Posted on 12/04/2011 8:32:52 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A study of human bones from the ruins of Harappa has revealed signs of lethal interpersonal violence and challenged current thinking that the ancient Indus civilisation was an exceptionally peaceful realm for its inhabitants.
An American bioarchaeologist has said that her analysis of skeletal remains from Harappa kept at the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, suggests that women, children and individuals with visible infectious diseases were at a high risk of facing violence.
Gwen Robbins Schug studied the skeletal remains of 160 individuals from cemeteries of Harappa excavated during the 20th century. The burial practices and injuries on these bones may be interpreted as evidence for social hierarchy, unequal power, uneven access to resources, and outright violence, she said in a presentation earlier this week at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, Canada...
She found signs of accidental injuries on skeletal parts, but the majority of head injuries appeared to be the result of clubbing. The prevalence of such head injuries was about six per cent -- a low figure for an ancient state-society. However, the distribution of the head injuries across gender and class appeared striking.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraphindia.com ...
There is also a mention of a sewage drain. They had plumbers back then?
Depending on how you define "sword"... sure. Of course iron and bronze have been worked into weapons for thousands of years. But even back in the stone age there were wooden "swords" with shards of obsidian or other glass-like stone stuck along an edge. Crude, but effective and fearsome.
Reference?
The only group I'm aware of that left India to the north and west in historical time are the Romany.
Technology doesn’t really change the basic human condition.
I thought the Dark Ages were a Renaissance Humanist myth.
Yeah, the 20th c claim that the Aryans were indigenous is just anachronistic nationalist (and isolationist) agitprop.
IndoEuropean languages have no common word for large bodies of water (IOW, each language borrowed a word from whatever locals they found when they first saw the sea); added to the fact that some odd practices described in their own ancient literature have been found only in archaeological contexts in Central Asia, and used plants that only grow there, it’s no coincidence that the Aryan invasion of India (also found in their own ancient literature) came down out of the central Asian highlands — just as Alexander the Great did later, and in fairly recent times, the Muzzies.
The Indus Valley scripts of the Harappan civ, though still unread, appear to have been used to record an agglutinative language (Sumerian, or something related, is a possibility, as the Sumerians themselves came from the east, by their own account), and there’s no sign of the all-important horse — all-important to the Aryans, that is. IOW, regardless of the colonization pattern of the Harappans (recent study has shown the northwestern sites are not older, but newer), the Aryans came from Central Asia. :’)
Indus-like inscription on South Indian pottery from Thailand
The Hindu | Thursday, April 8, 2010 | Iravatham Mahadevan
Posted on 04/07/2010 8:03:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2488802/posts
I believe S.L. was referring to the supposed dark age that followed the supposed collapse of the Bronze Age civ. Scientific dating has shown that it, too, is a modern myth — there was no single beginning or end to the use of bronze, and there wasn’t a Greek dark age.
http://www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
From Indus Valley To Coastal Tamil Nadu
The Hindu | 5-2-2008 | TS Subramanian
Posted on 05/02/2008 8:03:44 PM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2010555/posts
It’s hard to know what the average person thought in ancient Greece—the surviving literature comes from a tiny fraction of the population, mostly members of the elite. Men wanted sons and to carry on their families so most free men married (unless they were killed in battle too young). There were lots of female prostitutes. Probably for the average male most of his sexual activity over the course of his life was with his own wife, with the rest divided between prostitutes and adolescent males—but it isn’t certain that all men indulged in pederasty (it may have been more prevalent in the upper levels of society).
Indus Valley’s Bronze Age civilisation ‘had first sophisticated financial exchange system’
Telegraph | Tuesday, November 17, 2009 | Dean Nelson
Posted on 11/20/2009 7:55:16 PM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2391278/posts
Deciphering “The Mother of All Crossword Puzzles”
Posted on July 3, 2011 by xenohistorian
http://xenohistorian.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/deciphering-the-mother-of-all-crossword-puzzles/
The most telling are the laws that existed....there actually were laws created to “encourage” marriage when men became at the age to reproduce since most men needed encouragement to leave their lovers-—they put in laws and customs to discourage homosexuality until the men at least produced sons. They treated marriage as “necessary” and homosexuality as the recreation and “fun”.
In studying art (I got my degree in Fine Art), I was exposed to a culture which glorified homosexuality—put it on a higher level than heterosexual activity.
But the ideal was man/boy “love” and that was an accepted and even celebrated “lifestyle” in Ancient Greek culture—yes, always the elite practices which filtered down to the “worldview” in the culture. Most Greeks couldn’t afford the time for seduction and entertainment of boys...they needed to survive by working and there were the Stoics and ideology on the fringe (the Old Testament) which eventually changed worldview, particularly with the advance of Christianity which revolutionized the worldview and put homosexuality and pederasty—so common in all cultures, in the closet.
Columbus found rampant homosexuality in the pagan world-—the Samurai had the same man/boy paradigm as the Greeks....so do the Afghanis today. The Brownshirt occultist also had homosexual orgies with boys from the Hitler Youth.....it is a worldview....just an opposite one of the Bible which is the basis of the USA worldview—or was.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rJLLV7U-XY
Thanks for the info. You’re terrific and I love reading your stuff.
Pretty much all historians agree the period from around 500 to 1000 qualifies pretty well as a Dark Age in western Europe relative to what came before and after. Some take off a century or two on the front or back of this period.
Where the Renaissance Humanist guys came in was classifying absolutely everything from the Fall of Rome to their own perfectness as “dark ages,” including the High Middle Ages, which were as creative as any period in history, but denigrated by the RHs for not slavishly imitating the Greeks and Romans.
The funny part, of course, is that Renaissance civilization drew at least as much from the “dark” Middle Ages as from classical civilization.
My point was that the earlier Bronze Age civilization collapsed about as completely as the later classical version and was followed by a true “dark age.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages
Right.
What I find bizarre is that many Indians are passionate about the issue. They get really, really upset if anyone suggests that Europe and India may have both gotten their dominant languages from a Central Asian source. Meanwhile nobody in Europe or America seems to be in the least offended by the possibility. I just don’t understand why Indians find the idea offensive.
There were many, many invasions of India from the north and northwest. Alexander and the Moguls were just two of the best known.
India, by ancient standards, was wealthy and fertile. Tribes and nations stuck in Central Asia or Afghanistan had major incentives to raid or invade down onto the plains.
But those already living in the plains had little or no incentive to move up into the much harsher conditions of the mountains and deserts. So they didn’t, except for some empires that conquered parts of Afghanistan and thereabouts with the idea of stopping the raids and invasions. Which never worked for long.
“social hierarchy, unequal power and uneven access to resources”
So what?
And I forgot to add...GUILTY!
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