Did this ancient civilization avoid war for 2000 years?

Gizmodo ^ | 2014 | Annilee Newitz

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within.

Perhaps they fought them over there so they did not have to fight them here?

If you looked at any city in Canada, New Zealand and Australia using these criteria you would say they had not been in a war in 200 years.

Sparta was not invaded for hundreds of years. They were not peaceful.

[BobL]

That’s all good and fine, but were they, gay?

[Wuli]

At least these investigators admit when they are making guesses and they try not to project more than the evidence can accurately identify. That’s refreshing compared to the very many highly speculative archaeological reports that are produced with many speculations written as if definite facts.

[BobL]

“From what it seems they weren’t perfect: war enables innovation. The ancient indians didn’t war, so no innovations”

I guess it depends on which ‘indians’. American Indians, as far as I know spent much time on the warpath - but it didn’t get them much when Europeans arrived. As far as Asian Indians went - I don’t know enough either way.

[RightGeek]

What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappa

[Republic_Venom]

Wonder how the Hindu’s came up with their time scale? They came up with measurements of time in nano seconds to a scale of 1.76 million years. They too were living in a world that was ‘constant’ in a linear sort of way. Though the Hindu’s saw it as cyclical, and vast.

[VanShuyten]

“...the invasion of the Sea Peoples, a swarm of warlike bandits...”

Here’s a quiz for you. Which Mediterranean Middle-eastern peoples are probably descended from the Sea Peoples? (Hint - the Israelis, Egyptians and Assyrians were already there.)

[SunkenCiv]

What were walls for?

Congratulations Raycpa! We have a winner! Perhaps they didn't innovate in the direction of siege warfare -- not unlikely that the sizes of the cities played a factor. Given the architectural homogeneity, it isn't unlikely that the cities were in a continual state of remodeling, such that we're seeing only the last and very recent phase, all other traces gone.

It's also worth mentioning that the Indus Valley civilization a.k.a. Harappan civilization was only rediscovered in 1921. At first regarded as the wellspring of India, it is apparent from their surviving arts that they didn't know the horse, which is ubiquitous in all early Indian literature. Also, the still-undeciphered writing system appears to conceal and preserve an agglutinative language, a category that includes Dravidian, but not Indo-European languages. The last period of Harappan civ saw a population shift to the hinterlands -- apparently as the quarterly seasonal shift (wet-dry-wet-dry) became more severe, at least one of the tributaries of the Indus dried up, and the local diet shifted from wheat and barley to lower-yield millet and rice. A shift in what is eaten is reasonably deduced to indicate a cultural and ethnic transformation. Thanks fieldmarshaldj.

• harappan keyword

[colorado tanker]

It was the model 1177 BC Harappa SUV that did ‘em in. Climate change strikes again.

[Spruce]

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

[blam]

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Since most of it is in Pakistan, we’ll probably never know.

[editor-surveyor]

.
>> “Did this ancient civilization avoid war for 2000 years?” <<

No!

They were wiped off the face of the Earth.

Why are we expected to worship every failed culture?
.

[editor-surveyor]

.
Amen!
.

[editor-surveyor]

.
>> “if it really was that long.” <<

And it obviously wasn’t.

[editor-surveyor]

.
It was the autonomous model that did them in.

[Fred Nerks]

The Mohendaro Massacre

In a room with a public well in one area of the city were found the skeletons of two individuals who appeared desperately to have been using their last scraps of energy to crawl up the stair leading from the room to the street; the tumbled remains of two others lay nearby. Elsewhere in the area the ‘strangely contorted’ and incomplete remains of nine individuals were found, possibly thrown into a rough pit. In a lane between two houses in another area, another six skeletons were loosely covered with earth.

[editor-surveyor]

.
That was their health club.

[x]

How peaceful was Harappan Civilization?

They were in an isolated valley that was separated by mountains (and maybe deserts) from the rest of the world.

[Fred Nerks]

"An alternative theory was put forward that the city suffered extensive flooding and that people died off as a result of water-borne diseases such as cholera. Recent investigations revealed considerable evidence of flooding at Mohenjo Daro in the form of many layers of silty clay. The Indus River was prone to change its course and through the centuries moved gradually eastward, leading periodically to flooding within the bounds of the city. Indeed, the massive brick platforms on which the city is constructed and the fortifications around parts of it seemed to have been designed to provide protection against such floods. Conditions would have been ideal for the spread of water-borne diseases, especially cholera, although cholera epidemics cannot be proved to have occurred."