The Missing Horses Of Harappan Seals Are Not Really Missing

The horse has always been at the centre of a bitterly debated controversy in Indology. Almost close to a century, text books declared axiomatically that Harappan civilisation was distinguished from the Vedic by the absence of the horse. Horse domestication was said to have been done by Indo-European (IE) speakers of the Steppes. This horse riding culture is called the Yamnaya culture, which was supposed to have brought the horses and the Indo-European language. This stand is reinforced by the perceived paucity of horse representation in the cultural motifs of Harappa. Prof.Laurie L Patton in her scholarly introduction to the compilation of essays on the so-called Indo-Aryan controversy reflects the general academic consensus outside India when she says that ‘if the horse is ever discovered contemporaneous with early Indus Valley culture, or pre-Vedic South Asian civilization, the migrationist theories would have to change dramatically'. ('The Indo-Aryan Controversy', Routledge, 2005)

However, the picture has not always been clear with respect to horse remains and representations in Harappan culture because a large number of Indian archaeologists have always pointed out the presence of horses in Harappan civilisation.

Yet Another Study

Today, scholars involved in a detailed study of ancient DNA, seem to favour the Steppe horse riders bringing Indo-European language into the South Asian region. However, the possibilities of IE expansion through non-Yamnaya are also strong. Particularly there is the case of Hittites. These people who make their appearance with bronze age urban centres show a fusion culture of two linguistic streams - the Indo-European Nesite and the non-Indo-European Hattic. Now the interesting part is that recent studies have found no significant Yamnaya genetic influence among the Hittites. But in the case of India, it is assumed that the supposed Yamanya genetic influx gets correlated with Indo-European language expansion.

The Hittite Puzzle:

There is also the case of Kassites who rose after the fall of Babylonian Empire, and were prominent between 1530 BCE and 1155 BCE. Dr Mario Liverani, Professor of Ancient Near East History at the University of Rome points out that the Hittite Indo-European terms linked to horse riding were more of eastern (Indo-Iranian) origin than Anatolian:

In a very important paper that has not received the attention it deserves, the eminent linguist Janos Harmatta (1917-2004), whose pioneering work in deciphering of Bactrian inscriptions solved many problems in ancient Iranian linguistics, narrows down the Indo-Iranian to what he calls ‘Proto-Indians'.

So if we are to assume that the Steppe horse riders brought Indo-European culture into Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) in 1500 BCE as claimed, then we have to explain how the terms and deities which evolved from this branch of IE could spread to Hittites and Mittani - particularly those related to horses and war chariots. The absence of Yamnaya genetic influence in Hittites seen in this context, actually poses a serious question over the model of late Bronze age horse riders from Steppes bringing IE into India.

The Case For The Harappan Horse:

So were there domesticated horses in the Harappan society?

There has been a controversy going on between theoretically anchored historians and archaeologists here. The report of the archaeological survey of India when reporting about the faunal remains discovered at Surkotada, makes the following observations not just in terms of Harappan context, but also with relation to a chronologically longer and geographically vaster canvas:

Interestingly, this identification of horses in Harappan archaeological context (A K Sharma, 1990) was contested by the invasionist-migrationist school of historians. So Prof Sandor Bokonyi, an internationally renowned archaeo-zoologist from Hungary was asked to examine the evidence. After examining the material, the archaeo-zoologist who was also then the Director of the Archaeological Institute, Hungary, wrote to the then Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India thus:

Yet the question remains why then the horse is not found in the Harappan seals. There have been equid terracotta figurines discovered from Harappan sites for a long time. These figurines were often initially considered as depicting the horses. Later as the horse-riding Aryans versus equid-ignorant non-Vedic Harappan binary became the major framework, the figurines were considered as being ambiguous. The scholars started saying that they might be actually members of other equid family (like Equus asinus or Equus hamionus). Dr Sajjan Kumar in his thesis gives a succinct picture of the situation, though he says that 'one would like to have much more evidence' to state that 'the horse was present in Harappan civilization and played a significant role in the Harappan economy':

Kenoyer, a Harappan archaeologist who is skeptical about Harppan horse claims, in his entry about Indus civilization in a recent archaeology handbook has this to say:

Along with horse bones another innovation associated with horse riding, the spoked wheels too was known to Harappans. Terracotta wheels with spokes painted on them have been obtained from the Harappan sites of Banawali, Rakhigarhi and Bhirrana. Similarly, models of light weight chariots too were known to Harappans. All these taken together definitely poke a lot of holes in the model of Yamanya people bringing in horses and IE language, particularly into India.

So actually the question boils down to not the representation of horses in Harappan art, but the very obvious absence of the animal in the famous Harappan seals. This question often gets inflated with ‘absence of domesticated horses’ in Harappan society, which is altogether different.

Coming to the question of the alleged absence of the horse in the seals, there are quite a few explanations. For example, eminent archaeologist Dr B B Lal who leans towards the identity of Vedic and Harappan civilisation asks, “But then the camel is also absent. So why should the horse be singled out on that count?” However, unlike the camel, the horse plays an important role in Vedic culture as we understand from the literature. Late archaeologist S P Gupta also took a similar line and pointed out that a whole lot of animals (camel, wolf, cat, deer, Nilgai, fowl, jackal) whose presence in Harappan milieu was attested by their bones were not depicted in Harappan seals.

Vedic Horse And The Harappan Unicorn

Michel Danino, a scholar of Indian culture and history, in his paper on the Harappan horse question quotes K D Sethna, who points out that the cow too was absent from depictions. Danino mentions in passing the conjecture put by eminent archeologist Dr S R Rao that the unicorn itself might be a composite animal in which horse was embedded. Actually what S R Rao proposed was a very plausible scenario in which ‘gradually the animal deities were absorbed in the Fire-God ... wherein the unicorn, itself a composite figure of horse and other animals, represented the Fire-God.’ ('Dawn and devolution of the Indus civilization', 1991) Gautama Vajra Vajracharya, a Nepali Sanskritist, in a 2010 paper titled 'Unicorns in Ancient India and Vedic Ritual', published in EJVS a journal edited by rabid pro-invasionist/migrationist Michael Witzel, drew attention to this aspect - that 'the neck of this (Harappan) unicorn is much more elongated than that of a bull and bears some similarity to that of a horse or an ass.'

In 1935, historian Charles Louis Fabri published a paper arguing for the continuity of Harappan civilisation to the later historical times through the study of imagery in the punch-marked coins with those in the Harappan seals. What 'immediately struck' him were 'certain animal representations' which were 'the humped Indian bull, the elephant, the tiger, the crocodile, and the hare'. He observed that the 'old tradition was kept alive up to proto-historic times' though the punch- marked coins even though they are separated from the Harappan seals by a very minimum period of thousand years. Interestingly, in his comparison of seals and punch-marked coins, Fabri did not compare horse representation in punched mark coins with Harappan seals. Instead he had drawn a parallel between bull and the unicorn.

A comparison of the representation of the horse in punch-marked coins and the unicorn however reveals a very remarkable similarity. What actually seems to connect the horse depiction in punch-marked coins and the Harappan unicorn seal is the remarkable similarity between the object shown before the unicorn (Harappan seal) and before the horse (punch-marked coins).

Indologist Irvatham Mahadevan, who incidentally believes that Harappan culture was linguistically Dravidian and culturally Vedic, connects the so-called 'cult object' before the unicorn to the Soma ritual. In his interview to ‘Harappa.com’ he explains:

Soma Ritual Non-Vedic?

Iravatham Mahadevan contends that the Indo-Aryans learnt the Soma ritual from the Harappans as the Soma ritual is not present in the so-called ‘Indo-European’ cultures in the West. But as early as 1882, Charles Francis Keary had pointed out how Soma ‘corresponded to the mystic millet water (kykeon) of the Eleusinian celebrations' ('Outlines of Primitive Belief Among the Indo-European Races'). Renowned Indo-European scholar Calvert Watkins pointed out further parallels. According to him, “the ritual of Vedic and Indo-Iranian, by men for men, but symbolically by women; the ritual act of communion of the Eleusinian mysteries, by women for women; and a warrior ritual in archaic Greece, by women for men; all of these must go back to a single common Indo-European liturgical cultic practice” because “the number and the precision of the agreements between Indo-Iranian and Greek, and their articulation as a structure, a total social fact, are too striking for a fortuitous resemblance to be plausible.” ('Selected Writings: Culture and poetics', 1994, p.601)

All these jigsaw puzzles solve themselves if one goes beyond the artificial binary classification and perceptions of the Vedic-Harappan identity. The Asvamedha, the Vedic horse sacrifice, is itself a three-day Soma sacrifice.

Sri Aurobindonian Solution:

Perhaps, one such solution may come if one uses Sri Aurobindo’s approach to the problem. In fact, Michel Danino, in his paper, 'The Horse and the Aryan Debate' points to Sri Aurobindonian approach and quotes a passage from 'The Secret of the Vedas':

Perhaps, this also gives us a reason why both cow and horse, both sacred and ritually important in Vedic culture, were not depicted separately in the Harappan seals. Perhaps they were combined in the unicorn. Throughout Hindu iconography, such combined animals representing the divine have intentional gender ambiguities. Hence, it is highly plausible that the Harappan unicorn may be the combination of horse as well as androgynous bull-cow with the cow being subsumed by the bull. Earlier we saw that Dr S R Rao had identified the unicorn with fire-deity. Incidentally, the fire-deity is also called “the bull who is also a cow” (RV. 10.5.7). Such iconography is subsuming of one gender by the other in gender-ambiguous divines is also common in Indian iconography. For example, Shiva while shown in the male form also has androgynous dimension shown in the form of differentiated earrings. Purusha-mirugam, which is a combination of a male seer and an animal is said in Hindu legends to yield milk.

The composite depiction of divine with the combination of horse and cow in a Vedic context is seen in a mandapam (pillared hall) of Adi Varaha Swamy temple in Sri Mushnam, Tamil Nadu, which was either built or renovated by Nayakkar chieftain Achyuta Nayyakar in the 16th century. The mandapam with 16 pillars representing the 16 hymns of Purusha Sukta of Rig Veda is called Purusha Sukta Mandapam. Here, Vishnu is shown in the form of a cow and a horse with a male Vishnu emanating from the top portion of this composite animal. Brahma the creator deity is shown drinking from the udder of this divine form.

To summarize:

• The recent study on horse domestication despite pointing out that there was an independent earlier domestication of horses, still sticks on to the conventional invasionist/migrationist model for IE expansion and the introduction of the horse (by Yamnaya herders) in India. However the paper points out that Hittites were introduced the IE language without genetic influence of Yamnaya.
• Many renowned Indologists have pointed out that the Hittites have what is called proto-Indian influence.
• Horse remains have been discovered in many Harappan sites. Harappans also knew about wheel with spokes and chariots.
• The unicorn depicted in Harappan seals may be a composite animal which incorporates in it the horse. This is further emphasized by the remarkable similarity between the way horses are depicted in later punch-marked coins and unicorns in Harappans seals.
• There is a continuity of the composite nature of unicorn of Harappa extending to even 16th century. Perhaps the spiritual symbolism of Vedic literature when approached through the framework like that of Sri Aurobindo. It can also open our eyes to continuity of Harappan culture to our own times.

Most of the paradoxes and puzzles that Indology suffers from seem to be self-inflicted. For example, in the given case, all answers can be obtained by letting go of the false binary classification of Harappan as non-Vedic and of Vedic as the horse-riding Aryan bringing in the Indo-European culture. Once that is done most of the jigsaw pieces naturally fall in places. And what we then witness is a civilisation that has been flowing perennially for millennia, absorbing many streams, changing , adapting - yet never losing its basic core nature - which in turn is reflected from the discovered past remains to her experienced present.