Indus Valley

The Indus Valley held one of the earliest urban civilisations on earth, with planned cities at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, standardised brick sizes, drainage in the streets and a script on thousands of small seals. It also holds the clearest example in this atlas of how much cannot be said.

What survives is suggestive. A large watertight tank at Mohenjo-daro, surrounded by rooms and reached by steps at either end, is usually called the Great Bath and is generally taken to have served some collective purpose involving water. Seals show a figure seated with legs drawn up and a horned headdress, which John Marshall in the 1931 excavation report identified as a prototype of Shiva as lord of animals, an identification that has been argued about ever since and is now widely treated as unproven. Terracotta female figurines are numerous; whether they are goddesses, toys or something else is not established. No building has been securely identified as a temple, and no burial suggests a ruler treated as divine.

The obstacle is the script. It survives only in very short inscriptions, mostly of a few signs, with no bilingual text and no agreement on what language it records or even whether it records a language at all. Until that changes, statements about Harappan religion are inferences from objects, and the atlas records them as inferences.

The same river plain carries a second religious beginning, and the relation between the two is one of the most politically charged questions in South Asian scholarship.

The Rigveda, the oldest surviving Indian religious text, names rivers of this region repeatedly, among them the Sindhu itself. Its hymns describe a mobile, cattle-keeping, sacrificing society with a pantheon of gods sharing clear features with the gods of the Iranian Avesta and, further back, with those of other Indo-European traditions. Its language is Sanskrit in an archaic form, related to Old Persian and to Greek and Latin.

The Harappan cities were in decline before those hymns are usually dated. The mainstream reconstruction has Indo-Aryan speakers entering the northwest from Central Asia in the second millennium BCE and their religious tradition establishing itself over and alongside whatever the earlier population practised. An alternative position, argued in India with considerable public force, holds that the Vedic tradition is indigenous and that the Harappan civilisation is already Vedic, which would make Indian religion continuous from the third millennium BCE.

The dispute is not only about evidence, since national self-understanding is bound up in it, but there is evidence, from linguistics, archaeology and more recently ancient genomes, and it does not divide evenly between the two positions. The atlas records that the question is contested and where the weight of published argument currently sits.