Did this ancient civilization avoid war for 2000 years?

Gizmodo ^ | 2014 | Annilee Newitz

[Axenolith]

They probably had a standardized and undiluted monetary system. In antiquity the longest lived cultures are those whose neighbors realize that the subject culture has a sound money system. It facilitates trade among disassociated entities and no one wants to “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs”.

[Charles Martel]

I suppose if you have indoor plumbing but opt to avoid using it (see: San Francisco), that could be a sign that war approaches.

[SMARTY]

I'm not sure about that. When Europeans came to the new world and when they arrived in some of the remote islands in the Pacific... Europeans found native people who were cannibals. Some tribes attacked other tribes on a regular basis and had very developed rituals of music and dance which were associated with warfare and which initiated and celebrated ‘warriors’.

The whole myth of the peaceful, ‘noble savage’ is just that... a myth. One exception I read about was the N American Hopi people. Also-I never read about Australian native people conducting warfare.

[The Sons of Liberty]

If they were so friggin’ perfect, why did they die out?

When the time came to defend their nation, the snowflakes had to run to their "safe spaces".

[Cronos]

That could be a reason

[Cronos]

The climate change was the same reason why the rest of the Bronze Age civilizations (Hittite, Mycenean, Middle Kingdom etc.) collapsed. Read “1177 BC the year civilization collapsed”

[Steamburg]

Sounds like they were plagued by a Snowflake generation that wiped out their history and statues shortly before diversity wiped them all out.

[Balding_Eagle]

Every city was surrounded by a wall, but once inside, residents would find themselves walking past several more walled enclosures.

Walls don't work, it must have been something else.

Women in leadership roles perhaps?

Just in case....../s

[Right Wing Assault]

Read “1177 BC the year civilization collapsed”

Thanks! I checked some of the reviews and it looks good. I'll look it up in our library.

[Tunehead54]

Now we need to find out why the climate changed, since we can't find their cars, power plants, and oil refineries.

---

Cow or Unicorn farts - backed by a 97% consensus of modern climate scientists. Don't you read the papers? ;-)

[Ciexyz]

One major reason for the Bronze Age collapse was the invasion of the Sea Peoples, a swarm of warlike bandits, possibly of various tribes and people (historians can’t be sure of their ethnic make up) who descended on these Mediterranean kingdoms like Vikings. There’s numerous You Tube videos on it, just do a search. It’s one reason that archaeologists have found at least one settlement built on . one of the Mediterranean islands where the coastal cities were abandoned or ruined and locals retreated to mountain crags with only a single, difficult path leading up to it.

[COBOL2Java]

If they were so friggin’ perfect, why did they die out?

Perhaps try reading the article?

To wit:

Unlike other ancient civilizations in Egypt and China, the Harappan civilization has no obvious inheritors. When people began leaving Harappan cities in the late 1000s BCE, there is no obvious route that they took. Archaeologists studying the decline of this ancient civilization point to several factors that led to its death.

First, there was a rather brutal climate change that began in the early 1000s BCE. Monsoons came irregularly, and the once-fertile valley became parched. Add to this drought the fact that the cities had already been over-farming, and it's likely that starvation began driving people away from Harappa. There is also ample evidence that people in the cities were suffering from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. The one-two punch of famine and plague left the region depopulated.

[Cronos]

well, of course:

1. These weren't savages. They were civilized, in cities, with organized structures, indoor plumbing etc. by 3000 BC -- at that time the various Indo-European peoples hadn't even separated (so Celts, Germanics, Slavs, italics, Greeks, iranians, Indians, tocharisns were the same people)
   
   
2. Sans civilization there is no peace -- the Yoruba in the Amazon have murder rates that are higher than El Salvador. Ditto for the tribes in Papua new Guinea
   
   
3. The myth of the noble savage started with the Romans when they wanted to complain about the "sissification" of Rome (This started in the Republican era, so it wasn't really true)
   
   
4. In the Pacific islands you have the Maori who violently invaded the Chatham islands in the 1800s and committed genocide against the Moriori people (a people who had migrated from New Zealand 500 years earlier, so technically relatives)
   
   

[Mr Rogers]

“Every city was surrounded by a wall, but once inside, residents would find themselves walking past several more walled enclosures. We’re not entirely sure why the Harappans designed their cities this way...”

Here is a hint: You build walls to keep things out (or in). You don’t invest in massive labor and construction costs just because walls look pretty. Walls around cities suggest...what? That they were worried about illegal immigration, or...attackers?

[COBOL2Java]

Thanks for posting this. Archeology has always been an interest of mine.

This is an absolutely fascinating read. An extinct culture, and thus far we are unable to decipher their language and writings, so the best that archeology can offer are educated guesses at their society, based on what evidence they can unearth (no pun intended LOL).

What would it have been like for a child growing up in this civilization? One can only wonder.

[Cronos]

Cobol, what you say is also a wonder to me -- in our world we EXPECT change, we expect that the future will be different from today - either good or bad, but different

It's expressed in our language, our systems, our culture, our religion (Christianity is a religion based in a straight-line concept of time)

But what aobut those people in ancient Sumeria or Old dynasty egypt or the Harappan civilization. 2000 years with things changing so slowly as to be non-visible. This was also somewhat true in the Middle Ages, but still there would be some difference between your grandfathers time and yours in the case of kings and wars

These people would have had a completedly different mindset

[chesley]

And just why were the cities surrounded by walls?

[Cronos]

Could be non-human attackers (and i’m not talking zombies :) — I mean wild animals

[COBOL2Java]

These people would have had a completedly different mindset

So true, and yet, we're just one apocalyptic event from radically changing our world to something few can imagine.

A couple hundred years from something like that and mankind could be working our way back to something resembling the Harappans.

There's an interesting video game series, "Fallout" which explores a type of post-apocalyptic world.

[cgbg]

Lack of war because they didn’t have a centralized guberment who in order to justify their existence, convinced them that some neighboring tribe wanted them all dead so they have to go to war.

Change the word "existence" to "growth" and you nailed it, FRiend.