Governance and Standardization
From the Sindhu to the Nile
The earliest people in the Saraswati-Sindhu cultural complex
came from the emigrants from Africa in 60,000-70,000 BP who settled along the
coast of the Arabian sea from the delta of the Sindhu (Indus) and the
Saraswati. We have discussed in an
earlier posting, how they expanded along the foothills of the Kirthar range (a
southern offshoot of the Himalayas) following a nomadic way of life that lived
off the fauna of the Indus valley. When
they reached the Khyber Pass, this wave split into two and the western finger
met the descendants of the second wave of African migration (described below).
A second wave of migration from Africa, probably around
40,000 BP, crossed the Arabian desert and headed northeast to Mesopotamia
between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The common pattern was to live in the highlands or foothills and move to
the river valleys during the spring and the summer to “harvest” the animals
that came for the rivers and the plants that grew there. As the highlands became colonized, the
migration continued in three branches, possibly as early as 25000 BP. One branch went north to Asia Minor, Turkey,
and thence to Europe. In Turkey they
would become one of the earliest urban cultures in 10000 BP. The second group headed northwest towards the
Caspian Sea, still sticking to the highlands for year-round settlement and
using low-lying plains for spring and summer harvesting. They would then slowly
make their way round the Caspian sea – some would become fishing cultures, but
the others would discover the grass-covered steppes to the north and east. The expansion could only continue with a
change in rhe way of life as there were no highlands. The steppes themselves were populated by a
wide variety of animals (including the wild horse) that could provide meat and
vegetables and plants to supplement the diet.
The land was flat and grassy and finally a new form of nomadic culture
developed, characterized by homes built partially underground, with thatched
roofs, developed. The wild horses roamed
in large herds and were an easy source of meat. The underground homes, initially
built for protection from the other predators, created semi-permanent
settlements. This culture developed domesticated the horse. This was not easy as the horse was feral and
untamed – male stallions in particular were dangerous when provoked. But over
many years and centuries, mares and foals became accustomed to humans and were
kept as a source of meat and milk. By 10000
BP these semi-domesticated animals were trained to pull carts as well, using a
yoke. Later, around 6000 BP, it became
possible to ride the tamer horses. By 4000 BP, the bit had been invented and
reins could be used to direct the horse.
The horse never became as easy as the cow or sheep to manage, but proved
very effective in the hunt and later in war.
The third branch went east towards Persia and
Afghanistan. Initially, the Himalayas
were a barrier to further migration, but then this branch met with the
westernmost segment of the Sindhu-Saraswati culture, expanding northeast
through the Khyber Pass. The meeting was
friendly. Neither side suffered from a scarcity of resources. The presence of
lapis lazuli in Afghanistan, copper in many places, and the versatility of the
cotton plant from South Asia provided a basis for barter. The mingling of these two groups mingled
created a haplotype that could be called the “Ancient North Indian” (see Reich
et al, in Nature, September 2011). Trade between ANI and the SSC and the extraordinary
scale and fertility of the Indus valley encouraged the wide dispersal of that
haplotype into the SSC. The merged ANI-SSC
groups continued to spread eastward towards Kashmir and the foothills of
northern Punjab.
The SSC spent early spring and summer months along the river
plain, the rainy season in the hills, and returned in the early winter months
to the plain. This was a small change
from the pattern elsewhere in the world, where the predictable cold of the winter
drove game away and it was optimal to follow them rather than stay in one
place. In South Asia, the rainy season is highly predictable and winters are better
in the plains. The snow-melt that begins
in April causes floods in the lower half of the Sindhu and the Saraswati, but
the northern segments all the way to the Kashmir foothills were relatively free
of flooding. Trade across the Himalayan passes created trading centers that
became the seeds of urban life. The first cities, built on the western trade,
developed along the foothills close to the Khyber Pass and then spread north
and northeast, creating a chain of urban settlements all along northern
Punjab. The risk of flooding could be partially
addressed by building living quarters on mounds or hillocks. Producing food was no longer the most
important work to be done – settling down made it possible to specialize and
produce goods that went beyond subsistence needs. The population in Afghanistan
was in touch with the Mesopotamian culture to the west and this enabled a long
chain of connections from the Saraswati to the Euphrates and on to Anatolia in
the north and Egypt in the south.
Trade, by bartering with occasional visitors, created
knowledge and new needs. From these small beginnings, by 4000 B.C.E., a great
trade route had came into existence.
The Matriarchal republics of the SSC
In most of the world, most matriarchies became patriarchies
in the period 6000 BP to 3000 BP, sometimes with vestiges of matriarchal
governance. The first step in locally-driven change (as opposed to a change
enforced through conquest or imperialism) was conflict with neighbouring bands
and the transition of the band to a war-footing. The Nagas and the Rakshasas,
by avoiding war with each other, whether deliberately or because there were
alternatives, did not were still matriarchies in 4000 BP. In the Sindhu-Saraswati culture, settlements
in the north and northwest had to deal with the occasional invader, while the
southern settlements remained peaceful.
As a result, a patchwork of systems existed across the Sindhu valley.
The shift to rule by males occurred at a time when the role
of the father and the sexual act in
conception was being discovered. This
discovery occurs after a nomadic community settles down and begins a mix of
farming and raising animals such as cows and goats. By chance, the patriarchal shift in most of
the world occurred at the same time. In the case of the SSC, their extensive
contacts with other western cultures made them aware of the role of the father
well after settling down into urban settlements. A slow movement away from matriarchy began –
not due to resource conflicts with neighbors, but from knowledge that recognized
the crucial role of men without threatening the role of the matriarch. Concurrently, most men became traders of one
form or the other. Since there was no
need to create an army of men, the need to artificially boost the value of men
by denigrating women did not arise. The
result was a mixed-gender governing system in the SSC culture – the matriarch
ruled with the advice of a council of both men and women. The councilors were often self-selected from
powerful families. The councilor’s power and role in the council depended on
their standing in the community, either because of their own acknowledged
intelligence, or the perceived power or wealth of their families. Am unqualified councilor would be laughed at
and ridiculed and would leave. Thus the
settlements were functional republics with a reigning matriarch.
This difference in the political evolution of SSC
settlements did not mean that pressure did not build up to convert to
patriarchy. As the volume of trade increased, armed and trained men were needed
as guards to protect the caravans from attack by gangs of robbers. Many men became mercenaries who were paid for
their services with goods that they could use in their own families, or trade
on their own. This was a source of
income that men had and women did not, and that translated to greater influence
in councils, so that over time, the councils tended to have more men than
women. Effectively, the settlements
tended to be ruled by men, and specifically either male traders or male
warriors/guards, even though the matriarch was still the head of the
settlement.
All the SSC communities recognized the importance of trade
in their economies. When and if neighboring settlements conflicted over some
resource, the overwhelming pressure was to settle so that trade was not
disrupted. If, for some reason, a battle
was deemed necessary, mercenaries (trader’s guards) were available for hire –
that tended to favor the richer or larger cities, which made many conflicts
easier to settle. This did not mean that
smaller settlements could be intimidated indefinitely – other settlements
around them recognized the danger of the development of a dominant settlement
and would act to restrain any incipient acquisitiveness. Thus the culture developed into a large
collection of more or less equal towns distributed more or less evenly. And more
or less at peace.
The role of the SSC in developing a standards-based culture
In any extended network of trade and exchange, the points in
the network that are the farthest apart (in travel time) can be considered as
terminal points. Often, there is a
bottleneck that constrains the route to these points. The SSC was the eastern
terminus of a great trade route. Being
the end of the line requires careful practices, especially when trade is
conducted via barter. One of these is
that buyers must ensure the quality of products imported there – the loss due
to damages and fraud must often be swallowed.
These include adulteration, poor quality, under-weight deliveries of
bartered items, and a host of others. The buyer who gets cheated has few options
with respect to the seller as the seller can cut the buyer out of the network,
while the seller can find other buyers somewhere else.
As a result of being the end-point of the trade route, the
SSC developed weight standards at an early stage of development. A highly accurate and standard system of
weights – by 4000 BP, the weights in use bye SSC (many discovered in archaeological
sites in Mesopotamia as well as in many locations in South Asia) are more
accurate and better maintained than the weights developed locally elsewhere,
including Sumer.
The SSC became the first culture to appreciate the benefits
of standardization. This “discovery”, of
the utility of standardization, spread like wildfire throughout the SSC. In the absence of absolute rulers and chiefs
who dictated who should win or who should lose, the urge to standardize, to
make everything the ?same”, was the ultimate law in democracy. A rich or powerful person could not simply
force a poorer person to accept an unequal exchange – the inequity becomes
obvious when publicly revealed and that would bring opprobrium on the winner of
such an exchange.
Standardization spread to many many aspects of life in the
SSC – bricks were standardized so that it was easy to build and to compensate
the brick-maker uniformly; weights were standardized so that the market was
more easily monitored and fraud controlled; the layout of houses and
city-planning led to the construction of many standardized cities. Time and
space were standardized – the day was broken up into 60 ghatis and a ghati was 60 vighatis;
a yojana was defined in terms of the
sun’s transition during a vighati – in the latitude of the northern Punjab this
is about 6 miles – for they knew that the world was round and that the rotation
of the earth caused a night and a day.
The History of History in the SSC – the Oral Archive
The SSC developed a sophisticated system for archiving
history that may have been unequalled anywhere else in the civilized world at
that time. I say “may” because the rest of the world developed systems of
writing that led to the loss of any system like those of the SSC. The SSC became an oral recording culture.
Like the cultures to the west, the SSC used tokens[1]
to represent tradable objects and and “token boxes” as manifests – these were
versatile tools that worked for trade, for business, for taxation, for commodity
storage, and other commercial transactions.
Tokens could be used effectively for the size, range, and complexity of
commercial relationships in 4000 B.C.E..
But as the centers grew and the scale of business increased, tokens were
not sufficient. Token boxes grew in
complexity, but within a few centuries they did not suffice either. The problem within a community or city was
the number of different tokens that were needed and the range of meanings that
needed to be assigned to token boxes (began as indicating ownership, but then
went on to record loans, debts, inventory held for others, trading manifests,
and so on). The problem between trading
partners was that the tokens were not secure.
Tokens could be lost or stolen or destroyed and this could cheat the
owner of goods sent for trading. By
design, the tokens had to be simple, but that meant they could be easily
counterfeited. When a trade happened,
the token boxes had to be broken if the objects were separated, but if they
were sold together the box could be kept intact. A system of drawing tokens on the outside of
a token box to indicate the actual tokens present inside developed – this was a
promise of the contents of a box and the promise was validated by the imprint
of a signature seal. This allowed a
token box to be passed around as an exchangeable surrogate for its
contents. This development led to the
demise of the token box and its contained tokens – the promise of the right to
transfer a piece of property could be represented by the drawings of the
tokens.
Writing began with these humble origins from simple tokens
representing owned objects to drawings of these simple tokens. A newly-made clay tablet, still wet, could be
written on and the signature seal validated the tablet’s promise. A signature seal would, by its very nature,
have idiosyncratic and unique elements that could not be copied even by an
expert. The dried tablet was a contract
that promised delivery of its indicated contents – since the tablet could not
be modified once it was dry, the contract could not be unilaterally rewritten.
The cities of Mesopotamia and the kingdom of Egypt went down
this path and developed writing and subsequently coinage. But the cities of the SSC followed a
different path – contracts were verbal agreements that were memorized by the
trading parties and one or more guarantors. The role of guarantor became highly
respected, for without one or more guarantors, a contract would be one trader’s
words against another’s. Of necessity,
the guarantor(s) had to be most expert and efficient at memorizing many
contracts, while the counter-parties could be less expert. Thus all three of the parties developed some
skill at memorizing the assertions of a contract. The SSC became a culture in which everyone
had some level of skill at memorizing and a few were highly expert.
An expert guarantor did not strive to remember everything
that was heard – there would always be many things that were peripheral to the
contract. There were guarantors who
focused on remembering only the text of the contract; there were guarantors,
considered much more expert, who remembered everything that was heard in the
course of a meeting.
The word for “that which is heard” was shruti; the word for a remembered limited contract was smriti; the expert who could memorize
“all that was heard” was rishi. These three words would develop a potent
meaning in Hinduism centuries later. Shruti
would come to mean “that which is revealed” and refer to the Vedas and
their extensions called the Upanishads. The reliance of the SSC culture on the
memorized word would cast a long shadow – centuries later, it can explicate an
observation credited to Megasthenes, Greek ambassador of Seleucus Nikator to
the court of the Maurya Emperor. He
expressed amazement at the honesty of Indian traders and businessman who made
verbal contracts supported merely by their memories.[2]
The SSC developed a framework of memorizing speech and
honored the ones best at it. The people who gravitated to the profession of
guarantor formed the Kavi Sangha (“The
Society of Poets”). Here they studied
and extended their skills in memorization and as they rose up the organization,
they gained respect in the eyes of the culture.
The head of the Kavi Sangha, called the Vyaasa, was revered almost as though he were the head of a
religious cult.[3]
A member of the Kavi Sangha was required to perform some duties. The Kavi Sangha organized story-telling events
around festival days. Some of these
festivals were culture-wide, others were specific to a city or town. At the culture-wide festivals, the stories
that were told were the story of how the culture came to be, its successes in
past years, and how they had reached perfection on the Saraswati. At the city-wide festivals, the stories were
local – how the city came to be, who founded it, the obstacles they had to
overcome, and how wonderful that city was.
It was a matter of pride for a Kavi Sangha member to be asked to perform
at these events. Memorizing the history
of the SSC and of each city was an essential part of the member’s
training. In this way, the Kavi Sangha
became the oral archive of the history of the SSC.
Telling Time: the Human Chronometers of the SSC
The application of memorization techniques and
standardization as an approach spread to their music and poetry. This occasioned a most remarkable invention.
The Kavi Sangha realized that it was possible to use music to mark time. An entire genre of memorized music developed
that was used exclusively for keeping time.
A trained singer who started at sunrise would be able to accurately
announce each vighati and ghati, and identify when noon
occurred. Singing through the night, a
star-gazer would be able to note the time at which certain stars and
collections of stars were at their zenith, and, less precisely when they rose
or set. They discovered exactly how the
day varied through the year, that the time period from one dawn to the next (daytime)
decreased every day during Uttarayana, when
the sun was moving north every day and that the same period increased every day
during Dakshinayana, the other half
of the year. They could predict the course of the planets through the nakshatras (asterisms). The singer was a human chronometer, far
superior to any of the mechanical or water-based ones that other cultures
devised in those days. Of all the
ancient civilizations of the world, the SSC were the only one that considered
the earth to be a sphere (whose circumference was 3600 yojanas, a yojana being the angular distance traversed by the sun
in one vighati), and they were the
only ones who could determine longitude.
The SSC standardized on a diurnal clock that started at
sunrise in Takshashila. One curious side-effect of this standard and the
knowledge of longitude with respect to Takshashila was that SSC traders in
Mesopotamia knew when sunrise occurred in Takshashila and used that as the
standard for the start of their day.
Their technology for tracking time was a mystery to the Sumerians (for
the human chronometer could be silent) and they adopted the SSC standard –
sunrise in Takshashila became accepted as the start of a new day in Sumer. This standard spread to Egypt and later even
to the Persians and the Greeks. It is not clear that it ever lost its influence
– one should note the curious fact that midnight in Greenwich, England, the
defined start of a new day in the modern Greenwich Meridian Time or Universal
Time, still corresponds approximately to sunrise in Takshashila.
An accurate clock makes it easy to determine longitude. Two clocks can be synchronized with each
other. One of them stays put while the other moves to the location whose
longitude (relative to the initial position) is desired. The difference in the diurnal time indicated
by the two clocks at high noon is a measure of longitude – each vighati difference being 1/10th
of a degree. A small correction is
needed if the latitudes are different, but small differences in latitude can be
ignored. Under the mostly cloudless
conditions of South Asia, a large number of measurements can be made and easily
repeated. The accuracy can be improved
by synchronizing on the starting time of eclipses of the sun, less susceptible
to errors of judgment. To the human
chronometer, one vighati is
approximately 96 syllables (but can be as much as 108, which would explain why
108 is considered an auspicious number in Indian numerology).
The musicians who specialized as chronometers (and it became
a specialty as all standards-based endeavors are) came to be called Sama-Vedins in a later age, well after
the original purpose of that music had been forgotten.
Summary: Key characteristics of the SSC cities
By 4400 BP, the SSC was uniquely characterized by:
1.
The cities were republics (janapadas) under a matriarch who was the ritual head of the city.
2.
Extensive use of standardization for guaranteeing
contracts and the consequences – no writing, no coinage
3.
Memorization as a core skill in the SSC
4.
Historical Archives maintained by an institution of
highly skilled memorizers
5.
Skilled standardized recitation techniques used to keep
track of time – the invention of the human chronometer
6.
Application of the human chronometer for determining
longitude
One other characteristic to be discussed later was:
7.
The Zebu cow (the Indian humped cow, the male is also
called the “Brahmin bull”) domesticated as a source of meat.
[1] The Sanskrit word is Rupaka – coin or form – a signed token
representing an object. Initially made of clay in a form similar to the
represented object. As the form became simpler, it was validated by the seal of
a validating authority, who guaranteed the existence of the represented
object. Later this same seal would be
used on token boxes to validate that the external markings matched the internal
content. Initially, Rupaka referred to
the token, but over time Rupaka was used to refer to the seal on the token;
then it referred to the seal on the token box; and, finally it referred to a
flat clay medallion with two markings that guaranteed the value represented by
this medallion – one side of the medallion is embossed with the seal of the
guarantor and the other side with a icon of the object. Clay is fragile, and the next step in the
evolution of the name Rupaka would be
when metal medallions replaced the clay. The metal in the coin had an intrinsic
value and its quality, purity, weight, etc., was guaranteed by the seal of the
minting authority embossed on one side.
This coin was the rupaka, which
became rupya in common Indian
languages. The final step in the
evolution of money would be the divorce from a commodity by eliminating the
object icon on onr side – the intrinsic value could represented all that was
needed. The consequent ability to create
wealth by fiat led to the arrogation of sole minting authority to a king or
other ruler. The value of such a coin
was dependent entirely on belief in the staying power and reputation for
honesty of the king and/or his dynasty.
[2]
This honesty in contracting and
the absence of a coin led to the persistent Western belief in the
“non-materialism” of Indians and Indian culture.
[3] A side effect of the development of a
memorizing guarantor was that the rupaka,
i.e., the token sealed by a guarantor, never became as critical in the SSC
as it was further west (Egypt and Mesopotamia).
Thus coinage did not develop in the SSC and in the rest of India until
international trade expanded greatly and foreign coins began circulating
alongside tokens (probably around 600 B.C.E. after the Persian empire expanded
to its “Indian” provinces of Gandhara and XXX and the introduction of talents with the Emperor’s seal to the
west of the Indus). The superiority of
coins quickly ended the last stronghold of orally guaranteed agreements.
