Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What does the name “Harappan” refer to, and why is this civilisation named after it?
Answer: The name comes from Harappa, the site where the civilisation was first identified; it is named after a place, not after a king or a capital city.
Q. Name the two main sections into which most Harappan settlements were divided.
Answer: Most Harappan settlements were divided into the Citadel (smaller, higher, walled) and the Lower Town (larger, lower).
Q. Who is regarded as the “father of Indian archaeology” and first Director-General of the ASI?
Answer: Alexander Cunningham, whose main archaeological interest was the Early Historic period, is regarded as the father of Indian archaeology and was the first Director-General of the ASI.
Q. What is a “hoard”?
Answer: A hoard is a group of objects kept carefully by people, often inside a container such as a pot, sometimes jewellery or metal saved by metalworkers for reuse.
Q. What is faience?
Answer: Faience is an artificial material made from ground sand or silica mixed with colour and a gum and then fired; it was difficult to make and so was treated as valuable.
Q. Name the two coastal Harappan sites that specialised in making shell objects.
Answer: Nageshwar and Balakot, both near the coast, specialised in making shell objects such as bangles, ladles and inlay.
Q. Name the tiny settlement, less than 7 hectares in area, that was almost exclusively devoted to craft production.
Answer: Chanhudaro, at less than 7 hectares compared with Mohenjodaro’s 125 hectares, was almost entirely devoted to craft production.
Q. What is “Meluhha”, according to Mesopotamian texts, thought to refer to?
Answer: Meluhha, described in Mesopotamian texts as a land of seafarers supplying carnelian, lapis lazuli, copper, gold and wood, is thought to refer to the Harappan region.
Q. Who took over as Director-General of the ASI in 1944 and introduced stratigraphic excavation?
Answer: R.E.M. Wheeler, an ex-army brigadier, took over as Director-General of the ASI in 1944 and made layer-by-layer, stratigraphic excavation the standard method.
Q. Name the Harappan site where recent archaeogenetic (DNA) research was carried out.
Answer: Rakhigarhi, in Hisar district of Haryana, the largest known Harappan city at about 550 hectares, is where this DNA research was carried out.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Give two pieces of evidence that Mohenjodaro’s construction was planned in advance rather than built up haphazardly.
Answer: First, platforms were built before any other construction, fixing exactly where building would happen, and only afterwards were roads and houses added. Second, bricks across the entire settlement followed one standardised 4:2:1 ratio, which would not happen by chance without a shared building plan.
Q. What two broad categories do archaeologists use to classify Harappan artefacts, with one example of each?
Answer: Archaeologists classify artefacts as utilitarian (objects of daily use made from easily available materials, such as querns or pottery) and luxuries (rare objects made of costly, non-local materials or complex technology, such as faience pots).
Q. Why do archaeologists think miniature faience pots were considered “luxuries”?
Answer: Faience had to be made by firing ground sand or silica mixed with colour and gum, a difficult and skilled process; because it was hard to make, and because miniature faience pots are found mainly in large cities like Mohenjodaro and Harappa rather than everywhere, they are treated as luxuries.
Q. Name the two strategies the Harappans used to procure raw materials from outside the alluvial plain, with one example of each.
Answer: One strategy was to establish settlements at the source of the material itself, such as Nageshwar and Balakot for shell, or Shortughai in Afghanistan for lapis lazuli. The other was to send expeditions to distant regions, such as to Khetri in Rajasthan for copper or south India for gold.
Q. Give two reasons why reconstructing Harappan religious beliefs is especially difficult.
Answer: First, archaeologists often reason from the known to the unknown, assuming later religious traditions parallel earlier ones, which becomes speculative for something as abstract as religion. Second, key comparisons can break down on closer study, as with the “proto-Shiva” seal, whose seated figure does not actually match the Rigveda’s description of Rudra.
Q. How did George Dales’s 1964 study challenge the theory that the Harappan civilisation ended in a massacre or invasion?
Answer: Dales showed that the skeletons found at Mohenjodaro did not all belong to the same period, that there was no destruction level covering the city’s final phase, and that no armoured warriors surrounded by weapons were found, undermining Wheeler’s earlier invasion theory.
Q. Name any two kinds of objects on which the Harappan script has been found.
Answer: Any two of: seals, copper tools, rims of jars, copper and terracotta tablets, jewellery, bone rods, and even a signboard, as at Dholavira.
Q. What is stratigraphy, and why was it important in correcting Marshall’s excavation mistakes?
Answer: Stratigraphy is the study of a site’s layers, with the lowest layers generally being the oldest. It mattered because Marshall had ignored these layers, digging in uniform horizontal units instead, mixing finds from different periods; Wheeler’s stratigraphic method restored the ability to date finds correctly by the layer they came from.
Q. Why does the presence of nickel in both Omani and Harappan copper matter to historians?
Answer: Since this specific chemical trace is found in copper from both regions, it suggests the two shared a common source or exchanged copper directly, supporting the idea of a Harappan trade contact with Oman.
Q. What was Cunningham’s chief archaeological interest, and how did it cause him to overlook Harappa’s importance?
Answer: Cunningham’s chief interest was the Early Historic period (roughly sixth century BCE to fourth century CE), which he investigated using accounts of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims. Since Harappa was not part of any pilgrim’s route and predated the Early Historic period, it simply did not fit his framework, so he failed to grasp the significance of the seal he was shown.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Describe the drainage system found in the Lower Town of Mohenjodaro.
Answer: Roads and streets in the Lower Town were laid out in an approximate grid, intersecting at right angles, with drains built along them before houses were constructed. Every house needed at least one wall along a street so that domestic waste water could flow out. Inside the house, waste water first flowed into a sump or cesspit, where solid matter settled, before flowing on as waste water into the street drain. The main channels were built of bricks set in mortar and covered with loose bricks or, sometimes, limestone slabs that could be removed for cleaning. This same system, with minor variation in materials, is found even at smaller settlements like Lothal, where houses were of mud brick but drains were of burnt brick, showing how widely the standard was applied.
Q. Explain the three main problems archaeologists face while reconstructing the Harappan past from material remains.
Answer: First, most everyday materials such as cloth, leather, wood and reeds decompose, especially in a tropical climate, so only stone, burnt clay and metal usually survive, leaving whole categories of Harappan life invisible. Second, finds are accidental rather than typical: people threw away only broken or useless things and recycled the rest, so an intact valuable object usually means it was lost or deliberately hidden, not that such objects were common. Third, classifying finds by function, rather than simply by material, is largely guesswork: archaeologists must infer function from resemblance to present-day objects or from the context in which something was found, and this comparison is only ever an analogy, not proof.
Q. Describe the debate around the identity of the “priest-king” statue found at Mohenjodaro.
Answer: A stone statue found at Mohenjodaro, showing a seated male figure with one hand on the knee, was labelled the “priest-king” because archaeologists were familiar with Mesopotamian history and its priest-kings and drew a parallel with the Indus region. However, no spectacular finds were associated with a large building at Mohenjodaro that was labelled a “palace”, and Harappan ritual practices are not well understood. The book adds that there are no means of knowing whether those who performed rituals also held political power, which is why the name reflects an outside comparison rather than direct Harappan evidence.
Q. Explain how archaeologists identify centres of craft production, with examples from the chapter.
Answer: Archaeologists look for raw material such as stone nodules, whole shells or copper ore, tools, unfinished objects, and rejects and waste material. Waste is one of the best indicators, since pieces of shell or stone cut while making an object were usually discarded right where the work happened, even if larger waste pieces were sometimes reused into smaller objects. Chanhudaro, a tiny settlement almost exclusively devoted to craft production (bead-making, shell-cutting, metal-working, seal-making and weight-making), is the book’s main example. The minuscule bits left in work areas also show that craft production was undertaken in large cities such as Mohenjodaro and Harappa, not only in small specialised centres.
Q. Discuss the significance of the standardisation seen in Harappan bricks, weights and seals.
Answer: Harappan bricks followed a fixed 4:2:1 ratio of length to breadth to height across the entire region, from Jammu to Gujarat, even though bricks obviously were not produced at a single centre. Weights followed a precise binary-then-decimal system, and pottery and seals show extraordinary uniformity in style. This standardisation is taken as evidence of complex decisions being made and implemented across a wide area, which is one of the main reasons some historians argue that the Harappan civilisation functioned as a single, organised state rather than a set of unconnected settlements.
Q. Describe what the Rakhigarhi archaeogenetic study revealed, and explain why it is significant.
Answer: The study, carried out by the Deccan College Pune with the CCMB Hyderabad and the Harvard Medical College, extracted and analysed DNA from skeletal remains found at Rakhigarhi. It found that the Harappans were indigenous to the region, with genetic roots going back to 10,000 BCE, that their DNA has continued till today, with a majority of the South Asian population appearing to be their descendants, and that reconstructed facial features closely resemble the modern population of Haryana. This is significant because the continuity without any break in genetic and cultural history rules out large-scale immigration of the so-called Aryans, and indicates unbroken continuity for 5000 years in the region.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss the different views scholars hold on who ruled Harappan society, and the evidence used to support each view.
Answer: Archaeological records give no direct evidence of a ruler: a large building at Mohenjodaro labelled a “palace” contained no spectacular finds, and the “priest-king” statue is named only after a Mesopotamian parallel, not any Harappan proof of political power. Given this, scholars hold at least three views. Some believe Harappan society had no rulers at all, and that everyone enjoyed equal status. Others believe there was no single ruler, but several: Mohenjodaro had its own ruler, Harappa another, and so on. A third group argues for a single state, pointing to the similarity of artefacts across the region, evidence of planned settlements, the standardised brick ratio, and the deliberate placement of settlements near raw-material sources, none of which could have happened by chance across such a wide area without central coordination. It is also considered possible that Harappan society ran on some kind of democratic system, since some structures with their given features were apparently created for utilitarian purposes.
Q. Trace the history of the discovery of the Harappan civilisation from Cunningham to Wheeler.
Answer: Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General of the ASI, began excavating in the mid-nineteenth century but focused on the Early Historic period, using Chinese Buddhist pilgrim accounts to locate sites; a Harappan seal given to him in the 1870s could not be placed within his framework, since he believed Indian history began in the Ganga valley. In the early twentieth century, Daya Ram Sahni began excavating at Harappa and R.D. Banerji found similar seals at Mohenjodaro, leading to the idea that these belonged to one shared culture. In 1924, John Marshall, the first professional archaeologist in India, announced the discovery of this new civilisation, showing it was contemporaneous with Mesopotamia; however, his practice of digging in uniform horizontal units, ignoring the site’s actual layering, caused valuable context to be lost. R.E.M. Wheeler, who became Director-General of the ASI in 1944, corrected this by insisting on stratigraphic excavation, following the mound’s actual layers rather than digging mechanically. After Partition, when the major known sites became part of Pakistan, Indian archaeologists located and excavated sites such as Kalibangan, Lothal, Rakhi Garhi and Dholavira.
Q. Discuss the possible reasons for the decline of the Harappan civilisation, and explain why no single cause fully explains it.
Answer: By about 1800 BCE, most Mature Harappan sites in regions such as Cholistan were abandoned, even as population grew in new settlements in Gujarat, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. In the sites that continued to be occupied, the civilisation’s distinctive artefacts, weights, seals and special beads, disappeared, along with writing, long-distance trade and craft specialisation; house-building quality declined and large public structures stopped being built, leaving a rural way of life known as “Late Harappan”. Explanations proposed include climatic change, deforestation, excessive floods, the shifting or drying up of rivers, and overuse of the land. However, none of these causes by itself explains the collapse of the entire civilisation across such a wide and varied region; some may explain the decline of particular settlements but not others. What does appear consistent is the disappearance of a strong unifying element, possibly the Harappan state itself, evidenced by the shift from a standardised weight system to purely local weights and the disappearance of seals, the script and distinctive beads and pottery, together with the decline and abandonment of cities.
Q. Describe the long-distance trade contacts of the Harappans with Oman, Bahrain and Mesopotamia, citing the evidence for each.
Answer: With Oman, the evidence is chemical: both Omani and Harappan copper contain traces of nickel, suggesting a shared source or direct exchange, and a large Harappan jar coated with black clay, probably used to carry traded goods, has been found at Omani sites. With Bahrain, identified as Dilmun in Mesopotamian texts, the evidence is the round “Persian Gulf” seal found there, which sometimes carries Harappan motifs, and local weights that followed the Harappan standard. With Mesopotamia itself, texts refer to trade with Dilmun, Magan (probably Oman) and Meluhha (probably the Harappan region), listing products such as carnelian, lapis lazuli, copper, gold and wood as coming from Meluhha; a Mesopotamian cylinder seal also carries a humped-bull motif that appears to be derived from the Indus region. Together, this evidence points to a trade network stretching by sea from the Harappan coast through Oman and Bahrain to the cities of Mesopotamia.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark What have some scholars called the seated, cross-legged figure surrounded by animals shown on this seal?
Answer: They have called it “proto-Shiva”, regarding it as an early form of the Hindu deity Shiva.
(B) 2 marks Why does this identification not actually match the description of Rudra found in the Rigveda?
Answer: Because the Rigveda’s Rudra is neither shown as Pashupati (lord of animals) nor as a yogi, while the seal shows a figure in a yogic posture surrounded by animals; the two descriptions simply do not match.
(C) 3 marks What alternative explanation have some scholars proposed for this figure, and what general lesson about interpreting Harappan religion does this debate illustrate?
Answer: Some scholars have suggested the figure may instead be a shaman, a person believed to have magical and healing powers and the ability to communicate with another world. The debate shows that archaeologists often reason from the known (later religious traditions) to the unknown (Harappan religion), which works reasonably well for everyday objects like querns, but becomes far more speculative once extended to religious symbols, since the resemblance can turn out to be only superficial once checked carefully against the original source, here the Rigveda itself.
(A) 1 mark Which ancient text did Wheeler try to correlate with the skeletons found at Mohenjodaro?
Answer: The Rigveda, the earliest known text in the subcontinent.
(B) 2 marks On what basis did Wheeler conclude that “Indra stands accused” of destroying the Harappan civilisation?
Answer: He connected the Rigveda’s word pur (rampart, fort or stronghold) with the Aryan war-god Indra’s title puramdara (fort-destroyer), and linked this circumstantially with the 1925 discovery of sixteen skeletons at Mohenjodaro, arguing that Indra’s forces had destroyed a fortified Harappan city.
(C) 3 marks How did George Dales’s 1964 study overturn Wheeler’s interpretation? Give three points of evidence he used.
Answer: Dales showed, first, that the skeletons found at the site did not all belong to the same period; second, that there was no destruction level covering the city’s final phase and no sign of extensive burning; and third, that no bodies of armoured warriors surrounded by weapons were found, and even the fortified citadel showed no evidence of a final defence. Together, this evidence showed that the skeletons did not support Wheeler’s picture of a single final massacre by invaders; as the book puts it, a careful re-examination of the data can lead to a reversal of earlier interpretations.