HYDERABAD: Who walked the land of Deccan before the Qutub Shahis and the Bahmani Sultanate? Archaeologists say the pre-human history of Hyderabad dates back to the Harappan civilisation and, perhaps, earlier than that too.Believe it or not, the city is home to the country’s oldest megalithic structure and is perhaps the world’s oldest iron age site. Dating back to 2,500 B.C. or 4,500 years from today, this means the site is 1,500 older than Jesus, 3,000 years older than the beginning of Islam, goes way before Hinduism and even the discovery of agriculture.
In fact, archaeologists believe it was the time when the first languages were formed. The evidence is a burial ground (menhir) nestled inside the University of Hyderabad campus in the western part of the city, which is rapidly turning into a concrete jungle. “The ‘menhir’ standing stone orthostat is a sign of burial in the Megalithic age. If the University of Hyderabad was a site of burial, there must have been inhabitants nearby too,” says B Sriram, a researcher at the Centre for Research in Infrastructure Development Policy.
He is also an alumni of MA Anthropology from the University of Hyderabad. “Wherever there is water, there must have been some human habitation. The Nallagandla lake, which is the nearest lake to the site with suitable conditions for human inhabitation, is a potential site that has never been excavated. No proper excavation has been done here and this lake is now surrounded by commercial residential apartments,” he says.
The site was excavated in 2003-2005 by two History professors of the university, KP Rao and Aloka Parasher. It is the only well-preserved iron-age museum in Hyderabad. The archaeologists had found a huge 20-tonne granite ‘Menhir’ which is 20 ft high and is believed to go 20 ft below the ground. They also found some grains, signs of early agriculture and seed preservation. Besides this, the archaeologists found some well-preserved artefacts dating back 4,500 years.
“When people dug up HiTec City, Lingampally, Gachibowli and the neighbourhood to lay the foundation for commercial buildings, they had found archaeological remains, but did not report it to the government. That’s because the Archaeological Department would have immediately seized the land, which is currently prime real estate,” M Ganesh, a research scholar from the university, says. “The western part of Hyderabad has many such potential archaeological sites. Almost all of it are concretised now. Most of the archaeologists from the university, including me, prefer to excavate at a new site outside Hyderabad.”