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ALEXANDER CUNNINGHAM

Sir Alexander Cunningham KCIE CSI (23 January 1814 – 28 November 1893) was a British archaeologist and army engineer, known as the father of the Archaeological Survey of India. Both his brothers, Francis Cunningham and Joseph Cunningham became well-known for their work in British India. Born in London to the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham, he had his early education at Christ's Hospital, London. He joined the Bengal Engineers at the age of 19 as a Second Lieutenant and spent the next 28 years in the service of British Government of India. Soon after arriving in India in June 1833, a meeting with James Prinsep sparked his lifelong interest in Indian archaeology and antiquity. He was ADC to Lord Auckland, the Governor-general of India from 1836 to 1840. He was appointed as Colenol R.E in 1860. Cunningham retired in 1861, having attained the rank of Major General.Military life

He saw action at the Battle of Punniar and was with the Army of Sutlej in 1845-46. He later became the Chief of Commission of Ladakh-Tibet boundary with Richard Strachey, then a captain in the British Army and Dr. Thomson in 1847. The Commission was set up to delimit the northern boundaries of the Empire after the First Anglo-Sikh War concluded with the Treaty of Amritsar, which ceded Kashmir as war indemnity expenses to the British. He was also a member of a previous commission to chart the border of Ladakh under R.A. Vans Agnew.His early works are from his visits to the temples in Kashmir and his travels in Ladakh during his tenure with the Commission. He was also present at the battles of Chilianwala and Gujrat in 1848.

In 1851, he explored the Buddhist monuments of Central India along with Lt. Maisey, and wrote an account of these. He was appointed as the Chief Engineer of Burma in 1856 for two years, and later for three years from 1858 he served in the same post in the North-western Provinces.

The Archaeological Survey of India was set up following a correspondence between Cunningham and Charles John Canning, then the viceroy of India. Cunningham was appointed the first director of the project, which operated from 1861 to 1865. He published the first two volumes of the Archaeological Survey of India during his tenure here. In 1865 the Archaeological Survey was halted and he left India in February 1866 to join the Delhi and London Bank at London as its Director till 1870. In the year 1867, Cunningham was knighted. Upon the resumption of the Archaeological Survey in 1870, he returned to India to take up the position of Director-general of the ASI on 1 January 1871 maintaining his post until 1885. He was the author of 11 volumes of the ASI, while the rest were written under his supervision. He retired on 30 September 1885 and returned to London, and continued to write books on the Buddhist excavations and on ancient coins. He also published numerous papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society and the Numismatic Chronicle. Awards

He was awarded the CSI on 20 May 1870 and CIE in 1878. In 1887, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire.

Work on Buddhist stupas in central India

General Cunningham had visited Bharhut stupa, located in present Satna district in Madhya Pradesh in 1873 on his way to Nagpur. He was fascinated to find such a heritage site like Bharhut but at the same time pained at its ignorance by the people and the government. He left some guards behind to look after the site and came back in February 1874. He collected the scattered pieces of sculptures and records and tried to understand its design and lay out. He came third time in November 1874 with some legal rights. He carried some of the sculptures toKolkata and started a Bharhut gallery in the National Museum at Kolkata. After a detailed study of Buddhist literature and the sculptures from the site, he published in 1876 a book titled "The Stupa of Bharhut", which is still an authentic book about the Bharhut stupa. The famous 8Buddhist stupas have been built on the relics of Buddha in his honour. Bharhut is not in that list. It is still not clear about on whose relics this stupa is built. General Cunningham had found in 1874 excavations a small box carrying the "Rakh Phool (ashes)" , which could not be identified but he handed it over to the Raja of Nagod for safe custody. This could be because of the ashes belonging to ancient Buddhist monks.

Cunningham was associated with the excavation of many sites in India, including Sarnath, Sanchi, and the Mahabodhi Temple. In the case ofMahabodhi, Cunningham's work of restoring the Temple was completed by the pioneer of Buddhist revival in India, Anagarika Dharmapala. Cunningham died in London on November 28, 1893; today, his collection of rare Indian coins is displayed in the British Museum.

Some several thousand years ago there once thrived a civilization in the Indus Valley. Located in what's now Pakistan and western India, it was the earliest known urban culture of the Indian subcontinent. The Indus Valley Civilization, as it is called, covered an area the size of western Europe. It was the largest of the four ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China. However, of all these civilizations the least is known about the Indus Valley people. This is because the Indus script has not yet been deciphered. There are many remnants of the script on pottery vessels, seals, and amulets, but without a "Rosetta Stone" linguists and archaeologists have been unable to decipher it.

They have then had to rely upon the surviving cultural materials to give them insight into the life of the Harappan's. Harappan's are the name given to any of the ancient people belonging to the Indus Valley civilization. This article will be focusing mainly on the two largest cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, and what has been discovered there.

Alexander Cunningham, who headed the Archaeological Survey of India, visited this site in 1853 and 1856 while looking for the cities that had been visited by Chinese pilgrims in the Buddhist period. The presence of an ancient city was confirmed in the following 50 years, but no one had any idea of its age or importance. By 1872 heavy brick robbing had virtually destroyed the upper layers of the site. The stolen bricks were used to build houses and particularly to build a railway bed that the British were constructing. Alexander Cunningham made a few small excavations at the site and reported some discoveries of ancient pottery, some stone tools, and a stone seal. Cunningham published his finds and it generated some increased interest by scholars.

Major excavations had not been carried out for forty years until 1986 when the late George Dales of the University of California at Berkeley established the Harappan Archaeological Project, or HARP. This multidisciplinary study effort consists of archaeologists, linguists, historians, and physical anthropologists.

Since the establishment of HARP, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer has served as co-director and field director of the project. Kenoyer was born in Shillong, India, and spent most of his youth there. He went on to receive his advanced degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He is now a professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and teaches archaeology and ancient technologies. Kenoyer's main focus has been on the Indus Valley civilization's where he has conducted research for the last 23 years. Ever since he was a young graduate student, Kenoyer was particularly interested in ancient technology. He has done a great deal of work in trying to replicate processes used by ancient people in the production of jewelry and pottery. One of his first efforts in replicating shell bangle making was then co-authored with George Dales and published in an article. His doctorate studies were based upon this research, and his dissertation is a milestone in the field of experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology, besides being the definitive study of Harappan shell working.

Today, Kenoyer is assisted by co-director Richard Meadow of Harvard University and Rota Wright of New York University (A. C.I.V.C. Kenoyer preface) Kenoyer uses a contextual archaeological approach. His work is characterized by the use of cold evidence to draw the outlines of this ancient civilization.

Although , Harappa was undoubtedly occupied previously, it was between 2600-1900 B.C. that it reached its height of economic expansion and urban growth. Radio carbon dating, along with the comparison of artifacts and pottery has determined this date for the establishment of Harappa and other Indus cities. This began what is called the golden age of Harappa. During this time a great increase in craft technology, trade, and urban expansion was experienced. For the first time in the history of the region, there was evidence for many people of different classes and occupations living together. Between 2800-2600 B.C. called the Kot Diji period, Harappa grew into a thriving economic center. It expanded into a substantial sized town, covering the area of several large shopping malls. Harappa, along with the other Indus Valley cities, had a level of architectural planning that was unparralled in the ancient world. The city was laid out in a grid-like pattern with the orientation of streets and buildings according to the cardinal directions. To facilitate the access to other neighborhoods and to segregate private and public areas, the city and streets were particularly organized. The city had many drinking water wells, and a highly sophisticated system of waste removal. All Harappan houses were equipped with latrines, bathing houses, and sewage drains which emptied into larger mains and eventually deposited the fertile sludge on surrounding agricultural fields. It has been surprising to archaeologists that the site layouts and artifact styles throughout the Indus region are very similar. It has been concluded these indicate that there was uniform economic and social structure within these cities.

Ever since the discovery of Harappa, archaeologists have been trying to identify the rulers of this city. What has been found is very surprising because it isn't like the general pattern followed by other early urban societies. It appears that the Harappan and other Indus rulers governed their cities through the control of trade and religion, not by military might. It is an interesting aspect of Harappa as well as the other Indus cities that in the entire body of Indus art and sculpture there are no monuments erected to glorify, and no depictions of warfare or conquered enemies. It is speculated that the rulers might have been wealthy merchants, or powerful landlords or spiritual leaders. Whoever these rulers were it has been determined that they showed their power and status through the use of seals and fine jewelry.

Seals are one of the most commonly found objects in Harappan cities. They are decorated with animal motifs such as elephants, water buffalo, tigers, and most commonly unicorns. Some of these seals are inscribed with figures that are prototypes to later Hindu religious figures, some of which are seen today.

For example, seals have been recovered with the repeated motif of a man sitting in a yogic position surrounded by animals. This is very similar to the Hindu god of Shiva, who is known to have been the friend of the animals and sat in a yogic position. These seals are known as the Shiva seals. Other images of a male god have been found, thus indicating the beginnings of Shiva worship, which continues to be practiced today in India.

The Aryan's were supposed to have destroyed many of the ancient cities right around 1500 B.C., and this would account for the decline of the Indus civilization. However the continuity of religious practices makes this unlikely, and other more probable explanations for the decline of the Harappan civilization have been proposed in recent years; such as climate shifts which caused great droughts around 2200 B.C., and forced the abandonment of the Indus cities and pushed a migration westward. Recent findings have shown that the Sumerian empire declined sharply at this time due to a climate shift that caused major droughts for several centuries. (11) The Harappans being so close to Sumer, would in all probability have been affected by this harsh shift in climate.

In 2001 Kenoyer's excavations unearthed a workshop that manufactured seals and inscribed tablets. This was significant in that combined with the last 16 years of excavations, it provided a new chronology for the development of the Indus script. Previously, the tablets and seals were all grouped together, but now Kenoyer has been able to demonstrate that the various types of seals and tablets emerged at different times. The writing on the seals and tablets might have changed as well through the years. Kenoyer as well as others are trying to conclude when the dates of the script changes were. The revision of this chronology may greatly aid in the decipherment of the script. (12) There has been attempts at deciphering this script, and the results are not widely agreed upon, and its still a point of controversy.

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The ruling elite controlled vast trade networks with Central Asia, and Oman, importing raw materials to urban workshops. There is even evidence of trade with Mesopotamia, for Harappan seals and jewelry have been found there. Harappa, along with other Indus cities, established their economic base on agriculture produce and livestock, supplemented by the production of and trade of commodities and craft items. Raw materials such as carnelian, steatite, and lapis lazuli were imported for craft use. In exchange for these goods, such things as livestock, grains, honey and clarified butter may have been given. However, the only remains are those of beads, ivory objects and other finery. What is known about the Harappan's is that they were very skilled artisans, making beautiful objects out of bronze, gold, silver, terracotta, glazed ceramic, and semiprecious stones. The most exquisite objects were often the most tiny. Many of the Indus art objects are small, displaying and requiring great craftsmanship.

The majority of artifacts recovered at Harappa and Mohenjo Daro have been that of crafted objects. Jonathan Kenoyer has been working to recreate many of the craft technologies used by these people. He has successfully recreated the process by which the Harappan's created faience. The process of creating faience ceramics is very complex and technical. It requires such processes as the grinding and partial melting of quartz, fusion aids, and a consistent high temperature of 940 Celsius. A discovery in 2001 of a faience producing workshop revealed that the type of kiln used was very different from what they had thought. As no kiln was discovered in the workshop, Kenoyer suspected that the ancient crafts people had used a kiln assembled from two firing containers. This formed a smaller kiln that was unlike the usual large firing containers. Along with some of his students Kenoyer replicated the process of creating faience using similar tools that the Harappan's had. The result was similar to that of the Harappan's. This showed that the canister-kiln type was a very efficient way of producing faience. (13) Interestingly , Kenoyer has noticed that many of the same firing techniques and production procedures are used today in India and Pakistan as they were thousands of years ago. This is another point indicating that there was a continuity in culture that has been mostly unchanged for thousands of years.

The late George F. Dales, who was a long time mentor of Kenoyer's and established HARP, has said regarding the Aryan invasion theory:

"Nine years of extensive excavations at Mohenjo-Daro ( which seems to have been rapidly abandoned) have yielded a total of some 37 skeletons which can be attributed to the Indus period. None of these skeletons were found in the area of the fortified citadel, where reasonably the last defense of this city would have taken place." He further states that "Despite extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and destruction on the scale of the supposed Aryan invasion."

After 700 years the Harappan cities began to decline. This is generally attributed to the invasion of a foreign people. However, it now believed by Kenoyer and many other archaeologists that the decline of the Indus cities was a result of many factors, such as overextended political and economic networks, and the drying up major rivers. These all contributed to the rise of a new social order. There is archaeological evidence that around the late Harappan phase, from 1900-1300 B.C. the city was not being maintained and was getting crowded. This suggests that the rulers had were no longer able to control the daily functioning of the city. Having lost authority, a new social order rose up. Although certain aspects of the elites culture, seals with motifs and pottery with Indus script on it, disappeared, the Indus culture was not lost. It is seen that in the cities that sprung up in the Ganga and Yamuna river valleys between 600-300 B.C., that many of their cultural aspects can be traced to the earlier Indus culture. The technologies, artistic symbols, architectural styles, and aspects of the social organization in the cities of this time had all originated in the Indus cities. This is another fact that points to the idea that the Aryan invasion did not happen. The Indus cities may have declined, for various reasons, but their culture continued on in the form of technology, artistic and religious symbols, and city planning. Usually, when a people conquer another they bring with them new ideas and social structures. It would seem that if indeed Aryan's invaded India, then there would be evidence of a completely different sort of religion, craft making, significant changes in art and social structure. But none of this has been found. There appears to be an underlying continuity in the culture of India, and what changes have occurred are due to largely internal factors. This is an idea shared by many prominent archaeologists, such as Kenoyer, George Dales, Jim Shaffer, and Colin Renfrew.

The Aryan's are supposed to have brought the Vedic culture to India. These people and their literature is believed to have then originated after the decline of the Indus Valley civilizations. The Vedas have been dated as being written some time after the Aryan's supposedly invaded, somewhere between 1500-1200 B.C. Many of the Indus sites have been found along the banks of the now dried up Sarasvati river. This river is mentioned throughout the Vedas Recent geological investigations has shown that the Sarasvati was once a very large river (as well as satellite photos of the indus-sarasvati river basin), but dried up around 1900 B. C. due to tectonic movements. The Vedas, however speak of the Sarasvati as a very large and flowing river. If the dating of the Vedic literature is correct, than there is a discrepancy because the Sarasvati river dried up before the Vedas were supposed to have been written. This is an interesting situation. It might seem possible then, that with other evidence showing that there was no influx of an invading people, that the Vedas were then written by the people of the Indus Valley.

The idea that there wasn't in fact an Aryan invasion is supported on many levels, as I have tried to demonstrate. Even today, it is seen in India the legacy of these Indus cities in the traditional arts and crafts, and in the layout of houses and settlements. If there really was an invasion of a people that completely obliterated this other culture, then the many striking similarities we see today in the continuity of Indian culture is certainly most curious. The remains of the Indus civilization are enormous, and most of them are yet to be excavated. There are whole cites that have yet to be excavated, like the largest known Indus culture site of Ganweriwala, in the Cholistan desert of Pakistan. No doubt the continuing excavations will lend more insight into the world of this enigmatic civilization.

Harappa, the type-site of the Indus civilization, is today a large village in the Montgomery District of Punjab, 15 miles southwest of the district town. It overlies and adjoins the mounds of the ancient city, which appear to have had a circuit of not less than 3 miles, though the more emphatic mounds occupy a considerably smaller expanse.

The site at Harappa was first briefly excavated by Sir Alexander Cunningham in 1872-73; two decades after brick robbers carried off the visible remains of the city. He found an Indus seal of unknown origin. The first extensive excavations at Harappa were started by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni in 1920. His work and contemporaneous excavations at Mohenjo-daro first brought to the world's attention the existence of the forgotten Indus Valley civilization as the earliest urban culture in the Indian subcontinent.

His work was followed later in the decade by that of Madho Sarup Vats, also of the Archaeological Survey of India. Excavations by other archaeologists continued in the 1930's, and in1946 Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated the so-called fortification walls and found the first pre-Indus Valley civilization (Kot Dijian) deposits. After independence, Harappa was excavated by Mohammed Rafique Mughal of the Archaeological Survey of Pakistan in 1966. In 1986, the first systematic, multi-disciplinary excavations of an Indus Valley city were begun by the Harappa Archaeological Project (HARP), under the direction of George F. Dales and J. Mark Kenoyer.The main features of the plan, the citadel on the west and the mounds of the ‘lower city’ towards the east and southeast have already been indicated. To the north a slightly hollowed belt containing notably green crops marks an old bed of the River Ravi. Today the river flows 6 miles further north. Between the citadel and the riverbed, Mound F has been found to contain a remarkable and significant piece of town planning; to the south of the citadel lie the outlying hills, the Harappan cemetery and the post Harappan cemetery. To the southeast, sporadic digging has been carried out in Area G, but the ragged Mound E and its surroundings are virtually unexplored.There is an enormous amount still to be learned about the site, most of which remains unexcavated. The earliest deposits on the site go back to 5300 B.P. and the area seems to have been continuously inhabited ever since. Archaeologists think that ancient Harappa was the urban center dominating the upper Indus region, much like Mohenjo-daro dominated the lower Indus Valley and Ganweriwala might have been the urban center for what is now Rajasthan.

Archaeological evidence is the key to understanding Harappa’s past. Although Harappa continues to be the center of historical debate, further archaeological explanations may some day reveal the validity or inaccuracy in the historical accounts of Harappa. Regardless of its impact on written history, archaeology will continue to reveal the way of life for Harappa's inhabitants.

The first mention of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) is in 1826 when a British Army deserter, James Lewis, posing as an American engineer named Charles Masson, recorded the presence of "a vast ruined city with the remains of a ruinous brick castle" and fragments of walls and buildings in the town of Harappa, in Punjab. The mounds were later visited by Alexander Cunningham (Director of the Archaeological Survey of India) in 1853 as part of a survey of ancient Buddhist sites. Although the ruins were reported, there was no information regarding its age or its importance. The next major breakthrough came when British engineers working on railway lines decided to use the large quantities of bricks and rubble scattered on the surface of the mounds for constructing the railway beds. The largest collection of the mounds is at Harappa and each mound represented a large walled city built primarily of baked bricks. Cunningham carried out the first series of excavations between 1856 and 1872. However, the excavations did not reveal any Buddhist remains and the only antiquities from the sites consisted ancient pottery, stone tools, some worked shell and a badly-preserved stone seal depicting a one-horned animal resembling a bull and a short inscription. The inscription was in a script which had no parallels with any known writing of the ancient world. This seal aroused the interest of the antiquarians. From 1920-21, John Marshall (Director of the Archaeological Survey of India), carried out excavations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro. The excavations at Mohenjodaro revealed a well-planned city with an elaborate drainage system, massive brick buildings, stone sculptures, bronze tools, gold ornaments and cubical chert weights. Although Marshall could not date the civilization he suggested that it lasted several centuries before the rise of the Mauryan Empire, i.e. 3rd C BC. He also proposed that the developments in the IVC were indigenous in nature and not intrusive from other regions. When Marshall published his findings in the Illustrated London News (20 September 1924), he received responses from scholars who had discovered similar seals at ancient Susa (mid 3rd C BC) thereby showing close links with western Asia. Date 2500 BC Main cities Mohenjodaro and Harappa (Pakistan) and Kalibangan Two English engineers, John and William Brunton were engaged in building a railway line from Karachi to Lahore. Whilst looking for ballast for the railway they came across several mounds, which were supposed to be the ruins of an ancient city, built entirely of bricks. This city was Harappa. Sir Alexander Cunningham visited the site and collected antiquities, the first excavations took place in 1921 by Sir John Marshall. 1500 Harappan sites located. Area 680,000 sq km (twice the size of Mesopotamia or Egypt) Main Features Town Planning Comprises mainly of the citadel mound and lower township. The cities are also fortified. Citadel mound comprises the public structures such as the granary, the public bath (Mohenjodaro) The lower township is laid out in a grid fashion with a developed drainage system. It comprises of areas for residences and for specialised craft production. The houses are built of burnt brick and vary between one room structures to double storied buildings. Great Bath Used for public purposes. Equipped with a courtyard and rooms Dockyard at Lothal Walled settlements Protection from wild animals Monitoring the movement of goods Protection from floods