You're Dead to Me - The Indus Civilisation (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

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.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.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 Hankey Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

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 Parikh. Welcome, Danica. Hello. Thank you for having me, Greg. I'm excited to dig in. 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 and you'll definitely remember

him from our Julius Caesar episode. It's Ahir Shah. Welcome Ahir. Hello Greg. And as I learnt, it's actually Julius Caesar. So who's the historian now? 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 like comes from etymologically. I think that that's the thing. I imagine that this is 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. Oh, what have you, but I'm not sure quite how historically accurate some of the BJPs' claims on that front are. 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 you

about the glories of Ramesses the Great in 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 civilization 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 Mahenjo-Daro, it stars Bollywood heartthrob Hrithik Roshan, or maybe you've read Vineet Bajpai's trilogy of thriller novels, 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 do 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. Danika, let's start with the basics. When and where was the Indus civilization and how long ago are we going back? The sites of the Indus civilization, which is also known as the Indus Valley civilization or or the Harappan Civilization, 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, archaeologists actually rarely refer to it this way. There's an incredible range of sites. There's other cities. It's not just Haran and Mohenjo-Daro, which are kind of the two best known ones. There's also a site called Dholavira, which is situated in the Rana 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 near sources of raw materials for mining and quarrying and things

like that. There's really a very widespread 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. Harappa is the modern name. What does Mohenjo-Daro mean? So Mohenjo-Daro, which is in Sindh in Pakistan, the name's been translated to mean the Mound of the Dead.

Sick. Ahia, what's your favourite heavy metal band? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like they came out of Oslo and they're about to release their second LP. 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 kilometres or something. I think what we can do actually, I'll show you an aerial photograph of the biggest of the cities, Mohenjo-Daro. Jason Vale Oh, wow. Okay. Jason Vale 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 it. Jason Vale What's immediately striking to me is that,

so last year, I went to visit Pompeii. And just like the levels that you see, and there's sort of grid elements to it and you can almost tell that this is this quarter and this is that quarter. It's remarkable to be looking at a picture of something like this in South Asia and having wandered around something 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 connebate in this way, regardless of where we're from, which is pretty cool. I love the word connebate. Excellent. GCC geography flooding back into my brain there.

Yeah, no Oxbow Lakes in this shot, unfortunately. Indus cities were well planned, with wide streets running from north to south and east to west. Cities like Mohenjo-Daro 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, 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 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 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. They're often you know square seals made of stone 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? I think it's just that the archaeological evidence of the unicorns hasn't been found yet. I'm team unicorn on this one. So let's talk about daily life in the city. And I want to get down and dirty here. 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? Maybe something like chamber pots and collections to be used for fertilizer in fields on the outskirts, maybe something like that? It's a very good guess. Danika, 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. 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. Will Barron Wow, okay. What, like, water would be directed in channels and then that would take everything away? Shruti Mishra 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.

Already I'm impressed by the Indus. I mean, the scale of the city, we're talking 4000 years ago at least. 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. Will Barron- Meluha, that's nice. So there's a lot of animal imagery, and yet the Indus is sometimes dubbed the faceless civilization. Do you want to guess why? Will Barron- 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 and the faces of people, at least. That's a sensible guess, but I don't think that's quite right. So, Danika, why is faceless

used as an adjective? Yeah, I don't know if I love it. I feel like it's a bit dehumanising. 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. The other thing is that these figurines, they teach us a lot about the inner 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 easy 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 things that helps us read gender. These things can teach us, 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? We don't have the specificity of individual names and identities perhaps, but there are

these two very famous figurines. 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 Danica, why are they called Dancing Girl and Priest King? 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. 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 Archelotal 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. 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 Hindu 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 more dialogue kind of 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 kind 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, Mahenjo-daro means mound of the dead. That means presumably therefore there are dead, right? There must be human remains that archaeologists have excavated. 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. But we have some bones and obviously archaeological modern scientific techniques, the quite exciting strontium analysis and isotopic analysis and that sort of thing. And you can figure out what people ate and so on. So, um... Wait, what? Oh yes, ah yeah. 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 who have very illustrious academic credentials and whatnot, where every so often someone just throws out a little thing. And as a layperson I'm like, what? Hold on! You get to peek at my bones and you know what I've been eating. That's insane. 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 we find your body in a location... This is very sinister. If we were to find your body in 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 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 my parents' skeletons would show that they were likely born in India? Yes, absolutely. We would be able to know that from your parents' skeletons. I'm sorry, 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? 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 2 or 3%. Right. So you know, the numbers suggest very high beef consumption. And the other 38% are unicorns or that's a... It's just so tasty.

That's why they're extinct. We also know that from the majority of domestic animals, they were probably exploiting other products like milk and cheese and other variations of the diet as well. 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. 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. So what other non-meaty foods were going into the lunchtime meals? 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 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?

Damn it. 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? Damn it. So I'm going to say that it's where they stored grain and you're going to be like, no, it was like a coffee shop art gallery. You're on to us. The granary was not a granary, Danica? What? How come? I have figured it out. It was a gentrified pub. Well, sadly, there's a building at Har Harappa that we call the Granary, but we don't actually know that. It may have been a public building where officials met or it 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 Harappan Mohenjo-Daro have been definitively identified as temples or palaces. 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. Ugh, 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 warfare and 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. 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. Will Barron What does that word mean? Sorry, an ossuary. Will Barron A bone house. Shruti Mishra Yes. Thank you. That's the best way of putting it. Bonehouse sounds very different. What's a tasteful way of describing this? A granary but for both.

Thank you, yes, exactly. A bonery. Yeah. It's where you store bones after people have died, but they sort of all get put together. Right. 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 if it's a theocracy, if people are in charge, if it's kind of competing groups, but it doesn't look like 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. The Indus Civilisation, 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 Civilisation? 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 be a meteor impact and the fourth will be increased population leading to resource exhaustion. Which of those do not think has been suggested as a reason by archaeologists? So I think that meteor is one of these tricky ones that you will put, and there is evidence of there 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. A double, double, double. Yeah. But Danika, 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 centers had reduced or been abandoned by the 1900s PC. 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 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. Danika, 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 industry 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 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 at a service. 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. Will Barron That's baffling to me because you could say, oh, 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, 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 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. 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.

The nuance window! This is where Ahia and I put down our trowels and we listened to Danica for two uninterrupted minutes. Well, she tells us something we need to know. So my stopwatch is ready and if you are ready, Dr Danica, please take it away. So 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. So Eurocentric idea that bestows legitimacy from a moment of discovery that has to be validated by Western scholarship. 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. Now, the first excavations at Mohenjo-Daro were actually begun by the Bengali archaeologist Rakhaldas 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, mundane, unchanging over time. It was kind of a reflection of this orientalist idea of the unchanging East. 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. Now, it's really important for us to

think about where 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. 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 Indus 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 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. All right, well thank you so much, Ahir. Thank you so much, Dr. Danica. And, uh, 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 Chattel 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 Your 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. Danika Parikh from the University of Cambridge. Thank you, Danika. Oh, thank you for having me, Greg. I've had a lot of fun. And in Comedy 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 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! the Oculogy inspired heavy metal album, Mound of the Dead. Bye. From BBC Radio 4, this is What Seriously? I'm Dara O'Brien. And I'm Izzy Suttie. And in our new series, we're bringing you short stories and tall tales. What Seriously?

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