The Indus Valley's Bronze Age
civilisation may have developed the world's first sophisticated
system of wage labour, financial exchange and measurement, a Canadian
mathematician has discovered.
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 6:00AM GMT 17 Nov 2009
According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered
almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of
the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights
and measures.
Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical
Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis
ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with
markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative
size.
But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi
earlier this month where the original pots are stored in one of
the city's Mughal era forts. The three pots each had different
markings, the smallest with a 'V' to indicate 'measure' and three
long strokes. The medium vessel had six strokes and the largest
had seven.
When he measured them he found they were in proportionate capacity:
3:6:7.
The inscriptions on the pots matched those on bas relief ceramic
tablets which he believes are tokens of exchange for fixed measures
of grain or other commodities.
The size of the pots â€" the largest is 2.7 metres
in circumference, and contains 65 litres â€" indicates
an organised system of exchange for large scale transactions,
he said.
The bas-relief tablets are "definitely some kind of exchange
token. These pots are more than one metre wide. You're not going
to be carrying them around. The chits or tablets have representative
value and they are being used in an economic context," he
said.
In his paper Indus Weights and Measures, to be published in the
archeological journal Antiquity next year, Dr Wells suggests the
tablets may be the equivalent of 'wage slips' or credits for work
representing fixed volumes of food.
"It is possible that wages were paid with grains dispersed
from a centralised storage facility or in the case of incised
tablets material for construction projects and other short-term
projects," he wrote.
Although older coins and ingots have been discovered from the
Mesopotamia, but Dr Wells' findings amount to a more detailed
decoding of an ancient value system.
To expose the many metholodical flaws in the above claims, I
presented a paper at the International Symposium on Indus Civilization
and Tamil Language 2007 organized by the Dept. of Archaeology,
Govt. of Tamil Nadu, Chennai, 15-16 February 2007: "A Dravido-Harappan
Connection? The Issue of Methodology." It has been published
(with a few cuts in the conclusion) in the seminar's proceedings:
Indus Civilization and Tamil Language, T.S. Sridhar and N. Marxia
Gandhi, eds., Department of Archaeology, Government of Tamil Nadu,
Chennai, 2009, pp. 70-81:
Regards,