Railway tracking system in harappan civilization
Question :- Railway tracking system in Harappan civilization?
Answer:- The plight of Harappa
Although Harappa was the first site to be discovered, it was badly destroyed by brick robbers. As early as 1875, Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), often called the father of Indian archaeology,
noted that the amount of brick taken from the
ancient site was enough to lay bricks for “about
100 miles” of the railway line between Lahore and Multan. Thus, many of the ancient structures at the site were damaged. In contrast, Mohenjodaro was far better preserved.
Although Harappa was the first site to be discovered, it was badly destroyed by brick robbers. As early as 1875, Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), often called the father of Indian archaeology,
noted that the amount of brick taken from the
ancient site was enough to lay bricks for “about
100 miles” of the railway line between Lahore and Multan. Thus, many of the ancient structures at the site were damaged. In contrast, Mohenjodaro was far better preserved.
Wheeler at Harappa
Early archaeologists were often driven by a sense of adventure. This is what Wheeler wrote
about his experience at Harappa: It was, I recall, on a warm May night in 1944 that a four miles’ tonga-ride brought me as the newly appointed Director General of the Archaeological Survey with my local Muslim officer from a little railway-station labelled “Harappa” along a deep sand track to a small rest-house beside the moonlit mounds of the ancient site. Warned by my anxious colleague that we must start our inspection at 5.30 next morning and finish by 7.30 “after which it would be too hot”, we turned in with the dark figure of the punka- walla crouched patiently in the entrance and the night air rent by innumerable jackals in the neighbouring wilderness. Next morning, punctually at 5.30, our little procession started out towards the sandy
heaps. Within ten minutes I stopped and rubbed my eyes as I gazed upon the tallest mound, scarcely trusting my
vision.
Six hours later my embarrassed staff and I were still toiling with picks and
knives under the blazing sun, the mad sahib (I am afraid) setting a relentless pace.
FROM R.E.M. WHEELER,
My Archaeological Mission
to India and Pakistan, 1976.
Mohenjo-daro. Salination is damaging the bricks, and thereby destroying the excavations, of some Indus valley sites.
Another change to the southern Indus valley was the gradual introduction from the late nineteenth century of artificial control of the river with embankments and dams – notably the barrage completed at Sukkur in northern Sindh in 1932 – and the construction of extensive irrigation canals.
These helped farmers, but not archaeologists. Within decades, the over-irrigated land, including the ruins of Mohenjo-daro (now no longer washed by annual Indus floods), became impregnated with salts commonly known as saltpetre.
The slightest rainfall would convert the anhydrous salt into the hydrous form, whitening the landscape with ‘a brittle shining crust that crushes beneath the step like a satanic mockery of snow’, noted an archaeologist at Mohenjo-daro in the 1940s.13 This process of salination was accompanied by a more than 300 per cent increase in volume of the salt: an expansion disastrous for bricks, which caused the excavated ruins to start crumbling into dust within a few years.
At Harappa, there was a parallel destruction of the site by railway contractors and local people in search of bricks for construction purposes. It is fortunate indeed that the forgotten cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were discovered before the Indus civilization became utterly lost to the world, as we shall now see.
Site of Mohenjo-daro, early 1920s, just before the discovery of the Indus civilization.
In 1853 a British army officer and engineer, Alexander Cunningham, while serving in the Punjab, paid the first of what would be many visits to Harappa. By now, the inscriptions of Asoka had been substantially deciphered, beginning in 1836, and there was growing interest in the archaeology of Buddhism.
Cunningham saw himself following in the footsteps not of Alexander but rather of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang), who in the 630s made a monumental journey from China through northwest India to the land of the Buddha in the Ganges valley. Xuanzang described a great city in the Punjab area, Po-fa-to or Po-fa-to-lo, with four stupas, twelve monasteries and a thousand monks – perhaps located at Harappa, thought Cunningham.
Unfortunately, he had no opportunity to excavate until 1872, the year after he was appointed as the first director general of the Archaeological Survey. In the intervening period, contractors of the recently established Indian railways plundered Harappa for brick ballast needed to lay the track between Lahore and nearby Multan.
By the time Cunningham returned, some massive brick walls that had been present on the site’s southern mound in 1853 (which he had taken to be a Buddhist monastery) had simply vanished. Nevertheless, he drew up an accurate site plan and proceeded to dig for antiquities, some of which he published in 1875.
The key find was a seal – the very first Indus seal to appear in print. In Cunningham’s own words:The most curious object discovered at Harapa is a seal, belonging to Major Clark [sic], which was found along with two small objects like chess pawns, made of dark brown jasper . . .
The seal is a smooth black stone without polish. On it is engraved very deeply a bull, without a hump, looking to the right, with two stars under the neck. Above the bull there is an inscription in six characters, which are quite unknown to me. They are certainly not Indian letters; and as the bull which accompanies them is without a hump, I conclude that the seal is foreign to India.
