indus Valley Civilisation at 6,000 years before Christ, which contests the current theory that the settlements around the Indus began around 3750 BC.

 

Ever since the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the early 1920s, the civilisation was considered almost as old as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The finding was announced at the "International Conference on Harappan Archaeology", recently organised by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in Chandigarh.

Based on their research, BR Mani, ASI joint director general, and KN Dikshit, former ASI joint director general, said in a presentation: "The preliminary results of the data from early sites of the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggest that the Indian civilisation emerged in the 8th millennium BC in the Ghaggar-Hakra and Baluchistan area."

"On the basis of radio-metric dates from Bhirrana (Haryana), the cultural remains of the pre-early Harappan horizon go back to 7380 BC to 6201 BC."

Excavations had been carried out at two sites in Pakistan and Bhirrana, Kunal, Rakhigarhi and Baror in India.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Hindustan Times.

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Well, I expect this will start a good rip-roaring argument in certain circles!  For myself, I'm open to the idea.  Take a look at this map from Wikipedia:

It is well established that people were living in the Iranian Plateau and making beautiful pottery/clay vessels dating to as early as c. 8000 BCE.  I am no expert in this area, by any means, but I don't find it impossible to imagine migration from the Caspian Sea area to the coast on the Arabian Sea.  Notice the location of the Indus area in relation to the ancient areas of Baluchistan and Sind.  In fact, some late 19th century writers thought that chess originated in Sind (in today's world, southeast Pakistan)

See Art of Pottery in Iran at Iran Review. 

Whenever I see Baluchistan in print, I think of Shar-i Sokhtah (spelled in myriad different ways) and the wonderful miraculously preserved wooden game board of 20-squares that was about 4300 years old.  Notice on the map above the location of Shahr-e-Suchte (a/k/a the Burnt City) and Mohenjo Daro of the Indus civilization.  I blogged about this remarkable gameboard, formed by the bodies of interwoven serpents carved into the wood, back in 2010:

Sorry, not the best photo, but it's right out of a print report from back in the 1970s when the news was first published - unfortunately, the source below did not cite to the original report:

A well-preserved wooden 20-squares gameboard (the serpent gameboard) was excavated from Shar-i Sokhtah near the borderlands of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1970's I believe, and dated to about 2400 BCE. Also known as the "Burnt City," Shar-i Sokhtah was a trading hub as well as a center of decorative arts and crafts. Image: "Evidence of Western Cultural Connections from a Phase 3 Group of Graves at Shar-i Sokhta", M. Piperno, S. Salvatori, Mesopotamien und Sein Nachbarn, Band 1, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1997, pgs. 79-84, Tafel XXII. The illustration (Fig. 4) is described as "The wooden gaming board found in grave IUP 731 at Shahr-i Sokhta. The board features an engraved serpent [on a rectangular board] coiling around itself for 20 times, thus producing 20 slots for the game."  From June 10, 2010 blog "Author Fudging on Game Board Fragment in Article on Harappan Site". 
The game of 20-squares was made famous when Woolley excavated the remains of a couple of different boards from the royal tombs of Ur, dated to roughly the same period as the gameboard from Shar-i Sokhtah. 

Author Fudging on Gameboard Fragment in Article on Harappan Site

All was well reading this interesting article at Frontline online magazine (published by The Hindu):

The rise and fall of a Harappan city
T.S. SUBRAMANIAN
Volume 27 - Issue 12 :: Jun. 05-18, 2010

...until the very end of the article, when a photograph of part of a gameboard carved on a block of stone, holding some game pieces, was published as "A game, apparently involving a puzzle, found at the site." No attribution of the photograph other than "ASI" was given, no discussion of the gameboard fragment, or the gaming pieces, or the circumstances under which this board was recovered, nor a suggested age for the artifacts, was given.  This is the photograph from the article, credited to ASI.  Now, I'm not saying it's so, but it almost does look like a photo that was cribbed from some museum's website.

Come on dude, who do you think you're kidding? That gameboard fragment certainly looks like a part of a 20-squares game, played in Sumer, Egypt and throughout the Middle East. The game pieces resemble Egyptian "spool and reel" game pieces. The existence of these fragments in Dholavira, now identified as one of the five largest Harappan sites, is fascinating and deserves further research. But the author took a cheap shot when he tossed the photograph of the fragmentary gameboard and pieces into this article, with no further explanation. A "puzzle" - yeah, right. I'm sure Indian archaeologists know about the 20-squares game, and about trade. Now THAT would be a story to develop - talk about the trade among the great cultures of the time and how games travelled with the merchants from place to place.

Leonard Woolley is credited with excavating perhaps the oldest-known examples of the 20-squares game, at Ur ("royal tombs of") dated to about 2600 BCE.  Unfortunately the wood that the boards was made out of had long disintegrated, but the intricately carved ivory, shell, stone and metal insets that decorated the boards were meticulously preserved, so much so that the gun-ho "archaeologists" of the day were able to reconstruct what they looked like.

A well-preserved wooden 20-squares gameboard (the serpent gameboard) was excavated from Shar-i Sokhtah near the borderlands of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1970's I believe, and dated to about 2400 BCE.  Also known as the "Burnt City," Shar-i Sokhtah was a trading hub as well as a center of decorative arts and crafts.  Image:  "Evidence of Western Cultural Connections from a Phase 3 Group of Graves at Shar-i Sokhta", M. Piperno, S. Salvatori, Mesopotamien und Sein Nachbarn, Band 1, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1997, pgs. 79-84, Tafel XXII. The illustration (Fig. 4) is described as "The wooden gaming board found in grave IUP 731 at Shahr-i Sokhta. The board features an engraved serpent [on a rectangular board] coiling around itself for 20 times, thus producing 20 slots for the game."

The Egyptians were fond of the game and often put it on one side of a dual-game board, with senet (30-squares) on the other side.  Image: Oriental Institute OIM 371, 20 square game.  Acacia wood, copper.
New Kingdom, Dynasties 18-19, ca. 1570-1069 B.C.

All of this is well-documented in archaeological archives, and one does not have to be a "games expert" to know about these famous finds or do an eyeball comparison of these boards to figure out what the stone gameboard fragment found at Dholavira most likely was. 

13th Century BCE Twenty Squares Game Board

We'll be too late in New York (not arriving until May 19) to see this exhibition at the Met. Damn! Image: Photo: Jürgen Liepe; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Aegyptisches Museum und. Game Box with Chariot HuntEnkomi, Tomb 58; Late Bronze Age, ca. late 13th-12th century B.C. (© The Trustees of the British Museum; The Trustees of the British Museum, London ) As far as I am aware, the oldest known twenty squares board was found at Ur and dates to about 2600 BCE; the "serpent" game board laid out in the same style at the Ur game board was uncovered at Shar-i Sokhtah (the "Burnt City"), located in the borders area in southeast Iran where Pakistan and Afghanistan all merge, and dates to about 2400 BCE. This board demonstrates the long "tail" of 8 squares that was long in use on Egyptian twenty squares game boards. Goddesschess folks have always been big fans of cross-cultural contacts and interconnectedness as a basis for explaining the existence of a sort of "universal" iconography in board games in cultures across half the globe and separated by many centuries. This exhibit demonstrates the influence of far-reaching trade and cultural contacts most beautifully and concretely - in the artifacts left behind. Check out the online review of "the Art of Foreign Influence" at Archaeology Magazine.

Twenty Squares

From Biblical Archaeological Review Strata Gallery:

A graffito version of the Royal Game of Ur, the “game of 20 squares.” This improvised board was scratched—possibly by bored soldiers—onto one of the human-headed winged bull gate sentinels from the palace of Sargon II (721–705 B.C.) in the city of Khorsabad, Iraq. Other improvised game boards have recently been discovered on the surfaces of other ancient structures.(Courtesy WikiMedia)

Cartosemiotics - Who Knew?

Pimander a/k/a dondelion explodes on the scene like the meteorite over Tunguska - leaving behind miles of flattened trees and scorched earth - but no clues as to what he's really talking about! LOL! (If you read the post below this one you'll see to what I'm referring).

So, I pulled out my trusty old Webster's dictionary to try and get a grip on Pi's true meaning. I usually need help in interpreting Pi's thought processes - something that I can sometimes almost but not quite understand - for me, an intellectual process rather akin to Parcifal's physical quest for the Holy Grail. Fitting, I guess, since what we're after is, in essence, the Holy Grail of Chess to chess historians: ORIGINS (cue spooky music here....)

Semiotic or semiotics: (paraphrasing here) from the Greek semeiotikos observant of signs, from semeiousthai to interpret signs, from semeion sign; akin to Greek semu sign - more at SEMANTIC: a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals esp. with their function in both artifically constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.

Semantics: 1. the study of meanings: (a) the historical and psychological study and the clasification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic dvelopment; (b)(1) SEMIOTIC; (2) a branch of semiotic dealing with the relations between signs and what they refer to and including theories of denotation, extension, naming, and truth 2. GENERAL SEMANTICS 3. (a) the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; esp. connotative meaning (b) the exploitation of connotation and ambiguity (as in progaganda).

So, now that I know (sort of) what semiotics actually means (I have distilled it down to the study of signs and symbols to determine their meanings), I understand (I think) what cartosemiotics means. I know that "carto" has reference to maps - but, interestingly, "carto" is not a defined term in my Websters. The closest terms are cartogram (a map showing statistics geographically) - from the French carte and gramme; cartographer (one that makes maps), and cartography (the science or art of making maps) again referencing the french word carte card, map + graphie - more at CARD. There is also the highly suggestive definitation of cartomancy - literally from the French carte card + mancie -mancy: fortune-telling by the use of playing cards. It's quite probable that the earliest board games had divinatory significance - so this much later linkage of playing cards/fortune telling is like a distant echo of practices having much greater significance in the past.

Under CARD, the etymological roots of the word are fascinating: Middle English carde, modification of Middle French carte, probably from Old Italian carta, literally, leaf of paper, from Latin charta leaf of paprus, from Greek chartes. It's most common meaning is a small stiff piece of paper.

However, there is also cardi or cardio - HEART which, although not shown as related to the root words for CARD, caught my attention because of the concept of the axis mundi The axis mundi (also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar and center of the world), a symbolic concept representing the mythical point of connection between sky and earth. One of the definitions of HEART is CENTER. The concept of the axis mundi reflects man's thought of a necessary and vital connection between the center of the universe and the center of our world. Out of man's desire to build his local "world" around this centered concept arose, I think, the first mathematics and geometry.

Pulling all of this together, cartosemiotics - simplistically (the way I like it) - the study of the meanings of symbols and signs on maps was, to the ancients, the study of signs and symbols encompassing their understanding of the mystical and/or
spiritual connection (or attempting to understand such a connection) between the Heavens and the Earth as embodied in the axis mundi, as well as using practical means (via divination, for instance) to discern the meaning and intent of such signs and symbols, which they understood to contain messages from the gods.

If we can understand that, then we can begin to understand the significance of the earliest surviving representations of what we call board games. Pimander mentioned two of them: the "Scorpion-man" board game of 16 playing spaces excavated at Jiroft, Iran, and I think he had in mind the second game board show here, excavated
at Beth Shemesh (Stratem V), dating to the Middle Bronze Age, c. 2200 - 1570 BCE. Dating of the Jiroft artifact is uncertain, but is generally thought to be from between 3,000 to 2,000 BCE, the midpoint being 2,500 BCE (about the same date as the game boards discovered by Woolley in the "royal tombs" at Ur and the wooden "serpent" game board excavated at Shar-i Sokhtah (the Iranians call it the "Burnt City" because it was destroyed at least 3 times by catastrophic fires). Shar-i Sokhtah is located in the border area of where modern-day maps show Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan all meet, near the Helmand River.

Twenty Squares (Royal Game of Ur)

From the British Museum Website:

One of the most popular games of the ancient world
From Ur, southern Iraq, about 2600-2400 BC

This game board is one of several with a similar layout found by Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The wood had decayed but the inlay of shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli survived in position so that the original shape could be restored. The board has twenty squares made of shell: Five squares each have flower rosettes, 'eyes', and circled dots. The remaining five squares have various designs of five dots. According to references in ancient documents, two players competed to race their pieces from one end of the board to another. Pieces were allowed on to the board at the beginning only with specific throws of the dice. We also know that rosette spaces were lucky.

The gaming pieces for this particular board do not survive. However, some sets of gaming pieces of inlaid shale and shell were excavated at Ur with their boards. The boards appear to have been hollow with the pieces stored inside. Dice, either stick dice or tetrahedral in shape, were also found.

Examples of this 'Game of Twenty Squares' date from about 3000 BC to the first millennium AD and are found widely from the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt to India. A version of the Mesopotamian game survived within the Jewish community at Cochin, South India until modern times.

A board of identical shape but the playing spaces defined by the body of an intertwined serpent was excavated at Shar-i Sokhtah (Iran), and dates to about 2400 BCE. I wrote an article about the "serpent game board of Iran" for Goddesschess a few years ago.