Cunningham's Report for 1872 to 1873 Said Harappa's Mounds Had Supplied Brick Ballast for About 100 Miles of the Lahore and Multan Railway, and the Excavations Begun by Daya Ram Sahni in 1921 Then Placed the City in the Third Millennium BC

Alexander Cunningham wrote in his Archaeological Survey report for 1872 to 1873 that the brick mounds of Harappa “have more than sufficed to furnish brick ballast for about 100 miles” of the Lahore and Multan Railway. Ballast is the bed of broken stone or brick that holds railway sleepers in place. Harappa stands in Punjab province, Pakistan, and the town gives the Indus civilization its other name, the Harappan civilization.

Cunningham had visited the mounds in 1853 and again in 1856. When he dug there in 1872 to 1873, the surface had been “so completely cleared out by the Railway contractors,” in his words, that he found little worth keeping. Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni began excavating in January 1921, and the mounds turned out to hold a city of the third millennium BC, far older than Cunningham’s own guess.

The record is plain that railway contractors took brick from the mounds. It names no contractor, gives no count of bricks and dates the removal only loosely, and the figure of 100 miles needs careful reading.

What Masson and Burnes saw before the railway

Charles Masson reached Harappa in or about 1826, according to both Cunningham and Mortimer Wheeler, the Director General of the Archaeological Survey who dug there in 1946. Masson’s Narrative says his party camped “in front of the village and ruinous brick castle,” and that the castle’s walls and towers were high, though worn in places by long neglect. He noted a deep trench between the camp and the castle and a large circular mound behind the camp. From the lie of the ground he took Harappa for Sangala, the fortified town that the Greek writer Arrian says Alexander stormed.

Cunningham read Masson closely. Masson thought the western height a natural rock, and Cunningham found that it was “only an accumulation of masses of brick walls and broken bricks.” Cunningham also proposed a different identification for the city: Po-fa-to, which the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (Hwen-Thsang in Cunningham’s spelling) visited.

Alexander Burnes passed about 1831 on his way to Lahore and wrote of a ruined citadel. Cunningham records that Burnes put the circumference of the ruins at “about three miles,” and gave his own measure as about 12,500 feet round, with the highest mound, to the north-west, 60 feet above the fields.

The sources do not agree on what Masson’s “castle” was. Cunningham was told in 1853 that a Sikh named Mer Singh had built a fort at Harappa about 70 years earlier, around AD 1780, and wondered whether that was the castle. Wheeler judged it to be the small Mughal fort that now encloses the police station on the eastern flank of the site.

What Cunningham traced in 1853 and 1856

Cunningham wrote that in 1853, and again in 1856, he traced flights of steps on the eastern and western faces of the high north-western mound, together with the base of a large square building. Local people told him a great Hindu temple had stood there in the time of a Raja Har Pal.

On the south face of the southern mound he described “the traces of a large square building with rooms on four sides surrounding a court-yard, as in a Buddhist monastery,” with very massive walls. In the 1872 to 1873 report he added that “the whole have now been removed to form ballast for the Railway.”

His own excavations produced stone scrapers for wood and leather, pottery, and one object he called the most curious: a seal belonging to a Major Clark. It was a smooth black stone with a hump-less bull engraved on it, two stars under the neck, and six characters above, which he said were quite unknown to him and “certainly not Indian letters.” He concluded that the seal was foreign to India.

Wheeler noted in 1947 that the seal Cunningham recorded is now known to be typical of the Harappan culture.

Cunningham’s guess at the city’s date was also far off. He gave weight to the local belief that Harappa fell about 1,200 or 1,300 years before his time, and suggested it might have been destroyed by Muhammad bin Qasim’s invasion of AD 718. The excavators’ chronology in Pakistan’s UNESCO entry puts the mature Harappan phase at about 2600 to 1900 BC, more than 2,500 years before AD 718.

What the 100 miles does and does not say

Cunningham’s sentence says the best idea of the extent of the ruined mounds comes from the fact that they “have more than sufficed to furnish brick ballast for about 100 miles” of the line. It is a measure of the mounds’ bulk. It does not say in what years the brick was carted, or how many bricks went into each mile.

Wheeler repeated the figure in 1947, writing that the site had long supplied bricks for local buildings and then provided brick ballast for a hundred miles of the Lahore to Multan line. Pakistan’s UNESCO entry adds that later occupation of the site frequently reused Bronze Age bricks.

Other figures circulate. Robert Davreau’s 1976 Reader’s Digest book gives 93 miles of ballast and credits it to a William Brunton, with no source printed beside the claim. Pakistan’s Department of Archaeology and Museums, in its 2004 UNESCO submission, says “thousands of bricks” were removed for railway ballast “in the 1850s” and that this destroyed many of the late phases of occupation. Cunningham’s 100 miles and the Department’s thousands of bricks are in different units, and none of the sources consulted converts one into the other.

The railway, the Bruntons and the dates

Cunningham and Marshall both blame railway contractors, and neither names one. The Brunton name comes from the engineering record and from popular accounts.

The Punjab Railway’s January 1857 prospectus planned a line from Multan, then spelled Mooltan, to Lahore and Amritsar, 230 miles in all. FIBIS records a survey report dated 15 June 1857 by William Arthur Brunton, Superintending Engineer of the Punjab Railway Survey, and a consulting engineer to the Scinde Railway Company, T. A. Yarrow. Grace’s Guide gives the official start of the project as 25 March 1859, with a William Brunton as chief engineer. His Institution of Civil Engineers obituary, reproduced there, says he was appointed in September 1856 on the recommendation of Brunel and Robert Stephenson, and calls him Chief Engineer in India of the Punjab Railway between Multan and Lahore.

A separate Grace’s Guide page for John Brunton says he was Chief Resident Engineer of the Scinde Railway from Karachi to Kotri, built between 1858 and 1862. Both pages name a William Brunton as the father of a Brunton engineer, which fits the popular account that the two were brothers, though neither page says so outright. Neither page mentions Harappa, bricks or ballast.

The dates matter. Cunningham gives no year for the removal of the south-face building. FIBIS says the Lahore to Amritsar section opened in April 1862 and the Multan to Lahore line was finished in stages by April 1865. The Department’s “1850s” and works that ran to 1865 do not fit neatly together, and no source consulted says in which year a given building came down. An engineer’s name on the line is also not a record of who carted bricks, and Cunningham writes of contractors, not engineers.

The seals that sent Marshall back

Madho Sarup Vats, the archaeologist who dug at Harappa for eight seasons, wrote in 1940 that Cunningham had obtained seals at the site and published an account of it, and that more seals later reached the British Museum. J. F. Fleet published specimens in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1912. John Marshall, Director General of the Archaeological Survey, had interested himself in those seals and, in Vats’s words, set his heart on excavating the site.

Daya Ram Sahni began on Mounds F and AB in January 1921, according to both Vats and Wheeler, and continued in the winters of 1923 to 1924 and 1924 to 1925. Vats says these limited seasons were enough to show that the remains, inscribed seals included, belonged to the Chalcolithic Age (the copper and stone age) and were contemporary with prehistoric Mohenjo-daro, whose digging began in 1922. The Tribune records that Marshall announced the two sites in the Illustrated London News on 20 September 1924.

Marshall’s report for 1924 to 1925 describes what Sahni found, and what was missing. A footnote says that at Harappa most of the ancient structures near the surface “have been sadly damaged by the depredations of villagers and railway contractors in search of bricks,” though it was unlikely that much harm had reached the lower strata. In one pit the report says the structural remains “had been destroyed by brick contractors,” and yet the dig recovered portable antiquities and a brick drain with a gabled roof, exposed for 43 feet.

The largest find was a building unlike anything at Mohenjo-daro: two series of solid brick walls set parallel, with a central aisle 24 feet wide. Twenty walls had been exposed, fourteen east of the aisle and six west, each 52 feet long, the stouter ones 9 feet thick at the base and spaced 17 feet apart. Vats later wrote that these walls had been provisionally identified as the Great Granary.

Vats, Wheeler and the 95 per cent

Vats dug at Harappa from 1926 to 1934 and published two volumes in 1940. He judged the ruins so mutilated that “in 95 per cent of cases it is impossible to draw even a tentative plan” of the houses. He recorded that the usual size of the town’s burnt brick was 11 by 5.5 by 2.5 to 3 inches.

Wheeler’s 1946 season was run by the Archaeological Survey with B. B. Lal, B. K. Thapar and thirty students from Indian universities. It exposed the defences of the citadel mound and a cemetery, Cemetery R 37. Wheeler wrote that the spoliation of Harappa in modern times had robbed its remains of the coherent plan that makes Mohenjo-daro one of the most spectacular ancient cities of the world. He also called Harappa the type-site of the Indus civilization of the third millennium BC, meaning the place after which the whole culture is named.

Where Harappa stands now

Harappa was in the Montgomery district of the Punjab when Wheeler dug there in 1946, and it has lain in Pakistan since the Partition line of 1947. What the contractors removed was part of a heritage that India and Pakistan share: Lothal, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi in India belong to the same civilization. For the money side of the Punjab lines, see the account of who paid for India’s railways.

Pakistan’s Department of Archaeology and Museums describes the site in its UNESCO submission as a series of low mounds and cemeteries south of a dry bed of the Ravi. The full extent is 150 hectares, but the property and its buffer zone comprise eight mounds and two cemeteries, the rest lying under farmland or the modern village. The occupation sequence is more than 13 metres deep, and the excavators’ chronology gives the Harappan phase as about 2600 to 1900 BC.

The same entry names three damaging developments: the removal of bricks for railway ballast, irrigation that salted the ground, and excavation that exposed structures to the salt. It adds that many structures exposed and conserved by Wheeler in the 1940s have been completely destroyed. Dawn reported on 30 January 2017 that Pakistan had failed to submit the necessary dossiers for the sites UNESCO accepted in 2004, a group that included Harappa. UNESCO’s Tentative List entry for Harappa carries a submission date of 30 January 2004 and cites criteria (ii) and (iv).