Indus civilisation flourished along a course abandoned by the Sutlej, says study 

Indus civilisation flourished along a course abandoned by the Sutlej, says study 

Context

New findings on Indus Valley civilization

What has happened?

A team of Indian and British researchers has found that it was the Sutlej, not the “lost” Saraswati river, as some believed, that gave rise to the great Indus civilization that flourished around 4,000 years ago

Impact

This recent discovery may have significant bearing on our understanding of how the ancient urban civilization bloomed and ended

Findings

The scientists reported in the journal Nature Communications that,

• Unlike other civilisations such as Mesopotamian and Egyptian, which came up on major river banks, the Indus civilisation flourished along a course which the Sutlej abandoned some 8,000 years ago. Previously it was supposed that early urbanisation required access to perennial rivers. But the urban centres of the Indus civilisation (also known as Harappancivilisation) developed without the water provided by a big Himalayan river
• Archaeological evidence gathered from excavated Indus civilisation sites in India and Pakistan has shown that the ancient urban settlements came about 4,600 years ago
• Through meticulously carried out sediment studies and remote sensing, the scientists identified that the present-day Ghaggar, (called Hakra in Pakistan), which is a seasonal river, flows through the former course of Sutlej but the detailed dating of the river sediments carried out now show that the river did not flowing there at the time of the Indus settlements. The Sutlej had diverted several thousand earlier than that
• Questioning earlier claims: The study calls into question the contention of a section of archaeologists that the settlements might have developed along the “lost” river of Saraswati. It may debunk some of their arguments to “establish” it was indeed Saraswati, not Ghaggarthat supported the ancient civilisation. For instance, the “proponents” of Saraswati had argued that there was enough geological and sedimentary evidence to show that the river that fed the Indus civilisation carried glacier headwaters. Ghaggar, they contested, could not have been that river, originating as it does from the Shiwaliks in the foothills of the Himalayas

Major turning point

Many believed that it was the death of a river that led to the collapse of the civilization. But what we find is that it was the demise of a river (by changing of its course) that helped nourish this civilization. In that sense this is a major turning point in our understanding of our past

Sutlej & IVC

When the river changed its course, it left a former channel in the landscape which was a topographic low. This served to capture and concentrate monsoon-fed river flow and contained excellent soils for agriculture. Thus the Sutlej formed the environmental template for the civilisation in this region

• This was further proved by the fact that some of these ancient settlements — such as Banawali in Fatehabad district of Haryana — were actually built within the paleochannel, and had the river been active they would have been destroyed by floods