John Marshall (archaeologist)

Sir John Hubert Marshall CIE FBA (19 March 1876, Chester, England – 17 August 1958, Guildford, England) was the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1902 to 1928. He oversaw the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, two of the main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilization.

Quotes

• These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro.
  • Marshall, Sir John, The Prehistoric Civilization of the Indus, Illustrated London News, Jan. 7, 1928, 1. quoted in Durant, Will (1963). Our Oriental heritage. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to [Aurel] Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.
  • Marshall, John in Lahiri, Nayanjot, Finding Forgotten Cities in Danino, M. (2010). The lost river : on the trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.

• Indians have always been justly proud of their age-old civilization and believing that this civilization was as ancient as any in Asia, they have long been hoping that archaeology would discover definite monumental evidence to justify their belief. This hope has now been fulfilled.
  • Marshall, John, quoted in Danino, M. (2010). The lost river : on the trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.

• There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens.
  • Marshall, John, (ed.), Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, Arthur Probsthain, London, 1931, 3 vols, several Indian reprints, vol. I, p. vi. in Danino, M. (2010). The lost river : on the trail of the Sarasvatī. Penguin Books India.

• Hitherto it has commonly been supposed that the pre‐Aryan peoples of India were on an altogether lower plane of civilization than their Aryan conquerors … Never for a moment was it imagined that five thousand years ago, before ever the Aryans were heard of, the Panjab and Sind, if not other parts of India as well, were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own, closely akin but in some respects even superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet this is what the discoveries at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have now placed beyond question. (Marshall, 1931: v)
  • quoted in Michel Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence
  • Marshall J. 1931. Mohenjo Daro and the Indus civilization (3 volumes). London: Arthur Probsthain.

• Taken as a whole, their [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as *hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism….* One thing that ‘stands out both at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped on Indian soil, with many millennia of human endeavour behind it.
  • quoted in 'The Invasion That Never Was' by Michel Danino (1996)

Quotes about Marshall

• Marshall thus provided the foundation for a regional myth in India to assist perhaps innocently the 'divide and rule' policy of British Imperialism.
  • Amrit Pandya, Quoted from B.B. Lal in : Indian History and Culture Society., Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (2012). Bias in Indian historiography. 17