DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

66 INDUS CONSERVATISM [3.4
The latter would have been far more efficient and was known to
contemporary Sumerians, but occurs only in the top, layers after
foreign occupation (fig. 13). In later India, not only every part of
the country, but every century developed its own characteristic script,
whereas the Indus script shows no variation from the earliest to the
latest discovered strata. The Egyptian hieroglyphics retained their
forms for many centuries, but a hieratic and a demotic cursive writing
developed. In Mesopotamia, the cuneiform syllabary replaced the
hieroglyphic at an early age, giving us innumerable tablets of
merchants, the law code of Hammurabi, inscriptions that dedicate
statues, record transfer of land, sale of slaves, temple songs, epic poetry.
Here we have absolutely nothing but short lines on seals, or brief
scratches on pots. It might be that the merchants wrote on perishable
material, such as starched cloth, leather, pajjn-leaf, or birch bark,
but nothing has survived (except black lumps of what might be
ink) to prove it; yet there was no reason why they should not have
learned from their Sumerian counterparts how to write
imperishably on clay. The conclusion is that long-term records
were not thought necessary by them. The monopoly was absolutely
secure, its continuation ensured by static tradition.
Such conservatism based upon class monopoly of profits and upon
religion would explain the changelessness of the script, as also that
of the ground plan of a city dominated by its temple. The picture here
is of a fixed dass of traders under the tutelage of a mother-goddess
temple, to which they paid tribute that did not interfere with their
amassing considerable wealth on their own. The point is that the bulk of
the working class population must also have found religious causes
sufficient to keep them in their allotted position. No matter what the
similarities in the grip of temple cujts, cities like Ur of the Chaldees
show decidedly greater military equipment as well as 1 relics of kings
who used it without relying exclusively’ upon the gods. The Indus valley
does not.
3.4. We now come to the basic question, how did the
cultivators produce the surplus grain which was necessary to feed the
city people, whether temple-slave, workman, craftsman, trader or
priest ?