Sinauli in Uttar Pradesh Produced Copper-Sheathed Coffins and Three Full-Size Copper-Plated Vehicles From About 2000 BCE, and a 2024 Radiocarbon Paper Now Dates the Site

In the spring of 2018 the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) opened a trench at Sinauli, a village in Baghpat district of western Uttar Pradesh, and found wooden coffins standing on four legs and sheathed in copper, with full-size wheeled vehicles buried beside them. A paper published in the journal Radiocarbon on 30 September 2024, with the dig’s director S. K. Manjul among its seven authors, dates the site to about 4000 years before present, around 2000 BCE.

The authors write that these are the first royal burials with chariots from the Chalcolithic period (when copper tools came into use alongside stone ones) in the Indian subcontinent. Whether the vehicles were chariots is argued, and that argument is laid out below.

A second graveyard, a hundred metres from the first

Sinauli, spelled Sanauli in several papers, lies 60 to 70 km from Delhi, according to Asko Parpola of the University of Helsinki. It came to notice when a landowner scraped alluvial earth from a patch of his field, 35 by 20 metres and 1.5 metres deep, and exposed pottery, a copper sword with antenna-shaped hilt and human bones. After a preliminary visit in 2004, the ASI dug in 2005 and 2006 and uncovered a graveyard of 116 burials, mostly with the head to the northwest. V. N. Prabhakar’s study of its pottery, summarised by Parpola, found it to be the largest body of Late Harappan pottery then known from the Ganga-Yamuna doab, the land between the two rivers.

Chance finds by villagers led the excavators to the spot again. The new trench lay about 100 metres from the old graveyard and held seven more graves, according to Parpola, in what the excavators took to be a royal cemetery. Sanjay Kumar Manjul and Arvin Manjul, both of the ASI, directed the work. The Radiocarbon paper and Disha Ahluwalia, an archaeologist who worked at the site, count eight burials, so the totals differ by one between sources.

Coffins on four legs, sheathed in copper

Legged wooden coffins were a new mode of burial for Sinauli, since the 2005 to 2006 graveyard had none, according to Parpola. The wooden planks, 30 to 35 mm thick, had rotted away, but two of the three coffins kept a copper plating about 3 mm thick, which marked their outlines. Parpola, summarising the excavators’ report, gives the measurements of two of them. The coffin in burial pit 3 was 163 cm long on four legs of 44 cm. The coffin in pit 6 was 259 cm long on legs of 50 cm, with copper on the inside as well as the outside and a foliage design on the outer side.

The lid of the pit 6 coffin carries the best-known image from the dig. According to the excavators’ report, as Parpola quotes it, the lid was carved in wood in high relief, then covered with thin copper sheet fixed with small nails. It shows eight human-like figures wearing horned headgear, three of them seeming to hold objects. Parpola adds that the reporter T. S. Subramanian recorded another expert view in Frontline, that the carving shows bull heads.

Pit 1 held a legged coffin without copper, with an almost whole skeleton of a tall woman, and an armlet of agate beads at her elbow. A large dish-on-stand beside her held a broken dagger and a horn comb decorated with a bull.

Three vehicles with copper-plated platforms

The vehicle in pit 3, damaged by recent farm work, was the best preserved. According to Parpola’s reading of the report, it had a fixed axle carrying a semicircular wooden platform covered in thick copper plates, with side panels and a high dashboard at the front. Copper pipes framed the platform, and one was fitted to hold an umbrella. Both wheels were solid, with triangular copper sheets fixed in three rows from hub to rim by 2 cm copper nails. Pit 6 held a pair of the same kind beside the largest coffin. ThePrint reported two chariots in June 2018, and the later accounts, among them the Radiocarbon article and Archaeology magazine, say three. Archaeology magazine quotes Manjul as saying that vehicles in burial pits point to a warrior class and place India beside Mesopotamia and Greece, where chariots were in wide use.

Around the pit 3 coffin lay a bowl-shaped copper helmet, a violin-shaped shield decorated with copper strips in a checker pattern, a torch with a deep copper pan, a copper dagger and hundreds of beads. Pit 6 added a whip shaft decorated with copper, a chalice of solid copper cast in one piece on a tortoise-shaped base, and two electrum caps (electrum is a natural gold and silver alloy), which Parpola thinks were probably the ends of a sceptre. Strings of gold beads decorated the coffin.

The swords are of the antennae-hilted type, named for the two curled arms at the top of the hilt. One from a symbolic burial, a cenotaph, in pit 5 is 70 cm long and has a wooden hilt covered with copper strips. Parpola notes that swords of this type are characteristic of the early Copper Hoards and absent from the Mature Harappan culture.

What the 2024 paper dates

Six of the seven authors of the Radiocarbon paper are affiliated with the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Lucknow, and Manjul is the ASI’s author. Their abstract says that radiocarbon dates and the material culture place the site at about 4000 years before present, roughly 2000 BCE, and that it is thought to belong to the Ochre-Coloured Pottery and Copper Hoard culture. That culture, the authors say, developed in the Ganga-Yamuna doab and was contemporary with the late phase of the Indus civilisation. They see it as plausibly contemporary with late Indus, Mesopotamian and Greek civilisations.

This article could read only the abstract. The full text, including the isotope analysis named in the paper’s title, is behind the journal’s paywall. Parpola’s paper, written four years earlier, quotes a Times of India report that Manjul said carbon dating confirmed a date of 1900 BCE, and that the Lucknow institute had sent the ASI two radiocarbon dates, 3815 and 3500, each with a margin of error of 130 years. Manjul’s first estimate, in June 2018, was 2000 to 1800 BCE. Those two numbers do not match the paper’s 4000 years before present, and the tables that would show how they relate were not available for this article.

Chariots or bull-carts

A chariot, in the definition Parpola follows from the vehicle historians, is a light two-wheeled vehicle drawn by horses and fitted with spoked wheels. Manjul, asked in a February 2018 newspaper interview whether horses drew the Sinauli vehicles, said their size and shape indicated they did, Parpola reports.

Parpola gives several reasons for reading them differently. The wheels are solid, which he judges too heavy for horses. No horse skeletons, no horse skulls and none of the cheek-pieces used to control chariot horses turned up, and the imagery from the dig is dominated by the bull, from the comb to the horned figures on the coffin lid. He compares the vehicles to a copper bull-cart from Daimabad in Maharashtra, a Late Harappan find. On his reading these are bull-drawn carts, and he still calls the burials the first of their kind in Bronze Age India. Ruchika Sharma, a doctoral scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told ThePrint in 2018 that bullock carts are common at Late Harappan sites and asked the ASI why it called these chariots.

Ahluwalia, who worked on the dig, wrote in December 2018 that whether the vehicles were horse-driven remained unresolved, and that calling the burials royal rests on the outer appearance of the coffins and vehicles. The 2024 paper keeps the word chariot in its title.

Who the people were

The excavators place the royal cemetery outside the Harappan tradition while acknowledging contact with it. The Better India quotes Manjul as saying the chariots and coffins did not belong to the Harappan civilisation, and Ahluwalia reports that the excavators see little Harappan connection. The 2005 to 2006 graveyard nearby, by contrast, is Late Harappan in its pottery, in Parpola’s summary of Prabhakar’s study. Late Harappan is the final phase of the civilisation whose cities we describe in our piece on Indus water systems. The Ochre-Coloured Pottery of the royal graves is a thick red-slipped ware that rubs off ochre-coloured on the fingers, found mainly in the Ganga-Yamuna doab.

Two larger questions have been put to these finds. Parpola uses them in his model of how Indo-Iranian languages reached South Asia, with early speakers arriving through Central Asia. The other is whether they bear on the Mahabharata, which our explainer on what the Mahabharata is describes. Manjul gave a lecture in July 2018 on the epic and the Ochre-Coloured Pottery and Copper Hoard cultures, Parpola records, and an opinion piece in The Quint quotes him, when asked about a link, as saying it was too early to say. The scholar Giacomo Benedetti, quoted by Parpola, points out that the Rigveda, too, mentions warriors and chariots. Ahluwalia wrote that much more evidence is needed before anyone can say who brought horses to the region.

Where these people lived is also unknown. A trial dig in 2018, 800 metres from the graves, found pottery and hearths, Parpola reports, but the settlement has not been located. DNA samples taken from the 2018 skeletons were with laboratories at Deccan College in Pune and in Hyderabad, according to Parpola in 2020, and none of the sources consulted here reports a result. Ancient DNA from the Harappan period is covered in our article on the Rakhigarhi genome.

Under central protection

Swarajya reported that the ASI issued a draft notice on 6 June 2019 proposing to declare about 28 hectares at Sadikpur Sinauli a site of national importance, and that an earlier ASI statement had called the place the largest necropolis of the Late Harappan period. Chronicle India reported in November 2020 that the declaration under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 had been made, covering 28.67 hectares.