Ep. 011 – Harappa and the Erythraean Sea

In today's episode we shift our focus east and look at the earliest identifiable civilization on the Indian subcontinent. The Harappan people were known to have had contacts with Egypt and Mesopotamia thanks to Harappan artifacts that have been discovered in those places. Sadly, there is very little evidence of maritime activity on the part of the Harappans, even though we know they were active to some extent.

We'll also look at the characteristics of the Erythraean Sea (Arabian Sea) and see how the monsoons helped connect the civilizations of the near east in antiquity. Other items include the so-called 'dockyard' at Lothal and a few boat depictions from the ancient Harappans.

Episode Transcript

Today we leave ancient Egypt behind, roll back the clock, and shift our geographic focus about 4000 kilometers to the east. That’s 4000 kilometers by air though. If we were traveling by sea from an Egyptian port on the Red Sea east to Mumbai, India, we’d have to tack on at least another 1,000 kilometers, giving us a sea voyage of 2,750 nautical miles. Anyway, our next port of focus is India, or, the Indian subcontinent to be technical. This region, and the Indus River Valley specifically, is the third point in the triangle of civilizations we’ve seen thus far: the Mesopotamian cultures at the north end of the Persian Gulf, the Egyptian Red Sea ports strewn along the Red Sea’s western coastline, and now the Indus peoples, far to the east on the other side of what the ancients called the Erythraean Sea. Today we know refer to it as the Arabian Sea, the body of water that is bordered by the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. 

harappan_maritime_trade
The Harappan trade routes showing how their wealth of resources was traded along rivers and eventually into the Arabian Sea and beyond.

The word “erythra” in Greek means “red,” so the Greeks and Romans called the Arabian Sea the Red Sea, not be confused with the separate body of water we now call the Red Sea. A Greek writer commented on the origin of this name by saying: ”And they say that the sea called Erythra or "red" is of a deep blue color, but that it was so named, as I said before, from a King Erythras, who gave his own name to the sea in question.” Despite this ancient claim, it’s more plausible that the sea, like today’s Red Sea, gained its name from the annual blooms of the red-colored Trichodesmium erythraeum near the water's surface. These organisms are also known as ‘sea sawdust’ and are some type of bacteria that I didn’t spend much time researching, so I really can’t explain them to you properly beyond the fact that some of them appear a reddish-hue in the water. 

On a broad level, I think it will be helpful for us to understand the cultures of the Indian subcontinent as part of a maritime system, because much of what we know about the ancient peoples of the region, and their maritime exploits in particular, comes by way of their connection to Egypt or Mesopotamia. The early cultures of the Indian subcontinent didn’t leave us much in the way of a written record, and for the earliest of civilizations there, we haven’t even deciphered their pseudo- writing system yet, but more on that in a minute. Before we home in on the oldest known civilization of the region, let’s get a broad view of the roll that monsoons play in connecting the three regions I just mentioned. 

Our best source of information about the region from a maritime perspective comes from an anonymous work written by a Greek Egyptian in the first century BCE. It’s called the ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’ and although it comes from much later period, it’s a good jumping off point for our purposes today. The work is a 68-chapter description of the coastlines around the Indian Ocean, with descriptions of the major port cities, the goods that could be had at each port, and much more. The most interesting descriptions, in my opinion at least, involve the sailor’s navigation tips about how to reach these locales and the dangers for which to keep a lookout. In several places throughout the Periplus, the writer mentions a month of the year during which he suggests you begin your journey to or back from India, as the seasonal monsoon winds make the journey much quicker when the winds are at your back. I tried to summarize how the monsoon winds work myself, but I think it will be more helpful to just pull a paragraph from Brian Fagan’s book Beyond the Blue Horizon to describe the importance of these winds to the region and to history as a whole. He writes: 

The secrets of the monsoon were common knowledge around the northern Indian Ocean, sometimes called the Arabian Sea, long before recorded civilization. In these usually benign waters, the monsoon winds blow from the northeast from November to March and somewhat less predictably from the southwest between May and September. Summer heat warms the continental landmasses north of the ocean. The hot air rises and creates a low-pressure zone at the earth’s surface, causing moisture-laden air from the sea to move into the low-pressure area. As this air climbs on rising air currents, rain-bearing clouds bring monsoon rains. In winter, the pattern reverses, for the ocean cools more slowly than the land. The winds now blow toward the ocean. The northeast monsoon wind is the major player, a lovely breeze that blows virtually continually, never at gale force, almost never dropping to a flat calm, never changing direction dramatically. This is a sailor’s delight. 

- Brian Fagan, Beyond the Blue Horizon

Indeed it was and continues to be the sailor’s delight. The sailor who wrote the Periplus was intimately acquainted with the monsoon winds, telling his readers that most sailors left Africa in July en route to the Indus River Valley, so as to take advantage of the winds. He says that “it is more dangerous then, but through these winds the voyage is more direct, and sooner competed.” Of the Indus River Valley, the Periplus says that from it flows the “the river Sinthus [the Indus River], the greatest of all the rivers that flow into the Erythraean Sea, bringing down an enormous volume of water; so that a long way out at sea, before reaching this country, the water of the ocean is fresh from it. Now as a sign of approach to this country to those coming from the sea, there are serpents coming forth from the depths to meet you; and a sign of the places just mentioned and in Persia, are those called graea. This river has seven mouths, very shallow and marshy, so that they are not navigable, except the one in the middle; at which by the shore, is the market-town, Barbaricum.” Now, I can’t vouch for the validity of the serpents that supposedly met arriving sailors, and the Greek word used here, Barbaricum, refers to the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, but more generally it was used to describe regions that they felt were outside of civilization. 

The author of the Periplus had a negative opinion of the Arabian Sea as a whole, saying: “Navigation is dangerous along this whole coast of Arabia, which is without harbors, with bad anchorages, foul, inaccessible because of breakers and rocks, and terrible in every way.” His description of the Indian coastline also paints a bleak picture. Even after taking advantage of the monsoon winds to speed up the journey, a choice that carried some risk with it apparently, arrival in the Indus Valley region carried different risks altogether. Once you got past the sea serpent greeting party, you had to deal with treacherous coastlines and deceptive inlets. The Gulf of Eirinon and the Gulf of Baraca, the modern-day gulf of Kutch, was especially dangerous, being described this way: 

The water is shallow with shifting sandbanks occurring continually and a great way from shore; so that very often when the shore is not even in sight, ships run aground, and if they attempt to hold their course they are wrecked. A promontory stands out from this gulf, curving around from Eirinon toward the East, then South, then West, and enclosing the gulf called Baraca, which contains seven islands. Those who come to the entrance of this bay escape it by putting about a little and standing further out to sea; but those who are drawn inside into the gulf of Baraca are lost; for the waves are high and very violent, and the sea is tumultuous and foul, and has eddies and rushing whirlpools. The bottom is in some places abrupt, and in others rocky and sharp, so that the anchors lying there are parted, some being quickly cut off, and others chafing on the bottom. As a sign of these places to those approaching from the sea there are serpents, very large and black; for at the other places on this coast and around Barygaza, they are smaller, and in color bright green, running into gold. 

- The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

More serpents, apparently, but at least they are different colors to keep things interesting. All of this looking at the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea to say basically this: the monsoon winds in the Arabian Sea played a huge role in connecting the Indian subcontinent with Egypt and Mesopotamia. A little side note here before we move on to look at the people who populated the region we’ve been discussing. I was caught in two minds about whether to record the Periplus as a supplemental episode like I did with the Tale of the Shipwrecked sailor. The positives are that it is packed full of fascinating info about the writer’s perception of the people and cities around the Arabian Sea, but the negative is that it is rather length and that many of the city names are readily recognizable without some translation to their modern names. If you like, pop on to the forum or to the Facebook page and let me know if you’re interested in a supplementary episode of the Periplus. If there is enough demand, I’m more than willing, but I’ll have to figure out a way to include some of the explanatory extras to make it useful for our modern ears and minds. By the way, it’s likely that we’ll revisit this work when we cover Roman-era trade, as that is the period when it was written, so maybe I’ll record it for its benefit in several different discussions. I look forward to your thoughts! 

Now to the details we know about the oldest civilization from the region, the Harappan Civilization, also known as the Indus Valley Civilization. As you may suspect, this civilization was centered on the valley that tracks with the Indus River, the Indus River and many of the large Harappan cities located in modern- day Pakistan. The Harappans also spread east and into modern-day India, especially along the Gujarat coastline where one location we’ll talk about later is located, the ancient city of Lothal. 

So we know the location of the Harappan Civilization for a start. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there is still so much we don’t know about these ancient people. Sites that are now identified as Harappan were first described in an archaeological sense in the mid-19th century, but it wasn’t until 1922 that enough had been unearthed for scholars to connect the dots that the sites they’d been looking at were the remnants of a distinct civilization. Subsequent research has landed on the region of 3000 BC for the earliest signs of the Harappans coalescing into a veritable civilization, with the Mature Harappan period beginning around 2600 BC. It was by this Mature Harappan period that the settlement sites of the culture had grown into urban centers we would call cities. 

For being a fairly large and early civilization, the Harappan people left a faint mark on the pages of history. Part of this is due to the fact that these people were on the border-line of being a literate culture. They left plenty of seals, tablets, and pots with their markings, but the language, if we can ever legitimately call it such, has yet to be deciphered. Regardless, almost every instance of these markings is only made up of a few symbols at most, so even if we do decipher their writing system in the future, there is little chance that there will be any substantial literature from the Harappan culture. 

Most of what we knew about these people, then, comes to us from the traces that were left lying around in other civilizations. For instance, we know that the Harappan people must have had a vast trade network because pottery, beads, and seals with Harappan writing have been found at numerous locations, including locations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and places on the Arabian Peninsula. Other goods and items that are strewn across ancient sites in these regions include lapis lazuli, mentioned frequently in Egyptian sources, beautiful shells, and goods made of tin and copper. The sites on the Arabian Peninsula are particularly interesting, as they bring us back to something we saw early on in our look at ancient Mesopotamia, that is, their trade with the lands of Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha. 

While it’s entirely possible that the Harappan people sailed west on the Arabian Sea to conduct their trade, archaeological evidence of ships or shipwrecks is sadly lacking. That being said, the Indus River Valley is aptly named, a riverine region where the Harappan people learned the local waters by heart. Obviously their goods got to Mesopotamia somehow, and it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that the Harappans were enterprising sailors, but we just don’t have enough hard evidence to draw the conclusions we’d like to be able to draw. We do, however, have evidence from the late-third-millennium BCE that there was a village of Meluhhans, likely Harappan settlers, outside the Mesopotamian port city of Lagash. It would make sense that they got there via sea, though again its possible that they hitched a ride on board a Mesopotamian trade vessel, or even that they made multiple connections with short-distance traders between Meluhha, Magan, Dilmun, and finally the Lagash. 

So we know from evidence along the route to Mesopotamia that the Harappans traded a wide variety of goods with their neighbors to the north and west. Although we don’t have evidence of ships themselves from the Harappan period or even for a while thereafter, we have a few ship depictions that have been discovered at the main Harappan cities, though keep in mind that research into the many Harappan sites is ongoing and hasn’t been going on for all that long to begin with, so our knowledge of this culture’s maritime technology may grow extensively in the years to come. The first image is a seal impression discovered in the Mohenjo Daro, one the largest Harappan cities, located inland from the sea but still situated on the Indus River, giving it access to the Arabian Sea via the river. 

Mohenjo_Daro_boat_seal
The Mohenjo Daro seal depiction of a Harappan boat, most likely a reed boat but possibly a planked boat.

This crude seal depiction shows a boat that is probably a reed-bundle boat like those we saw in Egypt, though some have proposed the possibility that it may be a planked boat instead. It has a sharply upturned stem and stern and was steered by long steering oars. The seal depicts one of the earliest Indian ships represented in Bronze Age art, and though some believe that the vertical structures shown in the middle of the boat depict masts, it seems more likely that the boat simply had a cabin-like structure in the center. The best representation of a Harappan ship also comes from Mohenjo Daro, but this one is depicted on a terracotta amulet. This boat had a flat bottom with raked stern and prow and there are two steering oars at the stern. In the middle of the boat there is a cabin and at both ends of the ship a sea bird is depicted. These birds were called dishakak and were used by sailors to find land. There are also two masts on both sides of the central cabin. This ship also seems to be constructed of bundled reeds, again, a method of shipbuilding which was used in Egypt during the Bronze Age. 

mohenjo_daro_terra_cotta_boat
The well-depicted boat from the terra cotta amulet found at Mohenjo Daro.
harappan_potsherd_boat
The oldest depiction of a Harappan boat as contained on the potsherd found at Mohenjo Daro.

The oldest depiction of a boat comes in the form of a graffito found painted on a potsherd that was also found at Mohenjo Daro. This depiction is the one that’s most likely to represent a planked boat, possibly with a 'spoon-shaped' hull. The vertical and near-horizontal lines above the graffito hull may well be depictions of mast and yard and, if so, this is the earliest evidence for the use of sail in India. I do have a picture of this graffito up on the website, if you’re curious, but the only one I could find was a reproduction of the graffito as depicted on the seal for India’s 2001 International Fleet Review in Mumbai. It’s not the actual potsherd, but it gives you an idea of the type of boat that was depicted, and you can decide for yourself whether the lines above the hull depict a sail, or not. 

As for boat models, not much has been found either. One item was unearthed in the ancient city of Harappa, a site that takes its name from a modern village located near the former course of the Ravi River. The archaeological convention is to name a previously unknown civilization by its first excavated site, so the Indus Valley Civilization, or the Harappan Civilization, got its name from this ancient city of Harappa. Anyway, the item from Harappa is a 6 cm long terra-cotta item that has been interpreted as being a toy boat model. For what it’s worth, this model shares the traits of the boat depictions that were found at Mohenjo Daro. They are all flat-bottomed boats, with high prows, a shape that is characteristic of the reed bundle type of boat that was probably used to traverse the river system in the Indus River Valley itself. 

harappa_boat_model
The item from Harappa interpreted as being a toy boat model.

As I’ve said already at least once, we don’t have any physical ship remains connected to the Harappan Civilization. However, the mention of Harappa as a city brings up an interesting point that I was astounded by when first stumbled upon it in my research. The Harappan Civilization as a whole consisted of at least 1,000 cities and settlements, though the actual number was probably far greater. The city of Harappa itself is thought to have had around 25,000 residents, so a fairly large city for the time period about which we’re talking. Here’s the amazing part though. The Harappan Civilization encompassed over 680,000 km2 − more than twice the area occupied by its contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Harappan sites across this great expanse shared many remarkable similarities in terms of their material culture, iconography and settlement pattern, and although there are regional variations, it was the high degree of similarity across this vast area that led archaeologists to declare the discovery of a new civilization. 

Lest you think I’m straying too far from our maritime history focus, here’s why this tidbit is relevant. Harappa the city is located far inland on an alluvial plain, thus, also far from any significant sources of stone or other building material. The city also happens to be the second-largest Harappan site discovered to date, and every single stone found at the site, down to the smallest pebble, had to have been transported there by some human activity from the surrounding highland areas. Conveniently for the people of Harappa, although also the likely reason for why they built the city where they did, Harappa is located in the Punjab region, a region whose name literally means ‘Land of the Five Rivers.’ Most of the stone used to build Harappa originated from sources at least 120 km away from the site, some types of stone coming from sources over 200 km away. So how did they get it there? Well, the most apparent answer is that transport was accomplished by boat, taking advantage of the ubiquitous rivers in the Indus River Valley. This likely was the case, to some degree, though once analysis I came across made the case that the Harappan culture did the bulk of such transport on land, only using boats as ferries to cross the rivers when necessary. As with most of what we’ve seen so far from the region, we don’t have a definitive answer. We know these people were familiar with boats thanks to the few depictions that have been found, but the lack of physical ship remains would suggest that their use may not have been as prevalent as was the case in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 

Let’s go ahead and turn our attention to the coastal cities and see if we can flesh out how connected the Harappans were to the sea. The sites we’ve seen so far, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, were located far inland on the Indus River. The next few sites are all coastal sites interpreted as being ancient port cities of the Harappan Civilization. Many of these sites are situated somewhere in the Gujarat Region which includes the Gulf of Kutch and the Gulf of Cambay, the area that was discussed in the Periplus of the Erythraen Sea as being difficult to navigate. 

lothal_dockyard
The 'dockyard' or the irrigation tank at Lothal as it exists today.

The site that is most often mentioned as important to our understanding of the Harappan maritime trade in the Arabian Sea is the site called Lothal. This site lies at the head of the Gulf of Cambay and has yielded the largest cache of Harappan seals outside of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa itself, so it was likely a Harappan port city even though it lies 800 kilometers away from the Indus River itself. Many of the seals were found amidst the ruins of a building that seems to have been a warehouse, evidence of the city as a port. More controversial evidence of Lothal as a port comes from a structure that some have interpreted as being among the world’s oldest dockyards. This structure is basically a basin lined with brick and built into the ground. It has a depth of 3.1 meters, but is fairly large, measuring 214 by 36 meters. There’s also a sluice gate at one end to control the water-level and, presumably, to prevent the basin from overflowing. 

While the structure is most definitely of Harappan origin, recent interpretations have tended to discount the dock theory. Originally, it was proposed that this structure served as a dock for the berthing of ships that could reach the dock by rivers that fed into the dock basin itself. Other theories have focused more on the likelihood that the basin was an irrigation tank used to store water for drinking and for irrigation. I have to confess that I am somewhat skeptical of interpreting the Lothal structure as a dock, simply because it seems too good to be true. We know that Mesopotamia at this period had sea-going vessels and made long- distance journeys. We also have reference to docks in literature from this period in ancient Mesopotamia, yet, we don’t even have any archaeological evidence of a dock anywhere in Mesopotamia, yet. Compare that to the Indus Valley Civilization where we have no evidence of sea-going vessels, and very indirect evidence of maritime exploits to begin with. Why should we foist the dock interpretation on this structure that could easily have been a water basin or even something else we haven’t thought of. That’s my two cents, anyhow. I think it’s also instructive that there’s not much evidence of foreign items that’s been discovered at Lothal, so if the structure really were a dock for foreign and local ships, wouldn’t there be more evidence of trade? 

lothal_dockyard
An artist's interpretation of how the dockyard at Lothal would have functioned, if indeed it was a dockyard.

There are a handful of other coastal sites from the Harappan Civilization that have pointed to as port cities, the majority of them sitting west of Lothal. Some of them are west of the Indus River itself, and their presence is seen as being evidence of a coastal trade route that may have been used in conjunction with the middle-men of Dilmun and Magan. Beyond these other sites our maritime evidence of the Indus Valley Civilization is exhausted, and even the additional sites give us hardly any evidence in the way of maritime artifacts.

So we’ll bring today’s look at the Harappan Civilization to a close. As we saw in our discussion of Mesopotamia, the Harappan trade with their neighbors to the northwest began to decline around 1800 BCE and was almost completely dead within 100 years. The speculation is that a drought began the decline, and that once trade began drying up the decline picked up speed. The Harappan people began to move eastward, settling in modern-day India. This, combined with other migration from regions to India’s north, resulted in a transition to what historians now call the Vedic period, a period that’s beyond our scope today. We’ll get there eventually and see early India’s connections with it’s neighbors, but a large part of the Vedic periods was relatively quite on the maritime activity front.

At this point, I foresee us shifting over to the Mediterranean in earnest and looking at the Minoan Civilization on Crete. From there, we’ll fill in any remaining gaps and then see how the Sea Peoples wreaked havoc on the ancient maritime world. 

Sources

One Response

  1. On the subject of the “serpents” mentioned in the Periplus. These sound like they may be Moray Eels or related. Serpent like body, monstrous faces, have a folk reputation as dangerous (mostly unfounded). The varieties out to sea normally feed at depth but will often come to the surface. An Indian ocean coastal variety that comes to mind is the Ribbon Eel, it grows to 2 or 3 feet long, and is very yellow in it mature adult phase!

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