You're Dead to Me - The Indus Civilisation

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by guests Dr Danika Parikh and comedian Ahir Shah in the Bronze Age to explore the ancient Indus civilisation. They take a close look at the terracotta, toilets and even the unicorns of this vast civilisation which was in existence some 2,000 years before Pompeii.Research by Aimee Hinds Scott Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Aimee Hinds Scott and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve HankeyYou’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are jumping back to the Bronze Age and sailing down the Indus River to learn all about the archaeology of toilets, terracotta, ornaments and even unicorns.

Yes, it's the Indus civilisation. And to help us excavate this buried history, we have two very special guests. In History slash Archaeology Corner, she's a postdoctoral fellow at University of Cambridge Museums and postdoctoral research associate at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her research includes the archaeology of the Indus Civilisation of South Asia, as well as empire and race in museum collections, and she's a founding member of the European Society of Black and Allied Archaeologists. It's Dr Danica Parik. Welcome, Danica. Hello. Thank you for having me, Greg. I'm excited to dig in. Oh, an archaeology pun. Well done. Congratulations. Secret handshake for you. And in Comedy Corner,

he's a stand-up comedian, writer, and podcast regular. You might have seen his stand-up special Dots on HBO Max, or heard him on Radio 4, or seen him on Mock the Week, or Have Got News for You, or Live at the Apollo, or MASH Report. He's very busy busy and you'll definitely remember him from our Julius Caesar episode. It's Ahir Shah. Welcome, Ahir. Hello, Greg. And as I learned on the previous appearance, it's actually Julius Caesar. So who's the historian now? I'll get my coat. There's been a coup. Today, we're going way back into the ancient past, so way beyond Julius Caesar, to explore a topic with much lower name recognition. So what do you know about the Indus civilization, Ahir? So I think that Indus is like where the word Hindu comes from, etymologically.

I think that that's the thing. I imagine that this is a civilization, like given where the Indus is in Northwest, what is now like Northwest India and Pakistan. I'm sure that the current government of India would like us to believe that it was exclusively in India. And these people identified as Hindus and had little statues of Ganesh that they carried around with them all the time and invented faster than light travel and all of this sort of business until they were rudely disturbed or what have you but I'm not sure quite how historically accurate some of the BJP's claims on that front are. Danica any comment on that before we launch in? The Indus is very exciting so everyone wants to claim it but geographically that is where it is and yes I think a lot of people tend to imagine certain things about the industry, which we're going to hopefully get into over the next four hour long podcast. I think you said this

was Greg. Four weeks. It's pretty epic. So what do you know? Great. Well, that brings us to the first segment of the podcast, the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I'll bet you've heard of Troy, the subject of Homer's epic poem, The Iliad, as well as the slightly dodgy film with Brad Pitt. And we've previously regaled to you about the glories of Ramesses the Great and ancient Egypt and the New Kingdom and all that. But these mighty cities came centuries after the Indus people were doing their thing. And yet, the Indus civilisation doesn't get anywhere near as much coverage in modern films or books or television or whatever. Maybe you've seen the Hindi language film set in the city of

Mohenjo-Daro. It stars Bollywood heartthrob Hrithik Roshan. Or maybe you've read Vineet Bajpai's trilogy of thriller novels that are the Indus' answer to the Da Vinci Code, but they're not crap. But for most of you, I reckon you're coming into this episode feeling pretty blank. So who were the ancient people of the Indus and what were they eating and where did they go to the toilet and how do we know anything about them? And what has this got to do with unicorns? Let's find out. Danica, let's start with the basics. When and where was the Indus civilisation and how long ago are we going back? The sites of the Indus civilisation, which is also known was the Indus civilisation and how long ago are we going back? The sites of the Indus civilisation, which is also known as the Indus Valley civilisation or the Harappan civilisation,

existed in what's now modern Pakistan and India with a bonus single site in Afghanistan. It's been dated to about 4500 to 4000 years ago, so that's between about 2600 and 1900 BC. This makes it roughly contemporary with the building of Stonehenge, and its decline predates the reign of Hammurabi in Babylon and the Mycenaean civilization in ancient Greece by a century. So this is the first phase of urbanism in South Asia. But it's also worth noting that the name Indus civilization is contested. Civilization is kind of a loaded and problematic term. And while it's often called the Indus Valley in popular culture, because it was much wider than the Indus Valley in popular culture, because it was much wider than the Indus Valley, archaeologists actually rarely refer to it this way. Okay, so we're calling them

the Indus civilization with sort of brackets next to it kind of going, it's not a brilliant name, but it's sort of the functional name. Is that fair, Danica? I think it's a compromised name. It's fine. And it covers it. It's sort of generally agreed to fill the characteristics that we need for now. Where does this term Harappan come from? Ooh, well, excellent question. So Harappan actually comes from the site Harappa, which is one of the biggest cities of the Indus civilization. Harappa was located in Punjab in modern Pakistan. But again, you know, because it comes from a single site, I think there's really good questions to be asked about whether it's fair to kind of refer to the whole very big civilization with all of these diverse sites by that name. So it would be like calling the Romans Pompeians because we'd found Pompeii and gone, oh, they must have all been Pompeians.

OK, so Harappa and Mohenjo-Hodoro are the best known cities, but they're not the only ones. You mentioned one in Afghanistan. So where is our full range of sites, Danika? Well, there's an incredible range of sites. There's other cities. It's not just Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, which are kind of the two best known ones. There's also a site called Dholavira, which is situated in the Ran of Kutch in Gujarat, and another city called Rakhi Gadi in Haryana in India. And there's many other village and town sites as well in coastal areas, along rivers, located sources of raw materials for mining and quarrying and things like that. There's really a very wide spread of these sites.

And the important thing to remember is that most Indus people would not actually have lived in cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Oh, okay. And Harappa is the modern name. What does Mohenjo-Daro mean? If I remember rightly, it's got quite an exciting name when translated. Yes. So Mohenjo-Daro, which is in Sindh in Pakistan, the name's been translated to mean the Mound of the Dead.

Sick. Ahir, what's your favourite heavy metal band? Yeah, it seems like they came out of Oslo and they're about to release their second LP. They're sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart, these cities. So how do we know this is a shared civilisation? How do we know this is not just a bunch of random cities that all have their own stuff going on? That is an excellent question because it took archaeologists a while to identify how large the civilisation was. Because, you know, it took archaeologists a while to identify how large the civilization was.

And in some ways, because we're kind of still finding sites across what we think of as, like, let's say, roughly borders. In some ways, we're still kind of expanding how big it is. Now, we know that there were commonalities between the sites. Similar pottery kind of often made and decorated the same way. Beads and figurines. We know that there's sort of standardized measurements. And there is a shared form of writing as well. Now, the thing is, there's also regional differences, which make the story more interesting. But ultimately, we do know that raw materials, finished goods and individuals kind of move between Indus sites, which shows, you know, connectivity.

May I ask, when we say cities, nowadays, you think like there are cities in the world that have 10 million people in them or whatever. But I'm assuming that we're not talking of that kind of scale. So what does it mean to be a city at that time? Mohenjo-Daro, which was the biggest city, was about 250 hectares in size, which in normal people measurements is, I think, two and a half kilometers or something. So what's that in areas the size of Wales? I think we need a Welsh consultant. It's big. I mean, I think what we can do actually are here is show you an aerial photograph of the

biggest of the cities, Mahenjo-daro. Oh, wow. Okay. So on the left, we've got our aerial view. And then on the right, we have a reconstruction of what the city might have looked like when people were living in Europe. Obviously, there are differences, but there's also certain striking similarities to me of, I guess, this is just how human beings instinctively conurbate in this way, regardless of where we're from, which is pretty cool. I love the word conurbate. Excellent. GCSE geography flooding back into my brain there. Yeah, no Oxbow Lakes in this shot, unfortunately. I mean, I think these are fairly laid out streets, aren't they, Danica? We're talking here,

it's not quite New York, but it is urban planning, right? Yes, you know, Mohenjo-Daro and big cities like that, we can definitely see signs of urban planning. It's massive. I don't know how many whales it is. And I don't know how many jelly beans it would take to fill it. We didn't cover this, but maybe you and I should collaborate on a publication about this afterwards. But inner cities were well planned with wide streets running from north to south and east to west. Cities like Mohenjodaro and Harappa were built on huge platforms made of mud brick. At urban sites, buildings were constructed from baked bricks, while at smaller sites, mud bricks were used for construction. Despite the focus on the Indus civilization as urban, rural ways of life were also really

important. Evidence actually shows that these smaller sites were not entirely characterized by agriculture, but also found part of the craft economy. So they were producing and using elite goods, including beads, ornaments, bangles, and sometimes seals. So in some of the excavations that I've worked on at very small sites, we've even found things like occasionally, you know, a gold bead and things like that, which is really exciting. It's important that you've outlaid that, but I just heard the word seals and then immediately just thought of like seals balancing beach balls on their noses. What is a seal in an archaeological sense?

It's a kiss from a rose seal. He's had a really long, varied career. He's gone all around the place. Well, a seal in the Indus sense, they're often made from carved stone and then they're used to stamp onto clay, perhaps used to seal fastenings around doors or used to seal perhaps containers. We also occasionally have unusual seals in the Indus, you know, sometimes made out of things other than stone, occasionally silver, sometimes molded from terracotta as well. But one of the interesting things about Indus seals that a lot of people don't realize is that they had a big boss at the back with a hole in it. So actually, it looks like people must have been wearing them. So people may have worn them as they move around the cities, they may have been identification or a status symbol, or communicated something, you know, about the person and who they were and what they were doing. So is it like, on the one hand, you've got like in Japan, even now, like

everyone's got their individual seal that they have with them all the time that's still used for like important documents or is it like here where ridiculously posh people have the family one on the little finger and they wander around with that is it a sort of everyone seems to have one or is it the sort of indus aristocracy go around with these uh seals well that we honestly don't know in which case just say just say i could just make it up pick one and like your words as good as your words better than anyone's so thank you i'm gonna write that down and take it around with me in my daily life you can use it as a seal and just bring it out anytime you know i have to argue with a bus driver or something like that but no we know that people weren't buried with their seals, for example.

So if they were very, very individual, maybe, you know, that would be an indicator. But we don't know if, you know, it was maybe one per individual or specific motifs in different kinship groups or things like that. But what they looked like, they're often, you know, square seals made of stone, like I said, and they feature elements of the Indus script, symbols and often animal motifs, actually mythical and real animals. And the animals depicted include unicorns, bulls and elephants, and occasionally also things like rhinoceroses, gharials, which is a type of crocodile, and even scorpions. You know, unicorns, right? Let's go with this as a question about like unicorns and like dragons and everything. Given that in so many parts of the world where they didn't know each other, and yet they've still got the idea of like,

oh, there's this lizard that breeds fire, or oh, there's this horse that's got a stick on his head, right? Who are we to say that they didn't exist, given that it seems like everyone reckoned that this was a cool thing. So I think it's just that the archaeological evidence of the unicorns hasn't been found yet. I'm team unicorn on this one.

I mean, do you want to see an Indus unicorn? Because we've got an image, haven't we? We can show you out here. And he's here now! There you go. What do you think of that i mean is that not just like there are loads of things with antlers though like that just could be a thing with an antler couldn't it it's a side on profile so in fairness you can only see one horn are there animals with antlers in that sort of area okay let me interject because we get this a lot. And I think people always say this to us, like we haven't maybe ever considered that, that it's just in profile. So obviously,

as you're looking at it, the Indus unicorn doesn't really share much resemblance with the heraldic unicorn, the fairy tale unicorn. You know, it's not so much a very glamorous horse, more of an antelope or ox. And the reason why we we call it a unicorn is because all of the other animals that are the horned animals that are shown in profile are always shown with both of their horns oh and i kind of feel like maybe greg could have helped me out here by adding one of those to show you in comparison is this a unicorn or is it just like someone was doing a specific horned animal but that had one lopped off that just like lost a horn. You could say that about any unicorn.

Is it just a horned horse that's had a fight? You know, your classic horned horse. I'll hear started as a unicorn truther and about 30 seconds later became the unicorn cynic. So it's been a real sort of 180 from you. I've experienced the zealotry of a convert twice. This is an emotional rollercoaster. I mean, in fairness, the four legs of the unicorn slash antelope are visible.

So you can see four limbs and then only one horn. So unicorn is definitely appearing quite often. So we've talked about an urban city and it's got all these houses. I think some of them are two storey. It's got these streets. It's really quite impressive. And it's over 4000 years old. So let's talk about daily life in the city and I want to get down and dirty I hear and I want to talk to you about the toilet situation

in fact I'm going to ask you having been to Pompeii what do you think the toilet situation would have been comparably 2,000 years earlier in South Asia? 2,000 years earlier well I mean it's always going to be a real problem, isn't it? Like if you've got any sort of dense living, then how you deal with that to prevent disease outbreaks. Maybe something like chamber pots and collections to be used for fertiliser in fields on the outskirts, maybe something like that.

It's a very good guess. Danica, I think we can, I'm going to say it here, the Indus people were pretty impressive when it came to sanitation infrastructure. They're turd nerds. Aren't we all of us here? I assume this was a support group. Well, yeah, Greg's right.

They're, you know, one of the most extraordinary things about these ancient cities is their sanitation infrastructure. You know, at Mohenjo-Daro, there's actually hundreds of wells for drinking water distributed around the city. And there's drainage channels connecting to most buildings, meaning that lots of people could probably have used toilets in their home, potentially sending the waste down these drainage channels far away from their homes. It's even been argued by some historians that this kind of widespread sanitation plumbing wasn't seen again in major cities until the 1890s in Victorian Britain. Wow, okay. What, like water would be directed

in channels and then that would take everything away? Yeah, that's the speculation that you could have used the toilet in your house and then, you know, maybe with a pot of water or something, flushed the waste. So it's not quite a flush toilet in the, you know, drop the handle and it all goes away, but it basically is. Functionally, yeah. So, you know, Doctor Who, if he ever needed a poo and he's better off time travelling back, actually four and a half thousand years probably, because if you ever need a crapper, you need to go to Harappa.

Danica, I mean, we're talking here about a really impressive civilisation. I'm sorry about that. That had to be done. Did it, did it. Look, it's my show. I do what I want. And that's why we're recording this all in Greg's toilet. Already I'm impressed by the scale of the city. We're talking 4,000 years ago at least. So at the same time in history, we have ancient Egypt, we have ancient Mesopotamia. So is there interconnectivity,

not just between the Indus cities, but also outside of their empire, to use a modern word? Yeah, absolutely. Evidence really does demonstrate trade between the Indus and neighbouring cultures in the Arabian Gulf, in Western Central Asia and in Peninsular India. Archaeologists have found objects like beads of carnelian from Gujarat and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan in Mesopotamia, demonstrating contact between the cultures. And additionally, from 2400 to 2000 BC, records from Mesopotamia testify to trade with a place called Meluha, which archaeologists think may have been the Indus civilization. Meluha. That's nice. It's beautiful, isn't it? Although again, we don't know if that's what they called themselves

or if that's what other people were calling them. But I do find it a very fun word to say, and I feel already the tone of my voice changed when I said it. I was like, Meluha, what the magic. Okay. So that's possible exchange with the Mesopotamian, definitely in Western Asia and the Arabian Gulf, Central Asia. I mean, that's really far away. And we've got our unicorns and our bulls and our elephants and our scorpions, I think you said as well. So there's a lot of animal imagery,

and yet the Indus is sometimes dubbed the faceless civilization. Do you want to guess why? I am going to guess that it is because there is no sort of equivalent like portraiture or anything like that. You know, you've got these things of animals, but you don't have it of people, the faces of people, at least. That's a sensible guess, but I don't think that's quite right. So Danica, why is faceless used as an adjective? Because it's quite a specific phrase. Yeah, I don't know if I love it. I feel like it's a bit dehumanizing. I think the answer is somewhere in between. We do have lots of representations of people. I think what's hard to know is whether they are actually representing individuals every

time. That's kind of what's tricky. But when you look at these figurines, I don't think you can argue that the civilization is faceless, you know? Oh, I have another guess. I have another guess. is faceless, you know? Ooh, ooh, I have another guess. I have another guess. Yeah? Is it because with the ancient Greeks, there's a guy called Plato?

And is it that they're faceless because we know that the collective existed, but we don't know about the stories of individuals? That could be another guess, maybe? Yeah, also a fair guess. I mean, if we can't kind of know... Well, I mean, it's sort of true because if we can't find their names, then it's hard to know. But it's also because sometimes I think the figurines, they might be more of a type. So you kind of would say, well,

lots of these are very similar, and they're not necessarily hugely distinguishable from each other sometimes. I shouldn't say that as an archaeologist, I should say I minutely know the difference between all of them. But sometimes you can sort of say this is the type of figurine, a woman in a headdress, for example. So it's hard to say whether they specifically would have been individuals or whether people are making types of figurines. The other thing is that these figurines, they teach us a lot about the end of civilization. And some of them have really beautiful details, I think, of daily life. Sometimes they do show smiling people. Some of them show women nursing infants, things like that.

Human figurines can help us read gender. Many of them are easily recognizable as male or female, whereas others suggest that they may have been a cultural practice for more than two genders. We can see them wearing things like headdresses or necklaces, robes, bangles, things like that. And sometimes they are naked as well. That's one of the things that helps us read gender. These things can teach us a lot about how people may have dressed and live in daily life. Why are they called faceless then?

They don't sound very faceless to me. Yes, thank you. Why are they called faceless? Greg, did the whites do this? Mea culpa. It was my bad. Sorry. Greg went around sanding off the faces of all the figurines.

What, like hacking off everyone's dicks in those tattoos? It wasn't me personally. It was my dad. No. I mean, I think faceless is an unfortunate phrase, isn't it? We don't have the specificity of individual names and identities, perhaps. But there are these two very famous figurines that we can show you out here. One's called the Priest King. He sounds fancy. And the other is called Dancing Girl.

Feels like there's a bit more presumption there. But do you want to describe them for us? The Priest King does look uncomfortably like Narendra Modi. He's wearing a sort of armband toga type clothing, a sort of beard and ring around his head like a sort of small crown sort of situation. The angle of his vision is downward. So he certainly looks very superior. The other one is a naked woman. Seems like she's having an absolutely great time. One arm absolutely bangled up to the shoulder and the other also

with a couple around the wrist and one just above the elbow and a nice necklace. Danica, why are they called Dancing Girl and Priest King? Who decided that? And do we think that's valid? And where are these figurines now? Well, it's definitely not valid, I would say. I mean, the names come from British archaeologists who are really speculating. The Priest King was labelled because some archaeologists assumed that the Indus might be a theocracy due to a lack of evidence for military based rule. And the dancing girl is based on an initial description that I think relied on colonial ideas of Indian dancers. It's kind of a sexualized, colonialized, orientalist idea, really. You're both right. I do think that they show incredible personality and they are a bit

unusual in the canon of Indus figurines as well. But the story of where they are now is also very interesting, I think. So both statues were found at Mohenjo-daro and ended up in New Delhi at the headquarters of the Archaeological Survey of India, also known as the ASI. When India became independent from British colonial rule in 1947, it was partitioned into India and Pakistan. rule in 1947. It was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Following partition, they became part of the collection of the National Museum of India, although the site of Mohenjo-Daro was then in Pakistan. And following the Shimla Agreement in 1972, the so-called Priest King was returned to Pakistan, but the Dancing Girl actually remained in New Delhi. So they were separated. And the two most famous symbols of the Indus civilization

were separated by the border, much like the border now bisects the spread of the Indus civilization and separates all of those sites. This sort of modern division, does that make your job as an archaeologist more difficult when you're trying to ascertain the truth of this civilization that spanned these contemporary boundaries? It definitely complicates things. I think one of the things that I find really sad is that I think it's probably easier for Western archaeologists to work in both India and Pakistan than it is for Indian and Pakistani archaeologists to work in the other countries. It would be nice if we could have like a lot a lot more dialogue in how we were interpreting new finds,

how we were sharing that information. So I think there's a lot of very fraught arguments and lots of claims of ownership about who the civilization belongs to and whose heritage it really is and things like that. Yeah, I mean, history is political. We talked about the faceless civilization, which we then decided, no, that's not fair at all.

I mean, Mohenjo-daro means mound of the dead. That means presumably, therefore, there are dead, right? There must be human remains that archaeologists have excavated. So what do we know about people through their remains? The thing is that burials were actually generally relatively scarce. And, you know, in over a century of excavation, we're talking hundreds rather than thousands that have been found. So the burials that we do have, they're not easily differentiated into social classes.

You know, we don't have kind of very extravagant royal burials, but we can still read things like social identity from skeletal remains, looking at things like stress indicators on the anatomy and, you know, things like the quality rather than the quantity of grave goods. If they're only being buried maybe with some pots, the ones that are very elaborately decorated might be an indicator of status. If there are only a few sites that there's evidence of burials, is the assumption that maybe the majority of people were cremated? Yeah, I think they may have been practicing cremation as well. It could be issues of

preservation. It could be that we haven't necessarily found cemeteries. I forgot the word for a second. I feel like I should have remembered the word. Mounds of the dead. Mounds of the dead. Thank you. That's what I was trying to say. So it's presumably mounds of some dead. We've got some dead, but not the dead. But we have some bones and obviously archaeological, modern scientific techniques are quite exciting. Strontium analysis and isotopic analysis and that sort of thing. And you can figure out what people ate and so on. So... Wait, what?

Oh, yes. Long after you've gone, what? Oh, yes, I hear. Long after you've gone, I will know what you had for lunch. This is the thing with doing like a show like this with people with very illustrious academic credentials and whatnot, where every so often, someone just like throws out a little thing. And as a layperson, I'm like, what?

Hold on. You just, you get to peek at my bones and you know what i've been eating that's it's like don't just let that hang there that's so cool in terms of the science available now we can tell where people grew up from the sort of soil quality and water quality i think there's all sorts of things aren't there danica yeah absolutely for example if you know we find your body in a location. This is very sinister. If we were to find your body in like an abandoned warehouse. Let me revise that. When I excavate your body, I can take one of your teeth and find out, for example, if you died at a different location from where you grew up. Wow. We can find a lot of information from your teeth, basically. So if you ever want to donate your teeth to science. Oh my god. So like, you'd be able to tell, for example, like,

my skeleton would show that I'm a vegetarian versus the skeleton of someone who grew up eating me or like with my parents skeletons would show that they were likely born in India, but but they're not dead. Yes, absolutely. We would be able to know that from your from your parents skeletons. I'm sorry, I feel I feel rude for saying that, but yes, we would know that from their teeth. Wow. What do we know about what people ate then? What was on the menu in Mahindra Dharo? Unlike Ahed, they were not vegetarians. They were definitely eating meat. Domestic animals are predominant in the zoo archaeology. Buffalo or cattle account for over half of all animal bones. Sheep and goats account

for around 10% and pigs around two or 3%. So, you know, the numbers suggest very high beef consumption. And the other 38% are unicorns? It's just so tasty. That's why they're extinct. We also know that, you know, for the majority of domestic animals, they were probably exploiting other products like milk and cheese and, you know, other variations of the diet as well. You know, wild animals like deer or hares, fish, mollusks, reptiles, birds, all kinds of things. So it's a protein rich diet. You can see why they need those toilets plumbed in. And may I just say, like any listeners who aren't really aware of the like, political situation in contemporary India and everything, but even just to say that these people ate beef is like a pretty, that is a statement that there are people who really, really wouldn't like that as a say, history is political and how the political environment of the present can serve to change how history can be done. And there were other foods, too, weren't there? I mean, it's not just bones that can be analysed.

You can pick up pots and crockery and so on, and you can scrape them and you can look for residues of lipids and all sorts of fun words. So what other non-meaty foods were going into the lunchtime meals? Well, long story short, if I had time travelled, they would be a locator for him. Don't worry. Archaeobotanical evidence illustrates a wide diversity. Rice, millet, pulses, seeds and fruits. We know that people made use of winter and summer rainfall for agriculture. We do also have evidence for ingredients like ginger, turmeric, mango and aubergine. Nice. We've also

got a building called the Granary. Ahir, do you know what the Granary was for? This is going to be one of your annoying ones. I say that it was, well, it was for storing grain. And you're like, no, it was a pub. The King's head isn't where you store the king's head it's just a pub isn't it it's like like damn it this is good so i'm gonna say that it's where they stored grain and you're gonna be like no it was really it was like a coffee shop art gallery you're on to us the granary was not a granary danica what how come i had figured it out it was a gentrified pub no well sadly you know sadly, you know, there's a building at Harappa that we call the granary, but we don't actually know that.

It may have been a public building where officials met or may have had a ritual function. And, you know, some people also call it the Great Hall now. But names like the granary at Harappa and the College of Priests at Mohenjo-daro have been given by 20th century archaeologists, and they aren't necessarily based on the evidence. A lot of these buildings we can't identify definitively what they would have been used for. None of the monumental buildings at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have been definitively identified as temples or palaces. And there's a great bath too because they're very good with their water supply but do we know if that's a bath? I think that's probably kind of

our most accurate interpretation. I mean, the Great Bath, I think, is one of the most interesting finds from the Indus. And, you know, going back to what we were saying about there being literally hundreds of wells at Mohenjodaro, the Great Bath, it's this huge kind of rectangular sunken structure. It's lined with bricks. And it's actually lined with a layer of bitumen as well, which would have made it waterproof. It looks very much like a swimming pool,, which would have made it waterproof. It looks very much like a swimming pool and it would have been made waterproof. Calling it a bath, huge bath or swimming pool,

is kind of a great interpretation of what we do know from the archaeology. And if you look at the rest of the urban landscape of Mohenjo-Daro with all of this water management, sanitation, infrastructure and things like that, yeah, it's a pretty good interpretation. I mean, we heard briefly about the mention of the priest king. So that's an idea of a theocracy where, you know, you have a religious class in charge. We've also talked about the fact that there might not be a military kind of leadership here. There's not a big evidence of war. I'm surprised by, from what's been said, the absence of militarism in the record, because you just assume that human civilization of every from the smallest scale to the larger scale, that's something that has consistently just been

involved through human history. So if the idea of a clergy being the rulers is the best idea that we've got at the moment, but it seems more that, is it evidence of absence or absence of evidence? Oh, lovely. Look at you with your aphorisms. Beautiful. Do we have any evidence of powerful people, an aristocracy at least? Is this a socialist utopia? What's happening here? A lot of people have speculated that it was a peaceful society, that it was a socialist utopia, that it wasn't very differentiated. The answer is a bit more complicated. Oh, damn it.

I know, I know. This is why you shouldn't have brought me on the show. But the problem is that we don't have evidence for things like warfarin, a ruling class on the same scale as we see in other contemporaneous societies. We don't have a huge amount of weaponry. We don't have obvious palaces or lavish burials or huge statues. The Priest King statue, for example, is only about seven inches tall. So actually many of these things are very small. But we do have other evidence.

So studies on burials, for example, including an ossuary outside the city wall at Harappa, have argued for social stratification. What does that word mean? Sorry, an ossuary. A bone house. Yes. Thank you. That's? Sorry, an ossuary. A bone house. Yes, thank you. That's the best way of putting it. Bone house sounds very different.

I was sort of like, what's a tasteful way of describing this? A granary but for bones. Thank you, yes, exactly. A bonery. Yeah, yeah. It's where you store bones after people have died, but they sort of all get put together.

Right. So, back to the bone house. It sounds like the sequel to, like, American Pie. Oh, well. Okay, but in terms of evidence of stratification, there might be evidence of rich and poor, right? Yes, I mean, you know, skeletal analyses and studies on the ossuary and other cemeteries have shown that certain groups were more at risk of both structural violence and disease. Skeletons also show evidence for interpersonal violence through things like head injuries and broken noses.

And additionally, buildings and daily material culture were made of a variety of materials that probably showed things like status and economic differences. We don't know for certain, you know, is it if it's a theocracy, if people are in charge, if it's kind of competing groups, but it doesn't look like, you know, a centralized single ruler or something. We do know that there is status, there's differences, groups in society that are treated maybe a bit worse. And I would assume that, like, if not necessarily evidence of stratification, certainly of differentiation, if there is relatively little record of burial compared to the number of people who live there over time, then one might say that perhaps certain segments of society were cremated. So that could show some sort of difference, maybe?

Yeah, potentially. I mean, we don't know, again, the reason why some people might have been buried, they may have had different beliefs, for example, or it may have been an indicator of status. But definitely, there is absolutely differentiation. There's regional differences, there's differences in status, as we said, there's differences kind of in health outcomes. And we know that it wasn't a utopiaopia because people sometimes broke each other's noses. But maybe they broke their nose running in the swimming pool. We said no cannonballs! If we're talking 4,000 years ago, do we have any texts?

Do we have history? Do we have mythic texts? That was very many questions. We actually don't have really any texts. You know, we don't have historical or administrative records. We don't have epics or something like that. What we do have are the seals we mentioned, which have kind of short pieces of text on them. But the inner script has actually never been translated,

although people have been trying now for almost 100 years. So we actually can't read what they were writing. May we see some? Do you have some? Do you think you can do it now, live on this podcast? Necessity is the mother of invention. I thought there was some on the unicorn seal that we showed. Yeah. Let's have a look at the unicorn seal again. Let's see if Ahir can decode an ancient language

that has befuddled scholars for a century. And you can see just how short these bits of text are. I mean, in some cases, you know, it's just a handful of symbols. That just says, this is Sanjay the one-horned buffalo. Oh, excellent. Good. I'm glad we cracked the case. And another question for Ahir, just to make sure you translated that properly. Did you read it right to left or left to right? Oh, top to bottom.

Trick question. They are in a row, so top to bottom. Yes, three symbols horizontally laid out, but you've read them top to bottom. Very impressive. That's why no one's translated it yet. People, you need to change your paradigms, guys. I mean, this is what AI is for, right? I mean, this is what Elon Musk should be spending his billions on,

not buying Twitter. He should be spending it on a robot that can decode ancient scripts so we can know about these people. Can I just personally make a plea for Elon Musk to never become involved in Indus archaeology? Just purely defensively, please. Sadly, all good things must come to an end. The Indus civilization, one of the big questions is, why does it end?

And it ends about 4,000 years ago. And Ahir, we've got a mini quiz for you here. So I've got four options. Which of these four has not been suggested as a reason for the end of the Indus Civilization? Not been suggested, got it. Not suggested. So first one, so invasion and military destruction. The second would be environmental damage and climate change. The third will being a meteor somewhere near

at the time but because as we said like there are no evidence of like grand battles or something like that i'm going to say that inexplicably no one suggested war i like your answer i prefer it to the actual answer the actual answer is meteor because i made that up it's a double trick i double double double yeah but danica these are all reasons that have been given. Do we have any sense of which of them might be more true or they all equally true? How are we making these assumptions? Yes, no meteor. But what we do know is it's a slow process of decline or kind of a transition. All of the urban centres had reduced or been abandoned by the 1900s BC. Previously, scholars kind of did wonder if Indo-Aryan invaders were responsible, but we don't have any evidence for this theory.

There is some evidence that violence did increase immediately following the urban phase. And the decline of cities was also paralleled by a rise in diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis. Now, the reasons why it happened, I mean, it could have been rivers shifting, but it's been difficult and kind of tricky for archaeologists to date when this happened. But it could also have been, you know, drying of lakes, aridification, climate events. Short answer, we are still figuring it out. It's going to turn out it was a meteor.

And then you're going to feel really silly, Greg. It was the revenge of the dinosaurs. The meteor took them out. They came back and went, right, we're having a vengeance on the indus you said vengeance did you imagine there was a dinosaur in this like long epic feud clearly you've not read my fanfic yes have you not read tyrannosaurus versus priest king i have i thought it was sort of gratuitously erotic but yes that is a lot of my work is, in fairness. We don't quite know why,

but we do see the end of these large cities and rural communities, I suppose, and the transition to something else. And I suppose the other thing that we have to talk about, really, is the 20th century legacy. And these sites were first excavated just two years after the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb.

So we're talking the 1920s. So you think that everyone will be really excited to be like, oh wow, there's all this stuff coming out of the Bronze Age. And yet the Indus archaeology just does not excite the rest of the world. Why do you think that was? I would imagine that if you're a European archaeologist or historian at the time, there's almost a sort of like near weirdness and far weirdness. Somewhere like Egypt as a European historian or archaeologist in the early 20th century when these discoveries are happening, it seems like a very alien thing. And yet, you know that there's a history with the Greeks and the Romans and stuff. And it sort of like links close enough to a story that you can tell yourself about the past. Whereas the alien nature

of something that is happening that you don't have that tie into your pre-existing historical framework is just that much more removed from you, maybe that explains part of the reason. Your focus goes to something that is alien yet familiar rather than perceived to be that much more alien. It's a really interesting answer. I mean, it's a surprising thing to me, I suppose, that South Asia had this glorious, rich ancient history and people kind of went, meh.

I guess Howard Carter just showed up with armfuls of gold and everyone was like, gold, ancient history and people kind of went, meh. I guess Howard Carter just showed up with armfuls of gold and everyone was like, gold! Gold's better than seals. You just can't compete with Egyptomania. But Danica, what does happen to the sites in the 1920s? Are they excavated?

Who's excavating them? What is that process then? Yes, so, you know, they're excavating these sites in the 1920s. We make all of these kind of incredible discoveries and in some ways actually connecting the Indus to what's happening in the 1920s, we make all of these kind of incredible discoveries. And in some ways, actually connecting the Indus to what's happening in the broader Bronze Age is how we actually find out how old it is, because the material culture is published in the UK, and archaeologists who are working in West Asia see that and connect it to what's happening in

Mesopotamia. And that's when suddenly people realize how old it is. But at the same time, again, you know, as you said, Greg, it doesn't have the same allure on popular imagination. In some ways, actually, I think the archaeologists who excavated it, even sometimes did it a disservice. So John Marshall, who was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, I don't want to misquote him. But as far as I remember, he said something like it was as dull and orderly as a Lancashire mining town. Bonus for some reason, burn on Lancashire. I don't know why, but, you know, kind of element of classism there, but also not maybe himself seeing it as exciting as it could have been. That's baffling to me because you could say it's as dull and orderly

as a Lancashire mining town, or you'd say this is as dull and orderly as a Lancashire mining town or you'd say this is as dull and orderly as a Lancashire mining town and it's four and a half thousand years old that's an exciting thing all of the things that thrill me the most when we see these pictures or like hear about these histories is not the differences it's the fact that you'd essentially flush your loo and then go to the local swimming baths. And the fact that we can all fit our lives in a world that feels so removed in so many ways into the experience of these people, the mundanity of it is what's breathtaking. I want to put that on a t-shirt, the mundanity of it. It's great. It's great. I love that phrase. Thank you, Ahir. I mean, I absolutely agree. How can you not be astonished by a civilization that nailed plumbing in the Bronze Age? I mean, I think, you know, we have city planning, we have this kind of infrastructure, we have

really very interesting buildings. We know that they were really crafty, they love to make beautiful things that they traded all over the place then. And they developed really interesting technologies to be able to make these things, doing a lot of very clever things, traveling around and sourcing all kinds of raw materials. But, you know, we've talked a lot about this mundanity, but I also want to say it's not as though there isn't any kind of very creative, fantastic stuff going on as well. I mean, what we know of their religion and mythology is fascinating to me. I mean, seals depict composite animals like tigers with horns or antelopes with human faces. There's even a horned centaur-like figure that has a human head and torso on a tiger's body. We have narrative images on seals like processions of horned people or giant animals or people in trees.

And, you know, we also have things like some seals show a human figure with three faces or a person fighting off two tigers with bare hands. seals show a human figure with three faces or a person fighting off two tigers with bare hands. The reason why I really wanted to, you know, make sure we talked about this is because I was like, they weren't just doing, you know, sort of everyday things. I mean, I feel like some really wild and exciting things were going on in there. Given everything that you've said about what's on these seals, and you were talking about like theories as to why the civilization ended, why do we not bring up tigers? Because that like, as to why the civilization ended. Why do we not bring up tigers?

Because tigers is seemingly increasingly likely. Well, like I said, the seal shows a person fighting off two tigers with their bare hands. And I'm taking that very, very literally. I think that was... No, I mean, it does seem like they engaged a lot with wildlife, like I said. Elephants and tigers, rhinoceroses. Yeah, and we have 4,000 seals with writing on them.

As soon as we can decode them, then we'll know more about them as well. But there we go. Well, I mean, we've had a fantastic conversation and I'm excited to be enthralled by what we learn in the future. But it's time now for the Nuance Window. The Nuance Window! This is where Ahir and I put down our trowels and we listened to Danica for two uninterrupted minutes

while she tells us something we need to know. So my stopwatch is ready and if you are ready, Dr Danica, please take it away. The Indus Civilisation has been discussed as having been discovered by British explorers and archaeologists, but this sort of narrative discounts whatever local knowledge there was of these sites before. Now, to be very clear, it did take archaeologists to kind of figure out the extent and age of the Indus civilization and to link Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and then, of course, all of these other sites. But Indian archaeologists were also a really important part of this story. The first excavations at Mohenjo-Daro were actually begun

by the Bengali archaeologist Rakhal Das Banerjee. So one of the difficulties, I think, with studying the archaeology of the Indus civilization is that many colonial or orientalist ideas have persisted and proved extremely frustratingly difficult to shift in both in academia and in popular culture. The Indus has been characterized for a long time as homogenous, you know, mundane, unchanging over time. It was kind of a reflection of this orientalist idea of the unchanging East, you know, that everything's very traditional, that there isn't progress, there isn't kind of excitement or discovery. And even the names given to the priest king and the dancing girl reflect European ideas of Indian society, and I find it hugely frustrating that a sexist term like dancing girl has persisted for so long. Although we can't read its script, our knowledge of the Indus does keep growing and changing to reflect greater nuances in how

Indus people live their lives. Now, it's really important for us to think about where our ideas come from if we engage with archaeology, whether we're professional archaeologists, whether we're volunteers, whether we're podcast listeners. What we need to do is think about where these ideas have come from. And sometimes we need to recognize a lot of these early theories were speculation, born from people's personal worldviews, and maybe just let go of them. For me, it's crucial that we understand the Indus on its own terms, because a lot of misinterpretation has come from comparisons to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, where it's kind of seen as falling short somehow. Or also, you know, comparisons with later periods in India, where people project social and religious ideas onto the Indian civilization,

they just aren't supported by the data. What we need to do is kind of let go of the theories that aren't working, understand that archaeological knowledge keeps growing and changing, and absorb all of this incredible new information that's coming out. The best part for all of us is that 4,000 years later, we keep finding new things to say about this very, very fascinating society. Thank you so much. Danika, if we had a person from Harappa here with us, and you could ask them a question, what question would you ask them? Oh, I think it would have to be about religious belief. I think that's one of the hardest things for us to understand from archaeology. And if it was really just one question, I think I'd show

them one of the seals, you know, maybe the centaur, tiger, horned human person or the horned people procession and just ask them what is going on? What does it mean? And what does it mean to you? Please tell me everything because those are the stories that i think uh would probably be the most compelling and that's what i would really love to know i would ask about the unicorns oh my one question i should have used my question to ask for three more questions yeah exactly yeah are unicorns delicious? Yes? No? Okay. So what do you know now? This is our quickfire quiz

for Ahir to see how much he's learned. Last time out, you got 10 out of 10. Was that big enough luck or is this a pattern you can establish? Oh dear.

So how are you feeling? Are you feeling confident? Absolutely not. You're hunched forward in sort of... It's anticipation. Okay, we've got 10 questions. Here we go. Question one. What are the two best known Indus sites called? Harappa and then Mahindra Dharam, the Man of the Dead. Very good. Question two. What legendary animal is commonly found on seals discovered at these sites and is delicious? It's a unicorn. So by getting you to answer that question, I think Greg got you to co-sign the unicorn theory.

You have agreed to it now. Question three. Name three foods that were eaten across the Indus civilization. Beef, rice and millet. Very good. You could add mango or aubergine and various barley spices, all sorts. Question four. What unfortunate adjective is sometimes given to the Indus civilisation due to the lack of personal touches? The faceless people. Yeah.

Question five. Which two figurines from Mahendra Dharo are now kept separately in India and Pakistan? It's the Priest King and the Dancing Girl. Question six. Can you remember the name that Mesopotamians called the Indus civilisation? Ah, it's Malooja. Yeah, very good. Well done. Malooja, absolutely. malouha yeah very good well done malouha absolutely question seven name two faraway regions apart from mesopotamia that the indus traded with oh no no this is where i'm going to

collapse uh i'm just gonna there was the lapis lazuli from afghanistan yeah and then there were other things from what's now kutch in gud. But I don't know if these count as acceptable answers. I'll accept one of those. Give me one more. Wait, which one will you accept? I'll accept Afghanistan. Give me one more. You'll accept Afghanistan.

This has turned into a very anti-Ghudrati podcast. And I am deeply offended. I'm just going to say Babylon. West Asia, Arabian Gulf and Central Asia are written on my thing. So I'm going to give you half a mark for that. OK, question eight. Name three suggested reasons for the decline of the Indus civilisation. Three suggested reasons can include reasons suggested by me.

So meteor and tiger will go alongside war. Climate change and overpopulation and disease and stuff are also in there, but they're the lesser. This is frontier academia happening right now. Okay, new ideas. Question nine. What was extraordinary about the sanitation infrastructure in Bronze Age Indus civilisation?

Well, that it existed in a way that was not found again until like the 1890s, we were saying in this country, at least. Yeah, indoor toilets, drainage channels, water wells, rain collection, all sorts of things. And question 10, this for nine and a half out of 10. In what rough time period did the Indus civilisation exist? 2600 before Common Era to 1900 before Common Era. Oh, look at you with your absolute specificity. Wow. All right. Well, nine and a half out of 10 is excellent. And I was quite mean with the not accepting Gu. Wow. All right. Well, nine and a half out of ten is excellent. And I was quite mean with the not accepting Gujarat. But, you know, I would argue that was part of the Indus.

So, you know. I would also argue it was part of the Indus, very much part of the Indus, just to be clear. I feel like I have to state for the record, we have a lot of Indus sites in Gujarat, including one of the big cities. There we go. See, it wasn't just me. I was backed up wait that if it's part of the Indus then where my family are from is part of the Indus and then as an Indus guy I say that counts yes if it helps I think we are we both do have Gujarati

backgrounds and we are both I don't want to say we are both indus people but yes i think as kajati people this is part of our heritage i will happily take my nine and a half nine and a half very good it's very good and also maluha you did very well on that one that you should get a bonus point for for that it was a very hard one to recall so yeah i will upgrade it to 9.7 well done all right well thank you so much Well, thank you so much, Ahir. Thank you so much, Dr. Danica. And listener, if you want to explore more ancient archaeological mysteries, then why not listen to our episodes on China's terracotta army or Stone Age shuttle Hoyuk in Turkey? Or if South Asian history is your thing, then check out our episode on the

Mughal Empire. You'll find them all and more on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But it's now time for me to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the amazing Dr Danica Parikh from the University of Cambridge. Thank you, Danica. Oh, thank you for having me, Greg. I've had a lot of fun and I'm very glad that I and I have made up at the end about the unicorns, bonded by our shared Gujarati slash Indus civilization heritage. Absolutely.

And in Comedy Corner, we had the awesome Ahir Shah. Thank you, Ahir. Absolutely my pleasure. It's always such a pleasure doing this. So interesting. Thank you. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we dig up more fascinating historical nuggets.

But for now, I'm off to go and record my archaeology-inspired heavy metal album Mound of the Dead! Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Amy Hines-Scott. This episode was written by Amy Hines-Scott, Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow and me, and produced by Emma Neguse and me. The assistant producer was Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow,

the project manager was Isla Matthews and the audio producer Neguse and me. The assistant producer was Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, the project manager was Isla Matthews and the audio producer was Steve Hankey. I'm Paris Lees. Welcome to The Flipside from BBC Radio 4. In each episode, I'll tell two stories from opposite sides of the coin and use science to ask questions about elements of the human experience that we sometimes take for granted. Turns out that this person that I soldered my apartment to,

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