Harappan civilisation

Inference 1 is valid. A spindle-whorl is a hand held weight used with a drop spindle, and the absence of the spinning wheel means yarn had to be twisted by hand, thread by thread, which is slow work, while the recovery of whorls inside dwellings rather than in a dedicated workshop quarter places that work in the home. Inference 2 is valid, because graduated scales and a standardised binary and decimal weight series in chert cubes imply working knowledge of units, ratios and calibration, which is the sense in which scientific knowledge is meant here. Inference 3 is invalid and is the eliminator. Houses with their own wells, their own bathing platforms and enclosed private courtyards point precisely the other way, to individually held property and differentiated household wealth, not to common property.

Hence only 1 and 2 follow and (a) is correct. (b) and (d) accept the unsupported third inference, and (c) discards the sound second one.

Dholavira, on Khadir Bet island in the Rann of Kachchh, is defined by its water engineering. Located between the seasonal Manhar and Mansar streams in an arid zone with no perennial river, it survived by damming those streams and channelling the water into a cascade of at least sixteen rock cut reservoirs ringing the settlement, which is unmatched at any other Harappan site.

• Option (b) Kalibangan is known for the ploughed field and fire altars.
• Option (c) Rakhigarhi is the largest Harappan site by area and yielded the well known ancient DNA sample.
• Option (d) Ropar is noted as the first site excavated after independence and for a human burial with a dog.

Hence (a). The environmental logic is the memory hook: extreme aridity forced the hydraulic ingenuity.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Rigveda refers to varman, body armour, and to sipra, a helmet or head covering, in its battle hymns, while no armour or helmet has been recovered from Harappan sites.
• Statement 2 is incorrect on both halves. The Harappans worked gold and silver extensively, as the Mohenjodaro and Allahdino hoards and the jewellery from Harappa show, so the claim that they knew only copper and iron understates them; and iron was unknown to the Harappans altogether, the Indian Iron Age beginning around 1200 BCE, well after the mature Harappan phase. A single statement that is wrong in two independent directions is the eliminating statement here.
• Statement 3 is correct. The horse is prominent in the Rigveda, in the ashva hymns and in the horse sacrifice, whereas the Harappan animal repertoire on seals shows the humped bull, buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros and tiger but no horse, and the contested Surkotada bones are not accepted as settling the question. Rejecting statement 2 alone eliminates (b) and (d) and leaves (a) against (c), which is then decided by statement 3. The official answer (c) follows.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. No structure at any Harappan site has been securely identified as a palace or a temple, and the absence of monumental religious and royal architecture is one of the defining and most discussed features of the civilisation, standing in deliberate contrast with contemporaneous Egypt and Mesopotamia. The large buildings that do survive, the Great Bath and the granary at Mohenjodaro and the warehouse at Lothal, are read as civic, ritual or storage structures, and the identification remains contested.
• Statement 2 is correct. The seal from Mohenjodaro showing a horned figure seated in a yogic posture surrounded by animals, conventionally called Pashupati, and the numerous terracotta female figurines conventionally called mother goddesses, together support the worship of both male and female divinities, alongside the evidence for tree, animal and phallic worship.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The horse is absent from the Harappan faunal record at every mature phase site with the disputed exception of Surkotada, and the spoked wheel and the light war chariot are Vedic, appearing in the Rigveda and in the archaeology of a later horizon. The Harappan terracotta models show solid wheeled bullock carts. The official answer (b), two only, follows. The horse is the single most useful discriminator in the whole of this material, since its absence from the Harappan record and its centrality to the Vedic one is the standard basis for separating the two cultures.