Indian History Quiz: Indus Valley Civilisation

The correct answer is B, Mohenjo-daro. The Great Bath stands in the citadel of Mohenjo-daro in Sindh. It is a brick tank about twelve metres long and seven metres wide, with flights of steps at two ends, small rooms around it and a layer of natural tar below the floor to stop water from seeping away. Scholars read it as a place of ritual bathing, which makes it the best known public building of the civilisation.

Option A, Harappa, is the site of the granaries and of cemetery R-37, not of the bath. Option C, Lothal in Gujarat, gave the dockyard, rice husk and a bead-making workshop. Option D, Kalibangan in Rajasthan, is remembered for its ploughed field and its row of fire altars. Each of these sites is tied to a different find, and the examiner is testing whether you can hold the pairs apart.

The correct answer is A, Lothal. Lothal lies on the Bhogava, a tributary of the Sabarmati in Gujarat, and its eastern side holds a large brick basin connected to the river by a channel. Most archaeologists read this as a dockyard where boats were brought in and loaded, which fits the bead-making workshop and the seals found at the site and marks Lothal as a port of the Harappan trade with the Gulf.

Option B, Surkotada in Kutch, is known instead for bones identified as those of the horse and for its stone-lined burials. Option C, Chanhudaro in Sindh, was a craft town making beads, bangles and seals, and is the only major Harappan town that has no citadel. Option D, Banawali in Haryana, gave a terracotta toy plough and stores of barley. None of these has a dock.

The correct answer is C, Daya Ram Sahni. He dug at Harappa on the bank of the Ravi in 1921, and the finds from that season identified a wholly unknown urban culture, which was named after the site. Option A, R. D. Banerji, made the companion discovery a year later in 1922, when he excavated Mohenjo-daro on the Indus and found the same seals and bricks, proving that the culture was spread over a vast area.

Option B, Sir John Marshall, was Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India at the time. He directed the work of both men and announced the discovery to the world in 1924, but he did not himself open Harappa. Option D, Mortimer Wheeler, came much later, in the 1940s; he is remembered for the theory that invading Aryans destroyed the cities, an explanation now rejected by most historians.

The correct answer is B, Kalibangan. Kalibangan stands on the dry bed of the Ghaggar in the Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan. A field there, belonging to the pre-Harappan level, carries two sets of furrows crossing each other at right angles, showing that two crops were grown in the same plot at the same time. Kalibangan also gave a row of fire altars and bones of the camel.

Option A, Dholavira in Kutch, is known for its division into three parts and for the stone reservoirs that stored rainwater. Option C, Rakhigarhi in Haryana, is the largest Harappan site in India but is not associated with the ploughed field. Option D, Alamgirpur in Uttar Pradesh, marks the eastern limit of the civilisation. The examiner pairs a site with a single famous find, so learn them together.

The correct answer is C, 4:2:1. A Harappan burnt brick was four units long, two units broad and one unit thick, and the same proportion turns up at sites hundreds of kilometres apart. This standardisation is one of the strongest arguments for a common authority or at least a shared set of rules across the civilisation, and it goes with the standard system of weights that runs in multiples of sixteen.

Option A, 1:2:4, is the same three numbers written backwards and is the commonest trap in this question; length is the largest of the three, so the ratio must begin with 4. Options B and D, 2:2:1 and 3:2:1, are simply wrong proportions and do not match any Harappan brick. Read the order of the words in the question stem carefully before choosing.

The correct answer is C, Meluha. Mesopotamian texts list Meluha among the lands that sent ships carrying carnelian beads, ivory, timber and copper, and the goods named there match what Harappan sites produced. The trade was carried on by barter, since no Harappan coins have ever been found, and seals of Harappan type have turned up in Mesopotamia itself.

Option A, Dilmun, is identified with Bahrain and Option B, Magan, with Oman; both lay on the sea route between Mesopotamia and the Indus, and served as halting points rather than as names for India. Option D, Sindon, is not a Mesopotamian word at all: it is the later Greek name for cotton, taken from the Indus, and it recalls that the Harappans were the first people to grow the crop.

The correct answer is B, Iron. The Harappan Civilisation is a Bronze Age culture, and no iron object has been recovered from any of its levels. Iron comes into use in the subcontinent only in the later Vedic period, centuries after the cities were abandoned, which is why the word iron in a question of this kind is almost always the answer to a negative stem.

Option A, copper, was mined at Khetri in Rajasthan and used for tools, vessels and the famous bronze Dancing Girl, which is an alloy of copper and tin. Options C and D, gold and silver, were both worked into ornaments, and hoards of jewellery have been found at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Lead was known as well. Remember also what else the Harappans lacked: coins, temples and a script that can be read.

The correct answer is C, Maharashtra. Daimabad lies on the Pravara, a tributary of the Godavari, in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and it marks the southern limit of the Harappan world. The site is famous for a hoard of solid bronze figures, among them a chariot drawn by two oxen with a driver standing on it, along with a rhinoceros, an elephant and a buffalo.

Option A, Gujarat, holds Lothal, Dholavira, Surkotada and Rangpur, but none of them is the southernmost. Option B, Rajasthan, holds Kalibangan on the Ghaggar. Option D, Haryana, holds Rakhigarhi and Banawali. Learn the four outer sites as a set: Sutkagendor in the west on the Makran coast of Baluchistan, Alamgirpur in the east on the Hindon in Uttar Pradesh, Manda in the north on the Chenab in Jammu and Daimabad in the south on the Pravara in Maharashtra. Examiners often ask this set as a direction question, so fix the four names and their directions together.

The correct answer is A, Mohenjo-daro. The seal shows a figure seated in a yogic posture with horns on its head and animals around it, usually described as an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a buffalo, with deer below the seat. Sir John Marshall identified the figure as a proto-Shiva or Pashupati, the lord of animals, and it is the single most quoted piece of evidence for Harappan religion.

Option B, Chanhudaro, was a craft settlement that made beads and bangles and is remembered as the only large town without a citadel. Option C, Ropar in Punjab, gave a burial in which a dog was laid with its master. Option D, Banawali in Haryana, gave a terracotta toy plough. Seals in general were cut in steatite and most often carry the figure of a one-horned animal called the unicorn.

The correct answer is B, Dholavira. Dholavira stands on Khadir island in the Rann of Kutch. Unlike the usual two-part Harappan town, it is divided into three: a citadel, a middle town and a lower town, all enclosed by stone walls. Its people cut a chain of large reservoirs into the rock to store the rain and the water of two seasonal streams, and a board of ten large signs, the longest Harappan inscription, was found at one of its gates.

Option A, Lothal, is the port with the dockyard. Option C, Rangpur, is a smaller Gujarat site that gave rice husk from a late level. Option D, Surkotada, gave the disputed horse bones. Dholavira was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021, a fact that has since become popular with examiners.

The correct answer is B. The Harappan script uses about four hundred picture-like signs, and it was written in the boustrophedon style, that is from right to left in the first line and then from left to right in the next, turning like an ox ploughing a field. Since the inscriptions are very short and no bilingual text exists, no reading has been accepted, and the civilisation is therefore called proto-historic.

Option A is wrong on both counts: the signs are far too many for an alphabet and no decipherment has been agreed. Option C names Brahmi, a much later script of the historical period, first read from the inscriptions of Ashoka. Option D is wrong because the Harappans traded with Mesopotamia but wrote in a script of their own, quite unlike cuneiform, which was pressed into clay with a wedge-shaped stylus.