The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Six

DID THE HARAPPĀ CULTURE HAVE THE SPOKED CHARIOT-WHEEL OF THE ARYANS?

Perhaps an attempt will be made to show the posteriority of the Rigveda to the Harappā Culture by protesting: 'The Rigveda knows the spoked chariot-wheel, which is as much a sign of the Aryan as the domesticated horse. The Harappā Culture has shown only solid wheels for its carts and chariots. How will you explain this striking difference except by crediting the Harappā Culture with greater antiquity, if not also by supposing that the Rigvedics brought the spoked chariot-wheel into India in 1500 B.C. from abroad, where it is surely attested by that time?"

It is true that so far only solid wheels have been in evidence in Harappān toy-vehicles, but can we really affirm that spoked ones are not indicated anywhere? Actually a positive answer should be considered overwhelming. About the writing on the Harappān stamp-seals, Walter Fairservis, Jr., remarks: "It appears to be hieroglyphic or ideographic in form. Human, animal and floral figurines are readily recognizable, multiple dashes probably represent numbers, while such objects as wheels, bows and arrows, and trees very likely represent themselves - it would seem that they are not phonetic symbols."¹ Now, if we look at the wheels in the illustrations provided by Fairservis we find them clearly with six spokes.²

These wheels are fairly frequent in Harappā itself (e.g. Seals Nos. 2029, 2119, 2160, 3309). They occur on as many as nine seals recovered from a part (DK area) of the lower

1.'The Ancient East", Natural History (New York), November 1958,pp. 506-07.

2.Ibid., p. 505. See the plate we have reproduced, showing two seals.The present writer argued for spoked chariot-wheels as far back as 1963 inthe same article in which he made out a case for the domesticated horse.See fn . 1 of chapter 5 for the reference.

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city of Mohenjo-Dāro.³ They are seen on three seals from Kalibangan.⁴ They are still more frequent on weapons than on seals.⁵ Kalibangan has yielded also two potsherds inscribed with them.⁶ And now from Surkotada comes not only a seal from the lowest layer with a six-spoked wheel traced on it⁷ but also a pottery-fragment painted with the same sign.⁸

Pusalker, referring to the Harappān wheel-sign, says that, like the swastika, it is a symbol of the sun.⁹ Doubtless, in antiquity the circle was a sun-symbol: thus the Egyptian hieroglyphs had a circle, with a circlet within it, as a solar emblem whose sound-value was Ra or Re.¹⁰ But nowhere in the world either before 2500 B.C. or in the early Harappān period - that is, before the first few centuries of the second millennium B. C. when the spoked wheels appeared in Asia Minor - do we have in any writing except of the Indus Valley Civilization the sign of the circle with inner spokes. Outside the Indus Valley the earliest such sign is in the Mycenaean syllabary as set forth by Michael Ventris and John Chad-wick, the now-famous Linear B. script.¹¹ There is a four-spoked circle, denoting the ka-sound. The language is Indo-European, an archaic Greek spoken in the 14th century B.C. when people were already acquainted with the spoked chariot-wheel. And it is here that we get a confirmation of our thesis that in c. 2500 B.C. the Harappān spoked-wheel

3.E.J.H. Mackay, Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro (New Delhi ,1937), Vol. II , Pis. LXXXIII and LXXXIV.

4.B.B. Lal, Has the Indus Script been deciphered? An Assessment of Two Latest Claims (Paper read at the 26th International Congress of Orientalists, Paris, 16-22 July), p. 8.

5.Mackay, op. cit., PI. CXXVI, and M.S. Vats, Excavations at Harappā (Delhi, 1941), PI. CXXIII.

6.Lai. op. cit., p.8

7.J.P. Joshi, op. cit., PI. VII facing p. 121.

8.Sankalia, op. cit., p. 363, Fig. 95.

9."The Indus Valley Civilization", The Vedic Age, p. 189.

10.P.E. Cleator, Lost Languages (Mentor, New York, 1959), p. 51.

11.Ibid., p. 155, Fig. 11.

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sign points to a chariot like those that came into vogue in Asia Minor about 1700 B.C. For, in the first place, the Linear B script has many ideograms and some of them "are clearly pictorial (as in the case of Men, Tripods, Chariots)"¹² The pictorial ideogram of the chariot shows a four-spoked wheel.¹³ In the second place, even outside the script, we have representations of chariots ridden by Mycenaean warriors, and again we are faced with the same wheel.¹⁴ There is perfect justification for us to argue from the Harappān wheel-sign to a Harappān chariot running on wheels with six spokes.

Actually it seems we do not have to wait on a proof from Mycenae. Our spoked wheels do not invariably occur in isolated suggestiveness: they are also found in association with a sign that should make it perfectly evident that these representations are the wheels of a chariot. We get a most enlightening observation from the Finnish scholars who have tried to read Proto-Dravidian in the Indus script but, like everyone else attempting decipherment so far, unsuccessfully, as may be gathered from the penetrating criticisms of B.B. Lai and other savants, who have basically invalidated their linguistic assumptions, arguments and methods.¹⁵ They bring into prominence Seal No. 3357 where a man's figure is

12.Ibid., p. 156.

13.Ibid., p. 157, Fig. 12, col. 4, 2nd & 3rd Ideograms from below.

14.Piggott, Prehistoric India, p. 275, Fig. 13, 3rd picture.

15.For the enlightening observation see Decipherment of the Proto-Dravidian Inscriptions of the Indus Civilization by Asko Parpola, Seppo Koskenniemi, Simo Parpola, Pentti Aalto, (The Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, Special Publication No. 1, Copenhagen, 1969), p. 24.

For the penetrating criticisms see Lai's article "Indus Script: Inconsistencies in Claims of Decipherment", The Hindusthan Times., New Delhi, April 6,1969, p. 14, and the articles of Romila Thapar and P.B. Pandit in the same newspaper, March 30, 1969, pp. l-m.

Even T. Burrow, on whose researches in Dravidian linguistics the Finnish scholars substantially depend, has made discouraging comments on their procedures and conclusions: see his "Dravidian and the Decipherment of the Indus Script", Antiquity, Vol. XLVIII, 1969, pp. 274-78.

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shown standing with one foot on one spoked wheel and the other on a similar circle.¹⁶ Apropos of the attachment of the two wheels to the feet of the man and not to his hands, as in the case of bow-and-arrow signs, the scholars declare that this fact makes it clear what the spoked-wheel sign depicts: "a '(cart-) wheel'." They add: "We have made this identification while realising full well that the spoked-wheeled war chariot was a later invention of the Aryans."

If the decipherers had not been obsessed with the notion that Aryanism in India was post-Harappān, they would have drawn the correct conclusion that a Seal like No. 3357 proves the war-chariot with spoked wheels to be an earlier invention of the Aryans, and the Harappā Culture to be their inheritor in spite of whatever Dravidianism it may have developed. To propose, as the Finnish scholars do in their second publication (1969, pp. 6, 20-21, 42-43), that the wheels are those of a potter using both his legs to turn them is surely an excessive flight of imagination. Besides, it does not do away with their spoked aspect. This aspect is indeed the central point, and its application to a chariot-wheel is the most natural, especially in a sign-arrangement like the one before us.

S.R. Rao seems fully aware of the significance of the sign

16. G.R. Hunter, The Script of Harappā and Mohenjo-daro (Kegan Paul, London, 1934), PI. XXXII, No. H 106.

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under discussion. He remarks in connection with an important Harappān site in Saurāshtra: "Relevant to the subject of chariots is the graffito on the potsherd from Lothal wherein a figure is seen standing on two wheels resembling the Assyrian chariot-drivers painted on pottery. Attention may be drawn here to the fact that hubbed terracotta wheels painted in red with diagonal lines suggesting spokes are also encountered at Lothal."¹⁷ We may remind ourselves that "the Assyrian chariot-drivers" hail from a period when spoked wheels were a common property.

The varied mass of evidence we have marshalled is enough to counterbalance a curious notion expressed by Fairservis in a recent writing. Unlike those who read a sun-symbol, he still holds that the sign in question is a wheel, but he says: "Though it appears to be a spoked wheel, a closer examination of the actual depiction on the seals indicates that it is not. The 'spokes' are usually simply depicted by mere crossing lines, and these conform with the kind of wooden supports for solid wheels seen on Sindi carts to this day."¹⁸ The notion seems to have been thought necessary just because spoked wheels are deemed anachronistic in Harappān times, which are taken to be prior to the spoked-wheel Aryan charioteers of c. 1500 B.C.

Even apart from our evidence, Fairservis gets no encouragement either from concrete practice or archaeology. Does any Sindi cart have the exact arrangement of three intercrossing lines we witness here? Fairservis's formula - "the kind of wooden supports" - is quite vague. And a scrutiny still closer than his examination will lay bare the fact that we do not have on the seals a flat solid wheel with "supports" superposed on its surface: there is an outer rim in relief to which the "spokes" - also in relief - are fixed, a rim such as no solid wheel can have, and empty space can be distinguished between the spokes and under the rim. Besides,

17.Lothal and the Indus Civilization, p. 124

18.Excavations at Allahdino, III (Papers of Allahdino Expedition, New York. 1977), p. 89.

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"supports" can be conceived only if separate sections are joined to make a solid wheel. Where is the slightest indication of such sections in our sign? Further, in ancient times, solid wheels were made in two ways. A couple of half-discs were dowelled together against the hub," in which case there were no visible "supports". Or else the wheels "were made with two or three segments fastened with transverse struts and strengthened with a swelling around the hub."²⁰ Transverse struts can form no such pattern as our sign exhibits. On the other hand, wherever in the ancient world spoked wheels are shown, they correspond very accurately with the depiction before us. Egyptian, late Hittite and Assyrian examples have even the same number of spokes²¹ as on the Harappān seals, weapons and potsherds. Fairservis's idea can safely be brushed aside.

To the doubt whether the Harappā Culture had sufficiently sophisticated metal tools for the manufacture of the spoked wheel, the answer is unequivocal. The impression of primitiveness produced by some Harappān weapons needs to be emphatically qualified. A.L. Basham writes: "In one respect the Harappā people were technically in advance of their contemporaries - they had devised a saw with undulating teeth, which allowed the dust to escape freely from the cut, and much simplified the carpenter's task. From this we may assume that they had particular skill in carpentry."²² Then there is the twisted copper or bronze drill discovered by Rao at Lothal. Sankalia records the find and comments: "Its occurrence at so early a date is of great moment in the history of civilization."²³

The primitiveness of Harappān weaponry must be attributed to self-imposed limitations, the innate conservatism

19.Piggott, op. cit., p. 274.

20.Encyclopaedia Britannica (1974), Vol. 19, p. 520, col. 2.

21.Piggott, op. cit., p. 275, Fig. 31, picture 2; p. 277.

22.The Wonder that was India (The Grove Press Inc., New York, 1961), _P. 21.

23.Indian Archaeology Today, p. 61.

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which most scholars have noted. To quote Stuart Piggott: "The dead hand of conservatism, in design rather than technique, lies heavy on all the Harappā products. Complex technical processes were known, well understood, and admirably organized for production, but the output suffered from standardization and an almost puritanical utilitarianism."²⁴ The Harappāns' metallurgy was advanced enough to turn out complex works whenever they wanted them.

This point about the state of metallurgy is important, as it keeps the Harappān wheel-representation distinct from a certain solitary depiction, which is still earlier, tentatively dated to about 4000 B.C. Piggott has discussed the Tell Halaf painted pot where a human figure stands by a circular object divided by cross-lines. Piggott finds it difficult to accept this representation as that of a wheeled vehicle because the metallurgy of Tell Halaf times is known to have been hesitant and experimental, not at all equipped with tools of a standard demanded for the production of a spoked wheel.²⁵ Besides, there is no supporting evidence for any sort of wheeled vehicle in c. 4000 B.C. According to Gordon Childe, the earliest vehicles on wheels in Mesopotamia, which he considers the earliest in history, date to a little before 3500 B.C.²⁶ And they are without the least trace of spokes. Even as late as the Royal Tombs of Ur (c. 2500 B.C.) the Mesopotamian wheels are solid.

The Harappā Culture's spoked wheels have no precedent in Western Asia nor anything contemporary there to compare with them. With Western Asia ruled out, there can exist outside India no source for them. If they had a source it could only be a previous culture within India. A culture, developed enough and yet simpler on the whole than the Indus Valley Civilization, could make the right explanatory background if we knew that it had the spoked wheel together with the horse-chariot - and still more if we knew that it

24.Prehistoric India, p. 200.

25.Ibid. pp. 273-4.

26."The First Wagons and Carts from the Tigris to the Severn", Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 17(3), pp. 177-94.

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flourished in the very region where this civilization is located. The Rigvedic Culture of Sapta-Sindhu, the seven-rivered Indus territory, as well as of the Sarasvati Valley has all the necessary qualifications.

And when we learn from Macdonell and Keith that in the Rigvedic chariot "sometimes a solid wheel was used",²⁷ we get a link between India's oldest scripture and the clay-model carts and chariots of the Indus Valley Civilization, in addition to a link between it and that civilization's wheel-figurines on stamp-seals, weapons and potsherds. Thus a Rigveda prior to 2500 B.C. can account for all we know of Harappān wheels.

A critic may ask: "How is it that only in the pre-Harappān India of the Rigveda and nowhere else in the same antiquity spokes are to be seen? Also, how is it that even in Harappān times they are confined to India?" The answer is simple. Spokes were adopted at different times by different peoples and countries. O. Schrader has expressly pointed out agreement in the names of the following portions of the wagon in the Indo-European languages: wheel, axle, nave, linch-pin, pole and yoke. The agreement is set over against the near-disagreement about the felloe (the outer rim attached to the spokes) and the total disagreement about the spokes.²⁸ Schrader, referring to the terms in common, notes: "In this collection, it will be observed, there is no equation for the spoke of the wheel." Thus it is not unnatural for both the Rigveda and the Harappā Culture to have the spoked wheel exclusively in their respective epochs - with nothing like it in the rest of the world.

Not only is it unnecessary to date the Rigveda after the Harappā Culture in the context of the wheel with spokes. It is also more in the fitness of things to regard it as pre-Harappān in that context.

27.The Vedic Index, II , p. 201.

28.Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan People, translated by Frank Byron Jevons (Charles Griffin and Co., London, 1890; Oxford Publishers, Delhi, 1972), p. 339.

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