Which of the following animals was not known to the people of the Indus Valley Civilization?

Question

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Correct — B, Horse. Two of the three animals named are among the best-attested creatures in the entire Harappan record. The bull is everywhere: the single-horned bovine facing a standard — the so-called unicorn — is the commonest device on Indus seals, the humped zebu and the short-horned bull appear on seals of their own, and bulls recur as terracotta figurines and on painted pottery. The elephant is attested too, on seals and in terracotta, and it is one of the four large animals ranged around the seated horned figure on the famous 'Pashupati' seal from Mohenjo-daro, alongside the tiger, the rhinoceros and the buffalo. The horse is the conspicuous absentee. No seal, sealing, terracotta or painted vessel in the Harappan corpus has been accepted as a depiction of a horse — a striking silence in a civilisation that engraved almost every large animal it lived beside, and one that becomes sharper when you set it against the Rigveda, where the ashva is central to ritual, poetry and warfare. Two independent lines of evidence point the same way, and neither is archaeology. Ancient-genome work published in Nature in October 2021 by Librado and colleagues, drawing on 273 ancient horse genomes, places the homeland of the modern domestic horse in the Western Eurasian steppes around the lower Volga–Don, and finds that these horses expanded rapidly across Eurasia only from about 2000 BC, moving together with Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots; the same study shows that the earlier Botai horses of Central Asia, around 3500 BC, are not the ancestors of the modern domestic horse at all, so there is no older lineage to appeal to. The mature Harappan phase, roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE, is largely earlier than that expansion. The human genetic clock agrees: Narasimhan and colleagues, sequencing 523 ancient humans for Science in 2019, date the arrival of Steppe pastoralist ancestry in South Asia to about 4,000 years ago, and Shinde and colleagues, reporting the one Harappan genome yet sequenced — from Rakhigarhi — in Cell the same year, found it carried little if any Steppe ancestry. Horses, chariots and Steppe people all arrive on the same late clock, and it runs after the Harappan cities were built. Where the answer is finely balanced: the stem says 'not known', which is a stronger claim than 'not depicted'. Sándor Bökönyi identified equid remains from Surkotada in Kutch, dated to the late third millennium BC, as true horse in South Asian Studies in 1997, and Richard H. Meadow published a comment contesting that identification in the very same volume. The difficulty is genuine, because Kutch is home to another equid: the Indian wild ass or khur, Equus hemionus khur, which still survives in the Little Rann only a short distance from Surkotada, and separating half-ass from true horse on fragmentary teeth and limb bones is notoriously contested among faunal specialists. The dispute has never been settled. The answer stands because the mainstream reading of the evidence, and the position every standard syllabus takes, is that the horse was not part of the Harappan world.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The opposite of absent. Bovines dominate Harappan seal iconography — the unicorn device is the single commonest motif in the corpus, and the humped zebu and short-horned bull have seals of their own — and bulls also survive as terracotta figurines and as the draught animals of the terracotta model carts recovered from Harappan sites, which are among the earliest wheeled-vehicle models known from the subcontinent. That last point is worth holding, because it answers the unspoken half of this question: the Harappans did have carts and wheels, and the animal in the yoke was the ox, not the horse. If any animal can be said to be the signature of the civilisation's art, it is the bull.  (c) Also well attested, and on two independent kinds of evidence rather than one. Elephants appear on Indus seals and in terracotta, and one stands among the animals surrounding the seated horned figure on the 'Pashupati' seal from Mohenjo-daro; separately, worked ivory — combs, rods, gaming pieces and inlay — is a standard class of Harappan find, which means the animal was not merely seen but used. A candidate may pick this option on the vague sense that elephants belong to the later Indian history of war elephants and Mauryan armies, but that is a fact about how the animal was used, not about whether it was known, and the Harappans plainly knew it.  (d) This option only wins if all three animals were known — and it is the honest refuge for a candidate persuaded by the Surkotada horse-bone claim, or by the handful of ambiguous terracotta figurines from Harappan sites that have occasionally been read as horses. Both readings run into the same problem. The Surkotada identification was contested in print in the same journal issue that carried it and has never been resolved, and the region's own wild equid, the khur, is a live alternative explanation for equid bone in Kutch; the figurines are too crude to bear the weight placed on them, which is why no standard corpus lists a Harappan horse depiction. A contested minority reading cannot carry an exam answer against a securely attested one. Since the bull and the elephant are attested on both iconography and material remains and the horse is attested on neither, a positive option exists and 'None of the above' fails.

Concept: What we know of Harappan animal life comes from two independent bodies of evidence, and they are not equally strong. The first is iconography — the animals carved on the steatite seals, modelled in terracotta and painted on pottery, which tells us what the Harappans thought worth representing. The second is faunal remains, the actual bones recovered from excavated levels, which tell us what they lived among, worked and ate. The bull, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the tiger, the buffalo, the goat and the antelope appear in both records. The horse appears convincingly in neither, and the argument over the handful of contested equid bones has run for decades for two reasons. One is technical: several equids lived in the region, including the Indian wild ass, and identifying a species from broken teeth and limb fragments is among the hardest calls a faunal analyst makes, so a single disputed assemblage cannot settle anything. The other is that the stakes are not really zoological. The horse is the defining animal of Vedic culture, so its presence or absence at Harappan sites became the hinge of the wider debate over whether the Vedic people were the Harappans' descendants or later arrivals — which is why a few bones from one small site in Kutch have generated a literature far out of proportion to their number.

State PCS 2023 Q55 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q55 — History PYQ with Answer