The Valley of Ancient Innovation
Beneath Kashmir’s tranquil landscape, cradled between the Pir Panjal and the Himalayas, lies an antiquity older than most civilizations.
In Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir: Legends of Unsung Heroes, I traced one luminous thread of that antiquity — the art of shawl weaving — and demonstrated through archaeological, geographical, linguistic, and cultural evidence that the shawl was not an import from Central Asia, but a creation born of Kashmir’s fertile soil and creative spirit.
What predates this rich historic evolution is the prehistoric site of Burzahom.
During my tenure as Chief of the State Archaeology, Archives and Museum Department, I re-dated Burzahom to nearly 7,000 years before the present, contrary to the commonly held 5,000-year view, based on findings such as terracotta tiles with khuresti numerals unearthed at Hutmur near Ashmuqam and hordes of Greek and Scythian coins at Maidan Chogal, Handwara. These discoveries revealed a community astonishingly advanced for its time.
Recent DNA studies have now vindicated this assessment. Genetic evidence confirms continuity between the Neolithic inhabitants of Burzahom and the Valley’s present population. This scientific validation reinforces the truth that Kashmir’s civilization was not shaped by abrupt intrusions or borrowed legacies, but by an unbroken evolution nurtured by its own soil, climate, and imagination.
From the pit dwellings of Burzahom to the terracotta art of Harwan, from the grandeur of the 8th-century Martand Temple to the 14th-century Khanqah of Shah-e-Hamdan, the Valley’s history unfolds as a continuum of creativity and consciousness. This is an enduring testament to the genius of its people.
The Witness of Archaeology
Archaeology serves as the historian’s most faithful ally, translating the silence of centuries into articulate testimony. Every layer of soil and every fragment of bone bears tangible proof of human existence and evolution. Such discoveries provide firm evidence and make history move beyond the legend.
Similarly, the pit dwellings, trepanned skulls, spindle whorls, and stone tools from Burzahom lend support to the assumptions, giving them the eloquence of fact.
Weaving Genius at Burzahom
Excavations at Burzahom unearthed pit houses, stone implements, earthenware, and bone needles resembling modern Kani bobbins, demonstrating signs of a society already acquainted with textile manufacture. These finds reveal that Kashmir’s weaving tradition arose from within, evolving from necessity into artistry.
The refinement visible in the 3rd- to 5th-century CE terracotta tiles of Harwan, showing a woman draped in a stole-like shawl, marks the flowering of that ancient impulse which ultimately found expression in translucent woven garments the world had never seen. These delicate impressions are the early precursors to what would later become the famed Kashmiri shawl, which is a symbol of grace, intellect, and patience.
The Kashmir shawl is not an import; it is a creation of our own soil and skill, nurtured over millennia.
The Unseen Science of Trepanning
Burzahom also reveals the dawn of medical science. Several skulls bear circular trepanations with signs of bone regeneration, indicating that these were deliberate, successful surgeries rather than rituals.
The Burzahomite was not only a craftsman and builder but an early scientist who understood the body as a vessel of life and sought to heal it. Here, art and medicine coexisted. Even in those Neolithic pits, humanity practiced surgery with astonishing precision and compassion.
Genetic Continuity Across Millennia
Recent archaeogenetic research (2025) by the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, and the Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir, confirms this continuity. Ancient DNA from Burzahom reveals a maternal lineage (M65 haplogroup) stretching unbroken through seven millennia, linking early Kashmiris to their modern descendants, as well as to related groups in the Pamirs, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tibet.
Later genetic infusions from Swat, Central Asia, and Europe indicate contact and exchange, but the foundational population remains distinctly local. This biological persistence mirrors cultural resilience. Kashmir absorbed influences but was never subsumed by them. Its arts, crafts, and sciences evolved from an indigenous matrix, enriched yet never eclipsed by foreign influences.
Human Ingenuity
Burzahom stands not as a mute ruin but as a testimony to human ingenuity and innovation. Its artefacts speak of invention, its trepanned skulls of intellect, its ochre-painted burials of an early metaphysic that united art, faith, and survival.
Intertwining craft with consciousness, the first fabric was woven here. The Harwan tiles echo the culmination of our weaving genius with delicate imprints of a lady adorned with a shawl, refined and elegant beyond imagination.
Burzahom refutes the myth that Kashmir was a passive recipient of refinement from distant lands.
Continuity and Connection
Kashmir’s temperament, secluded yet receptive, allowed it to preserve its essence while engaging with the world. The Valley was not just a corridor but also a cradle where art, knowledge, and science flourished.
Burzahom, thus, becomes more than an archaeological site. It is a living metaphor of continuity, where the earliest Kashmiri mind sought to heal, weave, and imagine, creating the first stirrings of artistry and intellect that would shape a people’s destiny.
The evidence, strengthened by modern genetics and archaeology, situates Kashmir not at the margins but near the very genesis of civilization’s creative impulse.
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