Posted on 04/10/2018 3:50:41 AM PDT by Cronos
The Harappan civilization dominated the Indus River valley beginning about five thousand years ago, many of its massive cities sprawling at the edges of rivers that still flow through Pakistan and India today. But its culture remains a mystery. Why did it leave behind no representations of great leaders, nor of warfare?
Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within. Sifting through the archaeological layers of these cities, scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction. There are no enormous caches of weapons, and not even any art representing warfare.
That would make the Harappan civilization an historical outlier in any era. But it's especially noteworthy at a time when neighboring civilizations in Mesopotamia were erecting massive war monuments, and using cuneiform writing on clay tablets to chronicle how their leaders slaughtered and enslaved thousands.
What exactly were the Harappans doing instead of focusing their energies on military conquest?
The Indus River flows out of the Himalayas, bringing fresh water to the warm, dry valley where the ancient city of Harappa first began to grow. The Harappan civilization is the namesake of this city, located between two rivers, whose arts, written language, and science spread to several other large, riverside cities in the area. Mohenjo-Daro was the largest of these cities with a population of roughly 80,000 people.
Art from Harappan cities also attests to a very mixed population, with statues showing people who sport a wide variety of clothing and hair styles. So the Harappans appear to have been a very diverse lot. Some traveled far from their cities, probably by boat across the Persian Gulf, to trade with other great civilizations in the region during the 2000s BCE. There was at least one Harappan trade outpost in Mesopotamia, in the city of Eshnunna, which today lies about 30 km northeast of Baghdad. People from other Mesopotamian cities like Ur owned distinctively Harappan luxury goods such as beads and tiny carved bones
Harappans appear to have been traders who welcomed people to their cities from pretty much anywhere. But that doesn't mean they were disorganized or anarchic.
By studying the layers of built environments in Harappa, archaeologists have pieced together a fragmentary history of the civilization's rise. Harappa began as a village, probably about 6,000 years ago. There's evidence of agriculture and very early pottery throughout the 3000s BCE.
It's also during this time that we begin to see markings that look like writing on pottery. Over a period of just a couple of centuries, these crude marks evolved quickly into an alphabet that we still can't decipher. Here you can see a typical example of Harappan writing, on a seal that would have been pressed into soft clay, and was probably used in trade.
Indeed, it seems that writing in Harappa followed soon after the invention of standard weights and measures for commerce. Archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of blocks in a variety of standard sizes that conform to the binary weight system favored in the Indus Valley.
This fits with most accounts of how writing emerges in civilizations. Often, it begins with people using numbers and math to determine who owns what, or who has bought what from whom. From there, it develops quickly into a full-blown system of symbols. Writing seems to be one of those technological innovations that evolves very rapidly once people start using it.
It's next to impossible to build an urban civilization without standard measures and writing, but it's rare that we have a chance to look back in history to glimpse a literate culture emerging from a pre-literate one. In the ruins of Harappa, we can track that transition taking place. And the more writing we see in a given layer, the more complicated and advanced the civilization had become.
Advanced Technologies and Civil Engineering
Harappans didn't just create standardized measures — they liked everything to be standardized, right down to the size of the bricks they used to build their homes. Bricks and boards, like weights, came in just a few standard sizes. Echoing this love of order, Harappans built their cities on fairly strict grids.
Though the idea of a street grid seems perfectly ordinary to city-dwellers today, it was unusual at the time. Most great cities in Mesopotamia, for example, had curving streets and a more organic-looking layout
Sometimes archaeologists call the Harappan architectural style "nested" because they loved to build walls within walls. 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, but it's possible that these inner walls protected sacred areas or the estates of particularly high-status citizens.
I mentioned earlier that the Harappans left no monuments to their leaders, but their walls and city layouts make it clear that they were hardly egalitarians. Homes ranged from single rooms in dormitory-like buildings, possibly for slaves, to palatial estates with dozens of rooms and multiple outdoor courtyards. Harappans preferred two-story buildings, and semi-public courtyards were part of nearly every home.
There were regions of Harappan cities, often in their northwest corners, that were elevated above the rest. One of these elevated areas — surrounded by walls, of course — has been excavated extensively at Mohenjo-Daro. Dubbed (somewhat incorrectly) "the citadel," it includes what some archaeologists believe is a granary, as well as large, public buildings whose uses remain mysterious. But one structure stands out, partly because its design is tied to one of the greatest technological innovations of the Harappan city.
It is a public bath
You can see it above, along with the grand staircase that would have taken visitors down into its waters. The floor of the bath was built from specially-sized fired bricks, and it was surrounded by many passages and small rooms. Whether or not this particular bath was simply a public bathing site, or perhaps something more ceremonial, it was the largest version of a technology that was common throughout Harappan cities.
Because, you see, Harappans had plumbing. Every home had bathrooms, many had toilets, and drainage ditches throughout their cities carried waste beyond its walls. In fact, one way we know that the Harappans set up outposts in Mesopotamia is that their cities had such sophisticated, distinctive plumbing. Perhaps, instead of making war, the Harappans were devoting their money and energy to city infrastructure planning. Below, you can see an artist's recreation of what a city's plumbing would look like. Clay pipes ran alongside city streets, and past homes.
Harappans were also spending a lot of time perfecting the art of luxury goods. They made bangles, carved decorative bones, worked copper and other metals. Most of all, they crafted beads that must have been famous for thousands of kilometers, given that archaeologists have found them in far-flung Mesopotamian cities.
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”.
I suppose if you have indoor plumbing but opt to avoid using it (see: San Francisco), that could be a sign that war approaches.
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.
When the time came to defend their nation, the snowflakes had to run to their "safe spaces".
That could be a reason
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”
Sounds like they were plagued by a Snowflake generation that wiped out their history and statues shortly before diversity wiped them all out.
Walls don't work, it must have been something else.
Women in leadership roles perhaps?
Just in case....../s
Thanks! I checked some of the reviews and it looks good. I'll look it up in our library.
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.
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.
“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?
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.
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
And just why were the cities surrounded by walls?
Could be non-human attackers (and i’m not talking zombies :) — I mean wild animals
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.
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