The Indus civilisation’s only depiction of humans fightingĮrja Lahdenperä/ courtesy Archaeological Survey of India In nearly a century of excavations, archaeologists have uncovered just one depiction of humans fighting, and it is a partly mythical scene showing a female deity with the horns of a goat and the body of a tiger. Nor is there evidence of the horse, an animal well suited to raiding parties, which later became common in the region. No armour and no indisputably military weapon – as opposed to knives, spears and arrows designed for hunting animals – has been found. The chief cities show no clear signs of being fortified. Other aspects of the civilisation are even more perplexing. Each one is carved with an exquisite but mysterious script, which has provoked more than a hundred published attempts to decipher its language – with little consensus. Thousands of small sealstones have also been found worn around the neck, merchants would have used them to stamp their identity on clay tags. Indus craftsmen created complex stone weights for commerce and long, precision-drilled carnelian beads for jewellery.
The two largest Indus cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, boasted street planning and sewage worthy of modern times, including the world’s earliest known toilets and an impressive brick water tank known as the Great Bath. It had a vigorous maritime export trade via the Arabian Sea, and archaeologists have found objects made in the Indus valley in Mesopotamian cities such as Ur and Akkad. All signs point to a prosperous and advanced society – one of history’s greatest.
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