2. Yoga in the Indus Valley civilization (2500–1500 BCE)

The earliest civilization of the Indian subcontinent was the so-called Indus Valley civilization, which flourished between 2500 and 1500 BCE. It had a sophisticated culture. Its people were proficient in shipbuilding, agriculture, metallurgy, and town planning. They had a writing system, which to date has not been deciphered.

The script almost certainly does not record the spoken language. In 1921, under the direction of Sir John Marshall, Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, excavations properly began of the sites of the ruined cities of Mohenjo Daro (situated by the Indus river) and Harappa (situated by the Ravi river) in what is now Pakistan.

During the last ninety years, archaeological finds have revealed the broad geographical extent of the civilization. Artefacts from the civilization have now been discovered at over a thousand sites, stretching from the Iranian border to south India, about 1,500 kilometres from the initial excavations.

Concerning the origins of yoga, one of the most discussed archaeological finds from the Indus culture is what is usually referred to as the 'proto-Shiva' seal (of which there are a number of examples) made of steatite, which depicts a figure seated in what looks like a yoga posture, wearing a head dress with curved horns, and in some examples, surrounded by several kinds of animals.

Sir John Marshall believed that this image could be a representation of a form of Shiva (one of the main deities of Hinduism) seated in a yoga posture in his aspect as Pashupati, meaning 'Lord of the Animals'; another of Shiva’s aspects is as the Lord of Yoga (Yogishvara). For decades, scholars argued whether or not enough the seal provided enough information or detail to make an unequivocal identification with either yoga or with a form of Shiva.

Thomas McEvilley (1) maintains that the seal probably does represent someone doing a yoga posture; and that the figure may be a 'shamanic' proto-Shiva.

Several scholars have suggested that there is an ancient stream of yoga that has persisted in South Asia since before any kinds of records began, while others argue that the only clear evidence for the physical practices of yoga date from a much later period, perhaps around the middle of the first millennium BCE.

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