About 4,500 years ago, a man and a woman were buried in a grave together in a sprawling cemetery on the outskirts of a thriving settlement of one of the world's earliest urban civilisations.
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| The couple are believed to have died at the same time [Credit: Vasant Shinde] |
"The man and the woman were facing each other in a very intimate way. We believe they were a couple. And they seemed to have died at the same time. How they died, however, remains a mystery," archaeologist Vasant Shinde, who led the team, told me.
They were buried in a half-a-metre-deep sand pit. The man was around 35 years old at the time of his death, while the woman was around 25. Both were reasonably tall - he was 5.8ft (1.77m) and she, 5.6ft. They were both possibly "quite healthy" when they died - tests didn't find any lesions or lines on the bones or any "abnormal thickness" of skull bones, which could hint at injuries or diseases such as brain fever.
Archaeologists say this unique "joint grave" was not an "outcome of any specific funeral customs commonly performed at that time". They believe that the man and the woman "died almost at the same time and that, therefore, they had been buried together in the same grave".
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| Magnified image of 11A and 11B. They were placed in supine position with arms and legs extended. The 11A's head faced towards 11B. Asterisk indicate the banded agate bead found near the right clavicle of the 11B. Inset is the magnified image of a bead. Scale bar=2 cm [Credit: Vasant Shinde et al. 2019] |
Everything else they found in the Rakhigarhi grave was unexceptional for its time: a few earthen pots and some semi-precious stone bead jewellery, commonly found in graves from the bronze age Harappan civilisation. "The most striking thing about Harappan burials is how spartan they were. They didn't have grand burials like, for example, kings in West Asia," says Tony Joseph, author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From.
In Mesopotamia, for example, kings were interred with hoards of precious jewellery and artefacts. Interestingly, jewellery made of carnelian, lapis lazuli and turquoise possibly exported from Harappa were found in graves in Mesopotamia.
In Harappan cities, graves usually contained pots with food and some jewellery - people likely believed in life after death and these materials were meant to be grave offerings. A lot of the pottery, says Mr Joseph, comprised lavishly painted dishes on stands and squat, bulging jars. "There was nothing remotely suggestive of royal funerals, which were common in west Asia," he adds.
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| Archaeologists have excavated 62 graves in Rakhigarhi [Credit: Deccan College] |
To be sure, this is not the first time archaeologists have discovered a couple in a Harappan grave.
In the 1950s, the skeletal remains of a man and a woman, heaped on top of each other, were found in a sand pit in Lothal in what is now Gujarat. The skull of the woman bore injury marks. Some excavators made a controversial claim that the grieving woman had killed herself after her husband's death - a claim that could never be proved.
At Rakhigarhi, archaeologists have discovered 70 graves in the cemetery, barely a kilometre away from the settlement, and excavated 40 of them. But this single grave of the "mystery couple" has turned to be most fascinating of all.
Author: Soutik Biswas | Source: BBC News Website [January 09, 2019]
from The Archaeology News Network http://bit.ly/2VPKYyU
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