Did this ancient civilization avoid war for 2000 years?

Gizmodo ^ | 2014 | Annilee Newitz

[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.

[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]

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>> “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?
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[editor-surveyor]

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Amen!
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[editor-surveyor]

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>> “if it really was that long.” <<

And it obviously wasn’t.

[editor-surveyor]

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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]

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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."