From Harappa to Hastinapura: A study of the earliest South Asian city and civilization from the point of view of archaeology and ancient Indian literature

This dissertation explores the earliest South Asian city and civilization from the point of view of Sanskrit and Pali literature and the archaeology of the Harappan and Ganges civilizations. Aimed at showing a new way of using ancient Indian texts in South Asian archaeology, it combines the methods and epistemologies of anthropological archaeology, history and philology and is based on humanistic, subjectivist, structural and reflective principles.; In the theoretical introduction, it is argued that the sociopolitical consciousness of historical agents is inseparable from the phenomena of the past; and that from the point of view of archaeology, ancient Indian literature is valuable as source of ideas rather than facts. Given this premise, excerpts from Sanskrit and Pali texts are selected and analyzed with the goal of extracting the definitions of the city. It is established that the city was distinguished by two traits: fortifications and authority. Consequently, data on authority and fortifications from the twenty-five archaeological sites of the Harappan and Ganges Civilizations are analyzed with the purpose of determining whether the model extracted from the texts is historically accurate and whether the Harappan and Ganges Civilizations belong to the same cultural entity, i.e., the ancient Indian Civilization. After a site-by site analysis, it is concluded that indeed the earliest Harappan and Gangetic cities were epitomized by the concurrent processes of the construction of fortifications and the formation of authority. Furthermore, fortifications performed mostly ideational functions, i.e., symbolized authority, delineated space, and marked territorially bound identities.; In conclusion, to explore the relationship between the ideas of the city and civilization, two analytical models are extracted from the Sanskrit Purana&dotbelow;s. Depicting the genesis of a complex society, these models lead to a new definition of the ancient Indian civilization. According to this definition, the ethos of ancient India is formed prior to the emergence of the Harappan Civilization and is contingent on agricultural economy, orally transmitted codes, an idiosyncratic social system, and a set of ritual practices. Meanwhile, cities, writing and monumental architecture---the markers of the Urban Revolution that are often equated with markers of civilization---are epiphenomenal to the ethos of the earliest Indian civilization.