Ever since I understood, at an early age, that everything has a beginning, and only things of the past have any apparent ending ... ignoring how they themselves gave birth to other beginnings ... how things began has been, for me, a constant source of fascination.
The beginnings of essential Bangladesh, so rich in ancient heritage and in an extraordinary diversity of religious and social cultures that interact so wonderfully, took my attention from the first day I arrived in 1997.
In Bangladesh terms, therefore, I am a teenager, and, even at my real age, my friends comment that I display, in my relationship with Bangladesh, many teenage characteristics. A weird mixture of passion, enthusiasm, frustration, boredom, but above all, an abiding affection for this, one of the most chaotic countries amongst the many I have been fortunate enough to visit in my seven decades.
The beginnings, of course, are all about the river. A distinguished Bangladeshi is reported as saying he wished the nation would “get over” being the Ganges Delta. Why would it?
Perhaps it is, mysteriously, the reason the Ganges River does not actually exist in the last few hundred kilometres before the sea, becoming Padma, which merges with that other river that lost its character and name, the great Brahmaputra. I have never received any satisfying explanation for, at least, the loss of Ganges. The river capture by Jamuna of Brahmaputra I can appreciate.
But why would anyone want to get over their nation being, at heart, the lands of the Ganges delta, the world’s largest such deltaic lands, dwarfing, though inviting comparison, even with the famous Nile?
Hold that thought! The Nile delta is much more famously documented, if only because the ancient lands of Egypt were more accessible and more important to the culturally developing Europeans and, later, Americans.
But what is slowly emerging from the alluvial deposits of the lands of the Ganges delta may not be as tangible and visible a heritage as that revealed in Egypt. It is, nevertheless, arguably as ancient and as influential in the development of what we call civilisation today.
No one can say, for sure, when human life first encountered the great Mangrove swamps that undoubtedly formed, in very early times, in the water-soaked lands of the delta. It is theorised reasonably that the early “out of Africa” migrants who finally arrived in Australia over 100,000 years ago must have passed this way, probably travelling a shelf that now lies beneath the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal.
It may well be that they left behind them stragglers, as they did in Malaysia and Sri Lanka, amongst other places. But if they did, only genetic research may eventually identify them as earliest Bangladeshis.
The annual deposit of seasonal alluvium on the lands has hidden any marks of earliest habitation deep beneath the soils. However, the earliest tangible evidence of human habitation we have is traces of Palaeolithic peoples, of perhaps 10 or 20 thousand years ago, on the low ridges of sedimentary “rock” that run through the country of Bangladesh.
These ridges are probably echoes of the effect of the collision of continents that threw up the Himalayan range, up to 50 million years ago. It is the continuing movement of the “Indian” continental plate into that of Asia that is the cause of so much seismic activity in the area. It is estimated that in the next 10 million years it will penetrate a further 1,500km.
So crude are some of the early tools that it is, in fact, impossible to judge just how ancient they are. They may indeed be much older than the most recent estimates of Palaeolithic settlements in the deltaic lands.
However, there is increasing evidence of Mesolithic and Neolithic communities hereabouts. Probably, let’s say, in 5,000 BCE numbering in total no more than some hundred inhabitants.
Their tools and settlements recovered in both the lands of the delta, and in the hills around the lands that are now Bangladesh, give us an increasingly clear picture of the evolution of their culture.
But let’s stick for a moment with the thought that 7,000 years ago, a mere blink in the history of the human species, a few hundred people gathered in communities of crude shelters somewhere in Bangladesh, where we now live, all 170 million of us.
If I were to write that these people were your direct ancestors, or mine, you would immediately respond that, being European, they could not be mine. But you might well be wrong. The history of civilisation embraces what we know as the Indo European culture. This describes cultural development of peoples, originating, perhaps, in what is known as the Bronze Age, for its early use of tin and copper to blend into metal tools and weapons, about 5,000 years ago. It describes, especially, linguistic traditions that reach across the world, from ancient societies stretching from the Ganges basin and delta, to the Atlantic coast of Europe.
Taken together with increasing knowledge of genetic studies, such traces enable specialists to theorise massive migrations that lie at the foundation of most developing cultures across that vast stretch of the globe.
Our understanding of just where such cultures originated is far from complete. Even now, emerging details of Harappan culture, named for the first traces discovered a century ago at Harappa, in the Indus valley, are altering our appreciation of ancient history.
Indian archaeologists now believe that this remarkable early example of civilised communities may date back at least 7,000 years, predating by a millennium or so such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, presently seen to be the “cradle of civilisation.”
Until now, the development of what we know as the Ganges Basin Civilisation, which developed on the banks of the great river, and in its delta lands that are now Bangladesh, about 4,000 years ago, originated with the ending of the Indus, Harappan civilisation. But it is increasingly clear that we may have to rethink that.
What does all this mean to Bangladesh? Well, we may not have identified sites of Palaeolithic settlement, but it is not hard to see in so many of the crude homes of today’s Bangladesh, either mud or wattle walled, with rush roofs: homes that might have been familiar to the denizens of the country 10,000 years ago, suggesting little change over many millennia in such shelters.
And the crude wooden ploughs, still sold in shops around the country, would be familiar to anyone who has visited Iron Age site museums in Europe.
To actually see, with your own eyes, and trace such development of our early ancestors, it is possible to work your way through the galleries at such as National Museum in Dhaka.
But there is one gem of a place where, if you know what you are looking at, can take you on a short, but extraordinary journey to where Bangladesh began. It is the Pathan collection at Wari Bateshwar, in Narshingdhi.
The collection was started in the 1930s by the local schoolmaster from surface finds in the area. Now curated by his ageing son, the few display cases contains stone tools, both Palaeolithic and Neolithic. It also includes stone loom weights that describe emerging crafts and commerce.
It contains traces from Bronze and Iron ages, and the site, of course, girdled by its 5 kilometre mud ramparts, includes an excavated Bronze Age Pit dwelling. The more valuable artefacts, such as coinage or trading tokens, from as early as 6th century BCE, are held elsewhere.
As importantly, however, what the small collection also contains, and other collections in Bangladesh, in a larger quantity, is the tangible, visible evidence of both craft skills and trade dating back close to three thousand years ago.
Unsurprisingly, Wari Bateshwar, like other more famous sites, such as those at Paharpur and Mahasthangarh, stands on one of the low ridges of sedimentary rock that run through the lands of Bangladesh.
On those ridges the earliest people of Bangladesh made their homes; in the swamps and waters of the delta lands they subsisted; and from the great rivers that flowed into the delta from central Asia, and central India, and the delta’s connections with a developing world, they built what would become one of the world’s earliest, and greatest, centres of international trade and commerce.
This is where it all began, for Bangladesh, and millions of peoples across the entirety of today’s world.
