Harappan Cities: Were They Controlled by Kings?
- The most famous stone sculpture of the Indus valley, the Priest King, suggests that the cities may have been controlled by kings.
- The sculpture does not represent a priest-king, but instead an important clan or community leader.
- While we know a lot about the objects in the town, many questions about the festivals and celebrations remain.
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お願いします!!続き Harappan cities were orderly,well-organized places－were they possibly controlled by kings? One clue led some early scholars to think that they might have been.The most famous stone sculpture of the Indus valley is called the Priest King.It's one of only nine stone sculptures,mostly of men,that have been found at Mohenjo Daro.All were broken and defaced,which probably means that the people they represented had lost favor.The lower half of the Priest King is missing,but most stone sculptures with a preserved,lower portion are seated with one knee bent to the ground and the other raised.People sitting in this position are seen on many of the Indus seals worshipping a deity in a tree or a figure seated in a cross-legged yoga position.This suggests that the sculpture does not represent a priest-king,as its name suggests,but instead an important clan or community leader. We know a lot about the objects Sarang and his family would have seen in the town,but many questions remain.What was the harvest festival like? Would Sarang and his family have seen dancing and heard singing? Were there plays about the deities? Or were the celebrations solemn,with fasting and prayer? We can only guess.But it's probably safe to say that Sarang would have thought that his trip to the city was one of the most exciting times of the year.
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ハラッパの都市は秩序のある、整然とした場所でした ― それらはもしかして王によって支配されていたのでしょうか？ある手掛かりが一部の初期の学者にそれらが支配されていたかもしれないと思わせました。インダス渓谷で最も有名な石の彫刻は、司祭王と呼ばれています。それは、モヘンジョ・ダロで見つかった、大部分は男性の、わずか9体の石の彫像の1つです。すべてが、壊れていて、外観は傷ついていました、このことは、それらが表した人々が支持を失ったことを多分意味するでしょう。司祭王の下半分はなくなっていますが、保存された下半身のある大部分の石の彫像は片ひざを地面につけもう一方のひざを立てて座っています。この姿勢で座っている人々は、木の中に宿る神やあぐらをかいたヨガの姿勢で座っている人物を崇拝するインダスの印鑑の多くに見られます。このことは、彫像がその名が示す様な司祭王を表わすのではなく、その代わりに重要な一族や地域社会の指導者を表わしていることを示しています。 我々は、サラングと彼の家族が街で目にしたと思われる物について多くのことが分かっていますが、多くの疑問も残っています。収穫祭は、どの様だったでしょうか？サラングと彼の家族は、ダンスを見たり、歌に耳を傾けたのでしょうか？神についての劇があったでしょうか？あるいは、祝賀は断食と祈りがあって厳粛だったでしょうか？ 我々には、想像することしか出来ません。しかし、サラングが都会への彼の旅が１年の最も刺激的な時期の1つであると思ったであろうと言って多分さしつかえないでしょう。
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お願いします!!続き But as a pilgrim,you would probably have been most interested in the large building that today is called the Great Bath.You would go first into a small bathing area that was supplied with a well.You'd take off your outer clothes,which were dusty from your journey,and wash yourself.Once you were clean,you would move on into a large courtyard.You might walk along the roofed edges of the courtyard to better admire the sacred pool in the center.When you were ready for the bath that would clean your spirit as well as yourbody,you would walk into the large pool by one of the two wide stairways that led down into the healing water. Travelers from both Mohenjo Daro and Harappa probably would have felt least at home in Dholavira,the third major city of the Indus.Dholavira,located in what is now the modern country of India,was on an island in an inland bay far to the south of Mohenjo Daro.The farming was not good in the areas around Dholavira－the climate was too dry－so most people supported themselves by herding,fishing,and trading.To collect and store enough rainwater,the people of Dholavira built stone tanks or reservoirs that stretched over more than a third of their city. Dry Dholavira may not have had much mud,but it had lots of stone.Most of its houses and drains were made of sandstone blocks.Dholavira was the grandest of the cities,with huge walls and ceremonial gates separating the quarters was even topped by an inscription of ten symbols,each one a little more than a foot tall. Dholavira's magnificent gates couldn't change the fact that,in general,the people of the Indus Valley cities did not choose to build huge monuments to a king or religious ruler.Their cities were simple and workaday,without unnecessary flourishes or great pieces of monumental art.But towering high bbove the plain,with gleaming red-brick gateways and light gray mud-brick walls,they still must have been a commanding sight.
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お願いします!!続き Althongh they were made by hand and not machine,the fired bricks used used for building in the cities came in just one size and shape:a rectangle about 11 inches long and 5 1/2 inches wide(28 cm by 14 cm).These fired bricks were so strong that some of them have been recycled and are being reused in modern buildings.Bricks weren't the only things that were the same size－walls and doorways throughout the Indus Valkey are about the same size and design.Even wells were lined with the same styles of wedge-shaped bricks.And every city had a drainage system for carrying away rainwater and sewage from toilets and bathing areas. Who decided to make one-size-fits-all bricks?Who said that street had to run north/south and east/west?Today' cities are full of differences－the size,style,orientation,and building materials of any ten buildings are almost never the same.So why were the ancient Indus cities so similar? Maybe because one person－or one small group of people－was making all the decisions.Maybe a strong gouernment or strong religious leaders told everyone what to do.But there is no sign of large palaces or temples－the buildings of powerful governments and religious leaders.Perhaps the people of the Indus Vally had religious or historical beliefs that taught them that they should build everything in the same way.No one knows for sure. The cities of the Indus Valley were very well organized.They were divided into walled neighborhoods,with each neighborhood specializing in one kind of work.Potters lived in one area,and coppersmiths lived in another.People probably lived with their extended families－children,parents,cousins,aunts and uncles,and grandparents－all doing the same kind of work.
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お願いします!!続き Symbols scratched into pots after they were fired are called graffiti.Graffiti probably developed at the same time as potter's marks,around 4000 BCE,but the earliest examples from Harappa date to around 3300 BCE.They count as the earliest evidence for writing in the Indus Valley.By about 2800-2600 BCE,the symbols that began as graffiti had become a written language,one that was spreading rapidly throughout the region. Why did writing spread so quickly? For one thing,it was useful,especially to merchants who traveled throtghout the Indus Valley.They used square seals with animal designs and bold script across the the top to seal goods for trade.They also developed a system of tablets for keeping accounts.Archaeologists have recently found a building that was a kind of “mint” that made the tablets that merchants used to keep track of their goods. Merchants weren't the only people who were quick to see the power of the written word.Religious leaders may have used writing to record the names of deities and important religious rituals. Archaeologists have been trying to understand the Indus script for more than a hundred years－without any luck.For one thing,they've only found about 2,000 examples of it,and none of the examples has more than 23 symbols (most have only five).But they have been able to figure out a few of its features.They know that the Indus script is not directly related to any known writing system.They know that it was written from right to left (as is the script used to write Urdu,the modern language of Pakistan). But sometimes longer inscriptions are written from the right in the first line,then from left to right on the mext line,and so on,back and forth until the end.This type of writing style is called boustrophedon,a Greek word that means “as the ox turns,”because it moves down one row and up the next,the way oxen plow a field,or people mow the lawn.
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お願いします!! 続き Carved stone seals were common in the ancient world.Merchants and government officials stamped them into soft clay instead of writing a signature.The seals were usually decorated with pictures of animals and sometimes a few signs or symbols.Cunningham's seal had an animal and some lines that could have been letters.Except that the creature on his seal was not the usual bull or tiger,but something that looked like a one-horned bull－a unicorn.And if the lines were the letters or symbols of a language,it was not a script anyone had ever seen before. Alexander Cunningham spent the rest of his life thinking that his dig at Harappa in the Punjab had been a failure.He never realized that the seal he had found was a key to an unknown civilization,a civilization that no one ever suspected had existed.Before the seal was found at Harappa,archaeologists had believed that the oldest cities in India and Pakistan dated from about 700 BCE.They were wrong.The crumbling bricks that the engineers had used to raise the railroad out of the mud were 5,000 years old.They were what was left of an ancient civilization as large and well organized as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia.Historians call it the Indus civilization. The Indus civilization peaked with 1,500 settlements and serveral large cities,some with populations of up to 80,000 people.Its artisans were among the most skilled in the world,and its people traded with Mesopotamia and Central Asia.But in some ways,it was an easy civilization to overlook.Its people didn't build great pyramids or fancy tombs,as the Egyptians did.They didn't fight great battles and leave a great written legacy,like the Mesopotamians.
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お願いします!!続き As you wandered through the city,you would have seen one building that stood out from all the othes,the so-called Great Hall.Not only was it bigger than all of the other buildings,but it was also built of wood on a brick foundation.(Because the local trees were small,the builders probably bought the wood in the highlands,then floated it down the river to the city during the monroon.) Archaeologists don't know what the building was used for.At first,they guessedthat it was used to store grain,but there's no evidence of that.Today,they believe that Harappa's Great Hall,as well as a similar large building in Mohenjo Daro,was probably a government or public meeting place. Although the great cities of the Indus were very similar,they were not identical.If you were a pilgrim from Harappa arriving in Mohenjo Daro for a religious festival,you might have felt that the people in Mohenjo Daro were a little bit more formal than your friend at home.For one thing,Mohenjo Daro didn't have just a Great Hall,but many other large buildings as well.Each section of the city had several large complexes.Some of these buildings may have been religious buildings or mansions for wealthy merchants.One building had a circle of bricks in its courtyard,which might have been the site of a sacred tree.A double staircase led to an upper courtyard surrounded by several rooms.When archaeologists excavated it,they found that the house was littered with lots of seals and fragments of a stone sculpture depicting a seated man wearing a cloak over his left shoulder who might have been a political or religious leader of some kind.
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お願いします!!続き Archaeologists know that the Indus script probably used both symbol-pictures and letters standing for different sounds.They have made out between 400 and 450 symbols,which are too few for a language without an alphabet and too many for a language with an alphabet.The script of the Mesopotamians,for example,used more than 600 symbols,each of which stood for a syllable and sometimes also for a whole word.The Canaanites,who lived to the west of Mesopotamia,later developedan alphabet of fewer than 50 symbols,each standing for a specific consonant. A lot of the examples we have of Indus script come from inscriptions on seals.The square seals of the Indus cities were made from a soft stone called steatite,or soapstone.The original color of the stone ranges from gray or tan to white.If the steatite was going to be used for a seal,the seal maker bleached it with a chemical solution and fired it in a kiln to make it hard and white.(For 100 years,archaeologists have been trying to figure out what that solution was,but no luck yet.) Some sealr were made from faience paste that could be molded,fired,and glazed.Faience is made from ground quartz that is melted and then reground to make a glassy paste.It can be colored with copper to make a blue-green or turquoise color,and then fired at high temperatures to make a shiny glazed object.
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お願いします!続き After about a month of travel,the ship from Dholavira arrived at the delta of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers.Here they paused until the captain could hire a local fisherman to help guide the ship through the treacherous channels of the delta before it arrived at last in the great city of Ur. Many people of the Indus Valley had made the trip before,and some of them had probably settled there to live.The captain most likely would have contacted a merchant originally from the Indus Valley to help convert Mesopotamian weights and measures and interpret for his Akkadian-speaking customers. The people of southern Mesopotamia may have paid for some of their goods with fine embroidered woolen shawls and blankets.They might also have traded in silver from Anatolia,which was widely used in Mesopotamia,and perhaps even in the more valuable gold bangles from Egypt.These simple,round bracelets were a convenient way to measure and carry gold,and could be melted down and made into other objects. On the slower return journey,the captain stopped at Dilmun,the island that today is called Bahrain,and traded Mesopotamian silver and textiles for pearls from the Persian Gulf.He also stopped at Magan,in what is now Oman,for copper and large,heavy seashells. Finally,around the beginning of June,the captain would have seen the long red flag at the top of his mast begin to flap in the southwesterly winds.That meant it was time to set sail and catch the winds before the monsoon became too strong.After filling the water pots,he and his crew headed east to the mouth of the Indus and the Gulf of Kutch.The whole trip took almost five months,but he was coming home with a ship full of valuable things that he could sell for a good profit in Dholavira and up the Indus River at Mohenjo Daro.
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お願いします!続き After the discovery of some unburied skeletons on the highest,and therefore latest,street levels at Mohenjo Daro,some scholars assumed that the forts that Indra was destroying were the walled cities of the Indus Valley.But the Late Harappan cities were never destroyed by warfare,and there is no evidence of large groups of people coming from outside South Asia.Historians believe that the mysterious skeletons were people who died from contagious diseases.They were left unburied in abandoned parts of the city so they would not infect the grave diggers. So what happened around 1900 BCE? For many years,historians believed that invaders called Aryans poured into the Indus Valley and,with the help of the horse and bronze or iron weapons,destroyed the Late Harappan civilization. But archaeologists can't find evidence of major warfare,and the body types of the people living in the Indus Valley did not change during this time period.More likely,the disappearing Saraswati River stqained the Late Harappan way of life past the breaking point.Satellite photos of the dried riverbed and excavations along its banks show that the river was huge at one time,almost five miles across.As old ways of living and trade broke down,the people of the Indus Valley began to look around for other ways to stay alive.People from the countryside and highlands who spoke the Indo-Aryan language,people who had known amd traded with the Harappans for many years,became more powerful over time until they could challenge the Harappans' power.
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お願いします!!続き Do you feel that you get to know the people who lived in the places you are excavating?You really do.For one thing,there are fingerprints all over everything.You know,they're patting the clay and them it gets fired.And even though Harappa is a pretty disturbed site,every once in a while you stumble on something that is obviously just the way someone left it.We were digging in this little alley behind a house and found a little pit someone had dug,with some river mussels in it.It was their leftover lunch.And the Harappa are very creative people.Their figurines have a lot of character.It's hard to see humor across the centuries,but I certainly see people having a lot of fun with those figurines.Or maybe having a connection would be a better way to say it,since some of them are scary.Plus,my colleague is very good at that sort of thing.We'll find a pendant and he'll say someone must have been really upset to lose that. If you could have one question answered about the sites you've excavated,what would it be?I think I would probably want to know how the five great cities of the Indus were connected.Were they independent?Did the same family rule them all?That's what I'd lile to know. I think the really important thing about archaeology is that it connects people with the past.It's something we all share.No one in my family came from South Asia,but now I feel like that's a part of my heritage,too.Knowing about how those people solved their problems of living together in cities makes me think about the ways we try to solve a lot of the same problems in our cities today.The Indus people were so creative.I feel a lot of respect for them.And I feel like I share something with my colleagues in Pakistan.I think people need to appreciate each other's history.
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お願いします!!続き Say you were a merchant from Oman,in what is now known as the Middle East,come to Harappa to trade alabaster vases and fine woolen cloth for shell bangles and stone beads.The first thing you would have noticed was what wasn't there－no great temples or monuments,like the ones you had seen in the cities of Mesopotamia and Persia.You probably would have thought Harappa a poor place,without the grandeur of home.But hen you would have noticed the tidy,neat streets.Even as a stranger in a strange city,you didn't have to leave extra time in case you got lost in the maze of streets every time you went to the market.The streets were straight and predictable,and quieter than you were used to.Houses weren't open to the stredt,so you didn't hear every word that people were saying inside as you walked by.Instead,the main doorway of eabh house was located along a side street and had an entryway that screened the inside from curious eyes.The windows opened onto the courtyard at its center. You'd have noticed that the city smelled better than most cities you visited.Major streets had built-in garbage bins.Each block of houses had a private well and bathrooms with drains.The small drains leading from the bathing areas and toilets emptied hnto slightly larger drains in the side streets that flowed into huge covered sewer in the main streets,big enough for people to climb inside and clean.These big city sewers emptied outside of the city wall into gullies and were washed out every year by the rains.
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