Archaeology: Karnataka’s Best Kept Secret

Archaeology: Karnataka’s Best Kept Secret

Now out in the open!

We know about Halebid, Badami and Pattadakal and of course the famous ruins of Hampi, part of what we call the World Heritage. 

Now, the Archaeological Survey of India springs a surprise. 

They want Hirebenekal to be included in the list of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites, deservedly!

 360 degrees view of Hirebenekal Site

Hirebenekal….???? 

Ever heard of it? 

I’m sure you haven’t … unless you are a part of the closely knit group of archaeologists.

Let me tell you. It has been a couple of years since I had visited this site, prodded by a few archaeologist friends. Even though I have this habit of writing about the sites I visit almost immediately, I had refrained from doing it … with very good reason. 

“Why?” You may ask.

Probably it is some kind of instinctive reaction, to guard a treasure that you have found. 

Hill of Hirebenekal

Nature had kept it away from the human eyes and their desecrating hands for millennia, a fact that allowed its preservation in its virginal state. 

You may be getting a bit restless and want to shout,

“Where the hell is this?”

Now that the news is out in the open, let me tell you where it is.

The easier route to reach the place requires eight kilometers of trek through the hills and bush, with every chance of getting lost in the zigzagging goat paths. The tougher, more scenic route is a day’s trek through the leopard and sloth-bear infested hills from Hampi. Few people, not even the local shepherds, will be able to guide you. Your compass or GPS is of no use. Some field archaeologists of ASI had made some markings on rocks to guide us from the nearest village. It is easier to decipher Harappan script than these enigmatic signs. 

Rangappa, the Guide

Then, how do you go there?

Firstly, don’t even look at the Google Maps. You won’t find it. Hirebenekal is a nonexistent village. Hire means ‘old’ in the local lingo. There is a Benekal village a kilometer off the Gangavati - Koppal Road … if you drive 14 km from Gangavati – it is a mile after the bridge across Tungabhadra High Level Canal.

 An easy walk through the paddies

If you are lucky, you may find this very helpful farmer who lives there called Rangappa. He knows his way through the jungle like the back of his hand. He speaks Kannada and Telugu, spoken locally. It is essential that you find him before venturing across the rice paddies and the few orchards at the edge of human habitation. Once you start climbing the hills with its characteristic granite outcrops, you just follow him. 

Carry lots of water, you’ll need it, not only to quench your thirst but to sprinkle generously on the rocky walls of the shelters used by our Neolithic ancestors, to share the rock-art that they had left behind. The rock-art depicts some hunters on horseback and has a few similarities with the Mesolithic art of Bhimbetka and the Neolithic sites of Kurnool region. This alone is worth the trek.  

But, once you reach the top, it’s a wide undulating plain surrounding a small lake fed by a natural spring ... 

There are no words to describe the spectacular man-made landscape. 

 

Hundreds of huge ‘Dolmens’ …

It looks like some kind of uninhabited town with stone houses. These houses certainly are bigger than the Dharavi shanties. But, they were not meant to house the living. They are tombs. Their sizes are more or less uniform – Eight to Twelve feet square – built of stone slabs, more than half a foot thick. 

What are these Dolmens? 

They are burial chambers – above the ground. A base slab for floor, four vertical square slabs making it into a box and a cap stone – a slab usually circular – covering the chamber. The smallest of the chambers is about 8X8 feet square and a capstone of 10 feet diameter. The slabs are anywhere between 8 to 10 inches thick made of granite. 

Let us calculate the weight of 175 cubic feet of granite. Average weight of one cubic foot of granite is 168 pounds = 76 kilos. So a capstone weighed nothing less than 13 metric tons. Even the walls weighed ten tons a piece. How did they carry them – leave aside lifting them to ten foot height. 

Easy, isn’t it? 

You just need a crane, call Caterpillar. 

But the guys who did this belonged to a period which we call – Stone Age. 

They used tools knapped out of natural rock. Probably, they smelted iron from the Hematite that abounds in the neighbourhood … but that doesn’t explain their ability to cart and lift those weights.  

The area 500 Mts. above MSL, with a small spring-fed lake wouldn’t have supported a large labour force permanently. If you see the terrain, the possibility of their using any wheeled transport is out of the question. Assuming that one individual can lift and carry forty kilos, they would have needed 400 people to lift a single capstone.

Yet, they had built these dolmens – hundreds of them.

Sometimes I wonder if their intention in leaving them for us to discover was not to shock us and spoil our feeling of superiority. 

Shocked … Certainly, I was. 

I began exploring the valley with a small camera in hand. With a sharp eye, one may find a few unfinished hand axes and scrapers that lay on the surface and a few potsherds too. The area was certainly inhabited by people, two thousand years ago, probably a small unit of workmen, who mined the stone. 

 Stone working area next to the lake

They must have used a simple technique of heating the surface stone – layer over layer, formed eons ago due to some sequential volcanic activity – and suddenly cooled them by pouring water from the lake to induce fractures. The area surrounding the lake clearly shows the evidence of such activity.

But the actual carting and building of dolmens was done by larger groups of men, probably by those who gathered at the funeral and lent a hand. Even then, whoever afforded such burial and a funeral so grand must have been a very rich person. 

The number of dolmens raises a couple of question … for how long and how prosperous the country surrounding this place had been. 

Archaeologists estimate that these dolmens belong to a period of five centuries immediately before Christ that coincides with the Iron Age in India.

Debatable! 

The potsherds found certainly are similar to those found in other Iron Age (Mauryan / Asokan) sites like Brahmagiri etc. But the stone tools used are of an earlier milieu. More research may throw up facts that may shock us even more. 

Finally, you may now ask, why I had refrained from mentioning this site in my earlier posts. 

Protective Boundary Wall

Because, this greatest archaeological treasure is unprotected, except for a short wall of stones marking the boundary, away from the greatest depredator of artifacts and monuments, who is commonly called ‘tourist’. 

Until, ASI installs a proper protection and conservation mechanism, it is better the site stays away from the human eye and the tourist map, as it is. 

UNESCO ... 
and its conservation regimen 
are essential now to protect this heritage

also read  
http://www.archaeology.org/1005/etc/india.html

Rewinding the Traditional Clock – Part III

Geography of Jambudwipa series:

 Are the Sanskrit sources relevant in understanding the Indus Geography?

Here I would like to quote Prof. Asko Parpola in a recent interview.

 “I think these two language families have been in contact with each other ever since the Indo-Aryan speakers entered South Asia. It is impossible to leave Indo-Aryan sources out of account. They have preserved very important information of Harappan heritage.”

Coming from an authority like Prof. Parpola, whose contribution to the understanding of Harappan script and culture is respected by the scholars cutting across the parochial and ideological boundaries, the statement supports the rationale of drawing clues from the Sanskrit tradition in understanding the geography of the civilization milieu.

Similarly, the Dravidian literature also must have retained some of the clues, if we agree to the possibility that multilingual populations had shared the same civilization.

Where else do we look for more clues?

The literary tradition aside, the subcontinent has a culture complex with a multitude of isolated populations which retained some common memories and legends that had not transcended the folk domain to be a part of the written tradition. 

Finally, the geographical map as viewed by the civilization was not a constant. Coming to Jambudwipa, if that was what we assume they called their land, it must have changed with the times and therefore requires a look in from different chronological view points. 

7^th Millennium BCE

Was the concept of Jambudwipa present in the 7^th millennium BCE?

Archaeology tells us that most of the early farming sites are concentrated in the upper river valleys of Hindukush range. If we look at the map, Quetta Valley has the largest concentration of sites. We know that the valley is situated on a natural highway between the subcontinent and the Levant. It is plausible that the early farming communities of the Levantine Crescent and the sites in the subcontinent are somehow connected. Prof. Colin Renfrew thinks that it was during this period that a Proto-IE language had spread with the establishment of these communities. If that was the case, the original IE people belonged to the earliest of these farming communities. Mehrgarh certainly is a candidate along with some of the Palestinian and Anatolian sites.

Now the question is, ‘Were they the Rig Vedic people?’

True, there were many common names and legends Rig Veda shares with those of the classical Mediterranean cultures. But those came about much later and any commonality is probably due to later dissemination. Further, the Assyrian and the Rig Vedic traditions are entirely distinct. There are a few shared events and legends like the much touted flood legend of circa 3100 BCE belonging to Post-Ubaid, Jemdet Nasr period.

Therefore, Rig Veda may not be helpful in understanding the early farming communities of 7^th millennium BCE. Secondly, we are not sure if these early farmers belonged to the same people or entirely independent of each other, even though those village sites looked functionally similar.

I am not trying to speculate on whether these cultures evolved indigenously or were planted by the migrants from the west. Archeologically, they were present in the Quetta Valley in the 7^th millennium. I am looking only at the fact that when these technologically advanced communities existed, there were many indigenous communities that coexisted who were at an earlier cultural phase. Topographically, most of these farming sites are found in river valleys at substantial elevation – at an average of thousand meters above mean sea level, Mehrgarh being the lowest at around 700 above msl.

The hunter gatherers that lived in the plains must have looked at these technologically advanced people with awe. Their technology – their ability to control the animals and plants – was probably considered some kind of superhuman magic. These people of the ‘High place’ were probably the catalyst for the origin of the Meru myth. Naturally, when in the latter days, a geographically cogent world view developed, this mythical High place became its center.

Etymologically, it can be argued that Meru is derived from the Dravidian root, ‘Mél’. Not surprisingly Mél in Tamil is associated with height and the cardinal west.  

Zhob in all probability was the focus of this nascent civilization of the super human people and is the same river ‘su-po-fa-su-tu’ (or Subha-vastu) as mentioned by Hsuen Tsang. This argument is consistent with my earlier post – Finding Mount Meru …

http://saipapineni.blogspot.in/2012/08/finding-mount-meru.html

This entire argument above presumes that the concept of Jambudwipa belonged to a later phase in the prehistory of the subcontinent. Therefore, let us look at the next phase in my time-list to understand the Jambudwipa as a concept.

4500 BCE – Atlanticum

Om Bhūr Bhuvar Swar …. Thus goes the Gāyatri mantra. The spiritual interpretation of this is not what I would touch upon. But the context in which the mantra is first uttered is when the person enters the community as an accredited member. Manu samhita says that Vyāhritis – the three mystical words to have been milked by the first man from the three Vedas – resulted in the three lokas: Bhūr, Bhuvar and Swar. In essence, Gayatri is a pledge of loyalty taken by the newly inducted citizen to the way of life as dictated by the God of Bhrigus, the original source of illumination. It was the energy of the Sun that had brought these three spheres into one body. Every member of this emergent Aryan community was bound by this pledge. 

It is a rather simplistic and materialistic interpretation, but the people of the early urban milieu were also simple people – still evolving into a syncretic community combining three streams of subsistence. Please see my earlier post … Rewinding the Traditional Clock – Part II 
 http://saipapineni.blogspot.in/2012/08/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

Let us look closely at the words – Bhū-r, Bhuva-r and Swa-r.

The suffix ‘ar’ always denoted people. It was probably derived from the Dravidian tradition. But many North Indian Jāti names also end with this suffix – Kumh-ar, Cham-ar etc.

Bhūr-loka became synonymous with the land, a plain on which the normal humans lived; while Bhuvar and Swar came to be known as some kind of celestial plains where the mythical superhuman beings like the gods existed. The rivers – Sindhu, Saraswati and Sarayu were the focus of this human habitat … 

Bhūr-loka

Let us start with the identification of this Bhūr-loka in the prehistoric archaeological milieu.

We know where Sindhu is.

Saraswati is no more a speculation.

But, Sarayu is an enigma. I would like to point at a Rigvedic legend much touted in later epics…

“It was on the banks of Harayūpiya, Indra killed hundred priests called Vrichivats”, says Rigveda. Rāmāyana mentions the legend of Viswāmitra killing a hundred of Vasishṭa’s sons at Hariyūpa. They were called Vālashikhas. Sudas killed a hundred Vaikarnéyas on the banks of the river Parushni. Vālashikhas, Varashikhas and Vaikarnéyas belong to Vāsishṭa gōtra. All these above legends allude to one single incident in the remembered past.

We know Parushni is the ancient name of Rāvi on whose bank we find Harappa. Therefore, it is possible that the original Sarayu/Harayu is none other than the river Rāvi.

The three principal rivers – Sindhu, Sarayu & Saraswati – were Indus, Rāvi and  Saraswati (whose upper tributary was Sutlej). The riparian map of Punjab probably looked like this…

It was here the first native agrarian communities had established themselves and called their habitat drained by the three rivers as Bhūr-loka. 

Bhuvar-loka

It was the land of the ancestors. Those, who were looked up to. There are two names that crop up – Vasus and Pitris.  Pitris is just a synonym for the ancestors. I have – in my earlier post – speculated upon the possible association of the original builders of Neolithic communities in the upper Zhob region with the Vasus.

 http://saipapineni.blogspot.in/2012/08/finding-mount-meru.html.

These inhabitants of Bhuvar-loka had reciprocal relationship with the dwellers of Bhūr-loka – as benefactors and receivers of annual tribute. 

Swar-loka

It’s called the abode of the gods. Rigveda calls it by the name ‘Divi’. Three sets of superhuman beings occupied this sphere in successive periods. They were Gandharvas, Asuras and Dévas. Clues to the identification of this region lay in the various legends about its original occupants – Gandharvas.

Who are they?

Rigveda calls them Divya Gandharvas, meaning Gandharvas of Divi. They are the beings of the night. They came in their winged craft with the background of setting sun, their amphorae filled with intoxicating Sura and rejuvenating ambrosia. Their women Apsaras accompanied them, the nymphs of water with floral garlands bouncing on their naked breast to their gyrations to the tunes of divine music of their lute playing singers. They are free spirits unrestricted by the norms that governed the common folk.

I want to draw a parallel … the experiences of those early explorers of 19^th century who described the islands of the South Pacific – the Polynesian society. We know from the anthropological sources that the early migration route taken by the native populations of the Pacific islands had passed through the subcontinent. Remnants of these cultures still exist among the hill tribes of the region – speakers of Munda language group. 

Legends have it that the Gandharvas were evicted from their original homes by the Asuras and they fled to the hills. The most populous Munda tribes are still known by names such as Khonds, Gonds etc. Ramayana recollects that the Lanka was ruled by Kubéra, the overlord of Gandharvas who had to relinquish his control to Rāvan and relocate himself at Alaka near Méru. Gandharvas and their women, Apsaras were the children of Nārāyana, the original ancestor who had his floating abode in the waters of Nāra. The dancing girl bronze of Mohenjodaro has strong Austric features. The early levels of Kot Diji, Dholavira, Amri and Chanhudaro show distinct polychrome designs, indicating a lively lifestyle, as compared to the staid unadorned pottery of the later phases. Divi is synonymous with ‘island’ in most Munda and Dravidian languages. Lanka is an island. ‘Ganda’ means ‘Man’ in many Dravidian languages.

All these point to a vibrant native culture that had existed in the lower Indus region – where the rivers split into a myriad of distributaries creating many islands and oxbow lakes – drawing subsistence from the bounty of the river. No wonder, the eastern stream of Indus delta is even today known by the name ‘Nāra’.

We may conclude that primarily these three streams of people – the three lokas – with distinct cultural backgrounds constituted the builders of the first urban civilization.

For now it should suffice to say that the idea of Jambudwipa came into being only after the integration of early Neolithic peoples into a singular urban culture and the resultant need for an identity as opposed to the Upper Paleolithic people that surrounded it. The Gāyatri mantra was instituted as an instrument of recruitment into this emerging culture.

The integration had taken place sometime later. The spark that had ignited this process and the resultant worldview that had developed will be discussed in my next post.  

Until then...