The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations

16. The Historical Background of India's Axial Age

CHAPTER 16 The Historical Background of India's Axial Age HERMANN KULKE During her Axial Age in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. India experienced a dramatic socio-political and intellectual transformation . It culminated in the "urbanization" of the Ganges valley, the simultaneous rise of the first historical regional kingdoms, and the teachings of Buddha. The historical background of this process, however, is still a matter of controversy. The crucial problem is the question as to whether this transformation was the result of an "autonomous" Indian process of the early centuries of the first millennium or whether it derived its dynamics from much earlier Indian or even contemporary external impulses. According to their historical sequence these factors were the Indus civilization of the third and early second millennium, the coming of the Vedic Aryans to the Indus valley and Panjab in the late second millennium and the protracted process of their settlement in the Ganges valley during the early centuries of the first millennium, and, finally, on the eve of India's Axial Age, the conquest of the Indus valley by the Achaemenidian empire in the late sixth century B.C.E.. Till the early twenties of our century, the Vedic culture of the lndo-Aryans was regarded as the earliest civilization of South Asia. The discovery and excavation of the Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, however, immediately ranked India among the early Hochkulturen of mankind. These cities captivate their spectators particularly with their sophisticated town-planning and their highly developed system of drains. Initially, the excavators overemphasized the dependency of the Indus civilization on the early Hochkulturen ofthe Near East during the third millennium.' But recent excavations in Baluchistan make it more and more likely that the Indus civilization had its roots in an indigenous neolithic revolution in this part of the world. Archaeological sites like Mehrgarh reveal an 374 The Historical Background of India's Axial Age 375 uninterrupted series of settlement strata from the late seventh to the third millennium which depict a continuous evolution of agriculture, handicraft, interregional trade and, finally, urbanization.2 With regard to the Indus civilization three important problems are still unsettled: Who were the carriers of this earliest civilization in South Asia and who were its destroyers? Because for an evaluation of the historical background of India's Axial Age it certainly matters whether the Aryan population of the later Ganges civilization either has to be directly related with the early Indus civilization or, at least, indirectly with its destruction around 1700 B.C.E.-or whether their forefathers had no contact at all with this early civilization. But even in the latter case a third question still remains open: Did other ethno-linguistic groups transmit some faint knowledge about the earlier Indus civilization which was then reactivated during the second urbanization in the Ganges valley? All these questions focus on the "Aryan problem" in early Indian history and/or the problem of an alleged continuity between the early Indus and the later Ganges civilization which are, according to the conventional dating, separated by about one millennium (ca. seventeenth to sixth centuries). The assumption of an alleged Aryan origin of, or at least their participation in, the Indus civilization nowadays is rarely discussed outside India.3 But the question as to whether Indo-Aryans had come into contact with it before its fall or whether they at least discovered some ofits ruins, is not yet finally settled. Two factors are ofparticular relevance in this regard. First of all, we are not yet sure whether the Vedic Aryans who seem to have entered South Asia during the second half of the second millennium were the first Indo-Aryans or whether they had some Aryan predecessors who might have come into contact with the still existing cities of the Indus around 1800 B.C.E.4 Secondly, a large number of cities and urban settlements of the Indus civilization were discovered after the Second World War outside the Indus valley in Rajasthan (Kalibangan),5 Himachal Pradesh and Panjab (Rupar). These areas are definitely known to have been the regions ofsettlement ofthe Vedic Aryans in the late centuries of the second millennium. The fact that the great Vedic god lndra has often been praised in the Rigveda as the "destroyer of the forts" (purandar) therefore quite understandably led to many speculations about the role played by the Aryans in the rather sudden fall of the Indus cities. Archaeologists once were...