Civilization #20: The Proto-Buddhists of the Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilization

We are concluding our study of the Bronze Age with the Indus Valley Civilization. We've done Egypt and Mesopotamia, and now we turn to the Indus Valley. I'm going to look at three questions. First, what is it that makes the Indus Valley Civilization distinct or different from other civilizations? Second, why did it decline? They reached their peak from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, and then for the next 300 to 400 years, they declined and ultimately disappeared. Why did that happen? The last question is, what is their legacy? What is their contribution to the development of Western Civilization?

The World of the Middle Bronze Age

To understand the Indus Valley Civilization, we first need to understand the world at this time, from about 2500 to 2000 BCE. This is what we call the Middle Bronze Age because most people were using bronze for weapons and tools.

What makes the Indus Valley Civilization important is that it's by the coast, which allows it to access Mesopotamia and Egypt. During the Bronze Age, these three civilizations—Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and the Indus Valley Civilization—were heavily interconnected through trade. The Indus Valley Civilization had unique products, for example, Indigo dye, which was really sought after in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Their handicrafts and jewelry were also very famous throughout the world. They usually traded with Sumer and Egypt by trading with the Gulf State nations of Bahrain, Oman, and Dubai. They actually had a colony by the Persian Gulf. This civilization was so good at trading that we believe they even traded with China, which is pretty far away, but their ships were huge and they were very good navigators.

As the Bronze Age developed, bronze was in heavy demand, and the main components of bronze are copper and tin. Tin is mainly found in the mountains of Afghanistan. This meant the Indus Valley Civilization started to expand over to Afghanistan in order to access the tin trade. Tin was really sought after, but there's also another stone called lapis lazuli, which was really sought after by the Egyptians for its spiritual and aesthetic qualities. Because of the trade with Afghanistan, land routes started to develop into Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

As well, because of this trade in Afghanistan, new civilizations started to develop. They're not as advanced or as large as the three major ones, but they're still pretty advanced. For example, up here is what we call the Oxus Valley Civilization. The technical term used by archaeologists is the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). What makes this civilization important is that it interacts with the steppe people, called the Andronovo culture.

As you can see, the Indus Valley Civilization, through its partners—the Oxus Valley Civilization and its colonies—now traded with the entire world. There's no piece of the Western World the Indus Valley Civilization did not touch. This is a world from about 2500 to 2000 BCE that's heavily interconnected.

There were two major sources of demand. The Egyptians were extremely wealthy, and they wanted valuable jewelry and handicrafts for their burials. That's one source of heavy demand. The main source of demand was actually Mesopotamia, where the city-states of Sumer were fighting wars against each other. In war, bronze makes a huge difference because bronze armor is much stronger than copper armor. These two places were driving demand, and as such, the Indus Valley Civilization was growing wealthy through trade.

What Makes the Indus Valley Civilization Distinct?

Even though the Indus Valley Civilization was connected with Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was a radically different civilization.

A Peaceful Trading Empire

The first thing that makes the Indus Valley Civilization interesting is its huge area. It's actually, in terms of size, larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It had a population at its peak of about 5 million people. What's really interesting is we have found no evidence of any organized warfare in this region during this time. The reason why is this region was connected through trade.

We have found five major urban centers in the Indus Valley Civilization, and you can consider these urban centers to be what we call value-adding processing centers. These are urban centers that specialized in taking raw goods like metals and agricultural products and turning them into finished products like jewelry and handicrafts to be shipped and traded, mainly with Mesopotamia but also Egypt and possibly China. It also went north to the Oxus Valley Civilization, which then traded with the steppe people, the Andronovo culture. This trade network was very complex, and everyone was involved in some capacity.

So that's the first interesting thing about the Indus Valley Civilization: they traded internally peacefully, and they traded externally peacefully as well. We have absolutely no evidence that they ever had organized warfare. We have no evidence that they had any intention of organized warfare, meaning we have not found any weapons. We have found tools and hunting weapons, but we have not found things like armor and helmets.

How can we speculate there was no organized war?

How do we know there's no organized warfare? We know there was a lot of organized warfare in Mesopotamia and other places because of what we have dug up. We look at cities and see parts of the city that have been built on top of or destroyed, meaning there might have been some fires or warfare. But with these five centers that we've dug up, we have found them pretty intact, meaning they were not built on top of or destroyed while they were around. That's the first major piece of evidence.

The second major piece of evidence is we've dug up their graves. If you look at the civilizations of the Andronovo culture or Mesopotamia, they tend to bury warriors with their weapons, like helmets and armor. But when we dug up the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) culture people, first of all, we don't find a distinct caste of warriors. Also, we don't find any helmets, armor, or weapons. That's what led us to believe they didn't engage in organized warfare.

However, there's also evidence to suggest our evidence is not solid. First, they didn't have a tradition of burying all their dead; some were buried, but not everyone. Second, we don't know where they buried their dead. We assume they buried their dead in the cities, but that may not be true. The evidence leans towards them being a peaceful civilization, but as we dig up more over time, we may discover this was not true.

What's really important about the IVC is that this is a new discovery. We've only known about them for the past 100 years. What's interesting is the Indians themselves never knew they existed. It was the British who discovered these cities and started the archaeological work to reconstruct their civilization.

An Egalitarian Society

The second thing that was interesting and surprising for us is that for a very large civilization, they were egalitarian. In Mesopotamia, when we look at old cities like Ur and Uruk, there were huge palaces and temples, which suggested a concentration of power in the priesthood and in the king. But when we look at these five urban centers of the IVC, there are no palaces and no temples.

In fact, these cities are extremely well-designed. There are walls around the city, and as you go into the city, you're able to access every single part of it. But if you were to go into a city in Sumer, you're only able to access the temple or the palace. Authority was centralized in Sumer, whereas authority was sort of decentralized in the IVC.

Here's a question: if we suspect they were not engaged in warfare, why did they have walls? There are a lot of walls inside these cities. Why? The answer is customs and taxes. This was a value-adding processing center, and the way they survived economically was by collecting tolls and customs on people who traded. The way they collected taxes is when you entered the city, you had to go to the customs house, pay whatever was required of you, and then you could access the city. That's the way they centrally controlled the economy and trade in the IVC.

These cities are amazing. These were the first people to invent the private flush toilet, around 2800 BCE. If you go into these cities, you'll find that in private homes, everyone has a private toilet. The feces is put into a sewage system, and water flushes it out. That's pretty amazing. These were people who were very concerned about the well-being of all their citizens. When we look at skeletal remains through DNA analysis, we've discovered the majority of the people ate about the same high quality of food. There weren't these disparities between people as you would find in other civilizations. We think at least half the people lived past the age of 55, which was an amazing achievement back then.

In terms of sanitation, they had reservoirs and public baths. They also had really amazing things called wind towers. These are basically air conditioners. They are high towers with a hole on top. The higher the air is, the cooler it is. This cool wind gets into the wind tower, comes down, and pushes out the hot air from the other side. This is what cooled the houses in the summer. This was a pretty advanced technology.

Another really cool thing about the IVC is that even though it covered a huge area, they had standardized weights and measurements. This means that every brick they had was the same size, which means that their buildings and structures were extremely stable and resilient. That's why 5,000 years later, we still have their cities intact. You can actually go to the cities and live in them; that's how stable the technology was.

The Mystery of Their Writing and Religion

This was a pretty advanced civilization. Unfortunately, we don't know what their writing system is. If they had writing—and we can't know for sure—it was like Chinese, an ideographic language, meaning it was not phonological. The spoken language was not the same as the written language. In other words, it is impossible for us to decipher their written language. We don't have that many artifacts of writing. We have seals with characters written on them, but we don't have anything else.

The reason could be that if you look at Egypt, they used papyrus, which is stable in a dry Egyptian climate. If you look at Sumerian culture, they used cuneiform on clay tablets, which keeps forever. But if the IVC had a writing system and they did write, it would have been on palm leaves, which degrade very easily in a jungle climate.

We don't have access to their writing. This is problematic because without access to their writing, we don't have access to their religion. We don't know what their religion was. One thing that's very important is that religion or mythology is the operating system of a culture. It is the collective consciousness, the collective worldview that gives life to their culture. It explains why they do what they do. Unfortunately, we don't know their religion. It's a complete mystery to archaeologists and scholars as to why this very advanced civilization was very peaceful and very egalitarian. We can only speculate.

A Culture Shaped by the Dialectic

I'm going to speculate as to why they were peaceful and egalitarian. The key is their religion, because that will give us clues as to their mentality and their value system. We know the Mesopotamian religion focused on struggle and achievement. We know the Egyptian religion focused on the afterlife. For them, what's important is not the here and now, but what happens afterwards. That's why the Egyptians built the pyramids and focused so much on funeral rites and burial goods.

There had to be a religion in the IVC that was different from the belief systems in Sumer and Egypt that made it into a peaceful, egalitarian civilization. My speculation is this: the key is to understand that this is a civilization based on trade. They had been traders ever since they were born as a culture, meaning they were trading for at least 7,000 or 8,000 years before they became a civilization.

If you're a trader, you're able to access the entire world. We know for a fact they traded with Sumer and the Persian Gulf states because we have artifacts from the IVC in these places. We can speculate they also traded with Egypt and China, just based on their technology and trade networks. As traders, they were able to see what was going on in Mesopotamia and Egypt. They knew they built the pyramids in Egypt; they knew there was massive warfare in Sumer. I would think that if you were a trader and you saw these things, you wouldn't be impressed. In fact, you might be disgusted, especially by the warfare in Mesopotamia.

This is the idea called the dialectic, and I think this is a very important idea for us to appreciate how history is often driven by it. An example we have today is Japan and China. These are two radically different societies next to each other. Why are they so different? I think the answer is because Japan knows China very well, and a lot of cultural practices Japan developed over the centuries have been in response to what they see as failings or successes in Chinese culture.

Another example is Canada and the United States. The United States is probably the most belligerent nation in the world. Then you go north to Canada. Canada and the United States share the world's longest border; basically, Canadians are cousins of the Americans. We speak the same language and have the same cultural practices. But while Americans are the most belligerent nation ever in human history, Canadians invented peacekeeping—the idea that nations should strive for mediation and peace. I think a lot of Canadian values, especially its political system, are in response to what it believes to be failings and successes in the American model.

I believe that's what happened with the IVC. These traders saw what was happening in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and they were kind of disgusted, especially by all the warfare. Warfare back then was pretty awful. In Mesopotamia, they fought with clay bullets. You take a slingshot and throw it at someone, and these things kill. Think of David and Goliath. If you're a trader, you'll see this warfare going on, you'll see people being beheaded, and they're doing it in the name of God. Every city-state had a patron god that it believed it must defend, honor, and protect. Whenever there was a dispute, it's because they felt their god had been dishonored by another city-state, so they went to war and killed each other.

Again, if you're a trader and you see this, you don't think this is a good thing. You go to Egypt and see these pyramids. They are extremely impressive, but at the same time, you also see the consequences: massive inequality, massive corruption, just massive waste. I think that by trading with these two civilizations and others, it reinforced the deep cultural values of the IVC people and compelled them towards peace and egalitarianism. That's what I believe happened.

There are other arguments, for example, maybe these people were just genetically peaceful and egalitarian. But I've made the argument that from the onset of early human history, we were peaceful, egalitarian people, but different geographic circumstances changed our outlook. For example, the people in the steppes, who we call the Andronovo people, were forced to be cattle ranchers because of the grasslands, which were a poor, rugged, and unforgiving environment. Over time, their culture became very aggressive, expansionist, and opportunistic. Opportunistic just means they'll do whatever it takes to survive. If they face a problem, they'll trade with people if that's what benefits them; they'll kill people if that's what benefits them. They are not that moral. These people, with their cultural values, would go on to conquer all of Europe in about 200-300 years. These Yamnaya people continued to evolve over time, becoming even more aggressive, expansionist, and opportunistic. Eventually, the Mongols, Genghis Khan's Mongols, will come from this civilization.

My argument is that it was because of their interaction with other cultures that the IVC were convinced to pursue a peaceful and egalitarian lifestyle. There were still inequalities in the IVC—we know there were classes and wealth inequality—but relative to Mesopotamia and Egypt, it was a relatively peaceful and egalitarian society.

The Decline of the Indus Valley Civilization

Would they have been invaded?

When you're a peaceful, egalitarian society, you will eventually get invaded by other cultures. For the longest time, there was a theory, first proposed by the Nazis, called the Indo-Aryan Invasion. The idea is that these white people swept into India, conquered the people, and introduced civilization to the Indians. Even though this theory has been discredited, there is a slight kernel of truth to it, which I will explain.

The IVC was a very advanced civilization, but their entire economy was based on trade. We know that around this time, there was something called the 4.2-kiloyear event, which was basically massive climate change around the world. This event brought an end to the Egyptian Old Kingdom. It also brought an end to the Akkadian Empire in Sumer. A man named Sargon of Akkad conquered all of Sumer and built the Akkadian Empire, but because of this drought and climate change, his empire collapsed. In other words, the trade networks that the IVC heavily depended on started to collapse.

As a result, their cities, which were dependent on trade, started to depopulate. A lot of people started to return to the farms where they were from. They also started migrating to the rest of India, to the Ganges. As well, because of this climate change, the IVC itself was being affected heavily. There was drought, and the rivers were drying up. Remember, it's called the Indus Valley Civilization because it's dependent on the Indus River, among other rivers.

Over time, all civilizations face internal tensions. These can be divided into two major tensions. The first is conflict among the classes, the idea of elite overproduction, where you have too many people striving for limited status. The conflict is mainly between the upper nobility and lower nobility. In the IVC, we can imagine the conflict might have been between large trading families and small trading families.

The other social tension is the idea of rat utopia, especially the conflict between the old and the young. The problem in the IVC is you had too many old people living for too long, which meant fewer opportunities for achievement for the young. That created conflict as well. We believe that during this time, there was massive social tension within the IVC, and some would even say it was a revolutionary time when old customs and mores were being overthrown.

Because of climate change, the people of the Andronovo culture were forced to leave the steppes, which were no longer suitable for their lifestyle. They pushed into the Oxus Valley Civilization and, over time, assimilated it into themselves. This was not an intentional invasion. It's not that you have a general and an army that go into the Oxus Valley Civilization and conquer it. It was more opportunistic. At first, they were trading, and as the Oxus Valley Civilization declined because of collapsing trade networks, they started to come in and push out the people.

The culture of these steppe people was very aggressive. There were two strategies they would employ. The first was they might wipe out villages. These villages were depopulated anyway; they would come in and clear everyone out, meaning they killed everyone. The second strategy was to come in, kill all the men, and marry all the women. This was a gradual process of assimilation and cultural conquest, but it was not a military invasion.

After the Andronovo culture and the Oxus culture merged, this created a new culture called Proto-Indo-Iranian. It's called that because they would then go south to the Iranian plateau and eventually become the Persian people. They would invent a new religion that became a great world religion called Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism comes from this merger of the Proto-Indo-Iranian culture into the Iranian plateau. This process is called syncretism, where two major religions merge and share the same gods.

There are three distinct characteristics of the Proto-Indo-Iranian culture that became salient in the new Zoroastrian religion:

1. The use of a ritual drink called Soma.
2. The worship of fire and the heavy use of fire rituals.
3. Horse sacrifice, meaning that warriors were buried with their horses, emphasizing the warrior culture.

That's what happened in Iran; they became the Persian people. These people also pushed into the IVC. Over a process that took about 500 years, they pushed out the indigenous people, who then moved into South India, where they merged with the folk culture and animism of the local people there.

What's amazing about this is this process created two major world religions that are still influential today. The first we know as Hinduism. Hinduism is the merger, the syncretism, of Proto-Indo-Iranian religion with the local IVC religion. As the IVC people were pushed south, this created a new religion called Buddhism. Buddhism is just the major one; there were others being created as well through this process, like Jainism and Sikhism. This process created thousands of new religions.

This is what happened. It was not a military conquest or an invasion, but a process of, you could argue, cultural genocide, where new people came in and, over time, because they had an aggressive, expansionist, opportunistic culture, eventually took over. This was mainly done by marrying the local women, because the people who came in were basically males. They would marry the local women and either kill or enslave the local men. This is where we get the caste system from in India. This is a more subtle explanation of the Indo-Aryan invasion theory, and this is what scholars today accept happened. What's really important is to avoid generalizations and simplifications, because this was a process that took about 300-400 years, and there were different strategies employed by different people. Some of it was peaceful, some of it was violent. It was a mix.

The Legacy of the Indus Valley Civilization

What is the legacy of the IVC? They were a great civilization. Are they completely lost to us? The legacy of Egypt is the pyramids. The legacy of Mesopotamia is many things, like writing and world literature like the Epic of Gilgamesh. I want to argue that the legacy of the IVC is in their spiritual practice and their spiritual values.

The Birth of Hinduism and Buddhism

If you look at Hinduism, it's very different from Zoroastrianism, which is strange because they're both Proto-Indo-Iranian religions. Hinduism believes the reality we live in is false. The real reality is called Brahman, the true, absolute reality. As we live in this false reality, we collect karma, which is basically just an accounting of your good and bad deeds. Throughout your life, you're going to accumulate more bad deeds than good deeds, and your karma means your soul, called the Atman, is stuck here. Because Brahman is pure, you can only return to Brahman (heaven) if you're a pure person. It will take many lifetimes for you to cleanse your soul in order to return to Brahman.

This process of cleansing your soul is what they call Dharma, the right path. If, over thousands of lifetimes, your Dharma is correct, you will achieve what is called Moksha, which is basically liberation. Moksha releases your soul from the physical world and allows you to return to Brahman, where you will live eternally in paradise.

Another really important idea of Hinduism is that this entire process is mediated or gatekept by priests called Brahmins. You think being a good person is enough? No, it's not. You have to listen to the Brahmins because only the Brahmins understand Dharma. Depending on who you are, your Dharma will be different. In Hinduism, there's a hierarchy. At the very top are, of course, the priests, the Brahmins, because they have access to spiritual knowledge. Below them are the warriors and the kings. Below them are the farmers and merchants who keep the economy running. And at the very bottom are the servants and laborers.

What's really interesting about this system is that it can be differentiated by the color of one's skin. Remember, the Proto-Indo-Iranians had white skin. The IVC culture, the people we call the Proto-Dravidians, had darker skin. The IVC people of the lower class didn't intermix with the Proto-Indo-Iranians, so basically, the Proto-Indo-Iranians accumulated and centralized power through the idea of Hinduism. They were the priest class.

In this system, who's really unhappy? Which group of people is very upset with this system? The lower nobility, and in this system, that's the kings. The kings are the lower nobility; the upper nobility are the Brahmins because it's the Brahmins who can show access to Brahman. The kings must obey the priests.

The kings aren't happy with this, and from this conflict, you have the creation of Buddhism. Remember, Siddhartha Gautama, who is considered the first Buddha, was actually a prince. The man most responsible for spreading Buddhism in India and around the world, Ashoka, was the emperor of the Mauryan Empire. He was the one who institutionalized Buddhism as a state religion and sponsored missionary projects to China, Greece, and Egypt. These rulers didn't like Hinduism because they saw the Brahmin class as a threat to their power.

Buddhism follows this system except for one major difference: you don't need the Brahmins to access Nirvana. You don't need the Brahmins to access spiritual enlightenment; you can do it by yourself through spiritual guidance by monks. As you can see, Buddhism is in many respects a revolutionary religion meant to overthrow the power of the Brahmin class.

In response to Buddhism, what did the Brahmins do? They created the caste system. After the rise of Buddhism, Hinduism started to implement what we call today the caste system, which says these classes must separate from each other. They are not allowed to intermingle, not even allowed to touch each other or each other's food. The people at the very bottom are what we call today the Untouchables. This system was developed by the Hindu priests in response to the threat of Buddhism.

Over time, because the Proto-Indo-Iranian people were aggressive, expansionist, and opportunistic, Hinduism would defeat Buddhism in this struggle. One really important way they defeated Buddhism was by adopting most of its practices, like yoga, meditation, and also Nirvana. The Hindu Brahmins adopted whatever was popular in Buddhism. Another thing the Hindu priests did was start assimilating other religions. Most Indians throughout history believed in their local folk gods. Eventually, all these gods were assimilated into the Hindu hierarchy. That's why you have a million gods in the Hindu religion; they were all, over time, assimilated into the hierarchy. Obviously, these gods are lesser gods; the higher gods, the Holy Trinity, are Brahmin gods.

Could the IVC Religion Have Been a Proto-Buddhism?

What was the IVC's proto-religion? I want to make a very strange argument that most scholars probably will not agree with: I think the religion of the IVC was a Proto-Buddhism.

The reason why is if you look at Jainism and you look at Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, there are a lot of similarities. Proto-Zoroastrianism actually fits into the larger Proto-Indo-European religious framework. When you look at Hinduism, you've got this strange belief in karma, Dharma, reincarnation, impermanence, and Brahman as the ultimate reality. This is not part of the Proto-Indo-European religion anywhere.

At the same time, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism all share this fundamental belief that this world is a false reality created by our false beliefs. If we learn to tame our emotions and see the underlying reality governing all human structure, then we will be released from this world. Where would that come from? It must have come from the IVC because there would be no other place. It also explains why these religions have such huge followings in India; they don't have followings anywhere else. They are appealing to a fundamental sense of the world among Indians. They're basically appealing to nostalgia. Where is this nostalgia from? It must be from the IVC.

I would bet that if we were able to reconstruct the religion of the IVC, we would see a Proto-Buddhism. It would be very different, because Buddhism evolved over thousands of years, but the underlying assumptions about the world—basically the idea of Oneness and false reality—would be very apparent in the IVC, as they are apparent now in all four major Indian religions.

A Fundamental Human Nostalgia

I would argue that we as humans fundamentally have a nostalgia for these two ideas: Oneness and false reality. If you look at the West today, there are two ideas that are the most powerful. The first is Plato's allegory of the cave—the idea that we live in a shallow world and the truth is out there, but we have to seek it. It's a very powerful idea, and it's very similar to the ideas found in Hinduism and Buddhism.

The second powerful idea is the Second Coming, the return of Jesus. What does the return of Jesus signify? It signifies paradise on Earth. It signifies the destruction of our current reality and the replacement of a new reality that creates oneness, completeness, and wholeness on Earth. In many ways, this is very similar to what the Indians are proposing as well.

What this is saying is that at a fundamental level, everyone has nostalgia for a distant past. What is this distant past? It is the idea of animism. Remember, 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, we were in the Ice Age. We were hunter-gatherers, and the way we saw the world was very different. Back then, if you were a hunter-gatherer, you thought you were the same as the tree or the animal. It's the idea of Oneness: we're no different, we're all part of the life cycle, we're all part of Mother Nature, the mother goddess. We also believed we inhabited different realities at the same time. We live in this world, which is the material reality, but we're also inhabiting the spiritual reality. What we do spiritually matters a lot more than what we do materially.

I think that's where Buddhism comes from; it comes from animism. This Proto-Buddhism became reinforced and much more concrete because it was experiencing a reality in Mesopotamia and Egypt that was abhorrent to the people experiencing it. War goes against the human experience. Inequality, corruption, and waste go against the human experience. We fundamentally believe this to be evil and wrong.

Is human nature fundamentally benevolent?

I don't believe human nature is benevolent. I believe humans naturally seek a spiritual understanding of the world. Humans want to know: Why are we here? Where are we going? Where do we come from? We want to know why. We're also curious; we want to explore the world. I think trade is not a new invention; it's inherent to human nature. The idea of globalization—this was a globalized world 5,000 years ago, an extremely sophisticated, complex, globalized world.

I think that's what makes us fundamentally human: our curiosity and our imagination. You can say this is a good thing or a bad thing, and I would say it depends on the circumstance. Sometimes, in the IVC, this will lead to peace and egalitarianism. But this is also what drives the idea of the Second Coming, which is driving the conflict in the Middle East today. It depends on the context. If this curiosity and imagination are channeled effectively, then I think that's a good thing. If it's channeled opportunistically, then it's a bad thing.