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.
as for Australian Aborigines: for “war” you need a group of people to attack another group of people. So by definition, you can't have war without cities: but you do have gangs attacking other small groups of people.
The Homo Erectus and Neanderthals have lots of injuries on their skeletons suggesting fights, and even Jane Godall’s peaceful chimpanzees were observed going to war against another group of chimps.
The author of the article is a woman, projecting her feminists ideas into what she is finding...so she sees the DNA suggesting women married men from the outside was a sign of women's independence, when it was probably a sign that the local men were dead (from wars?) and the gals were given to the outside mercenaries by their fathers etc.
“...Which Mediterranean Middle-Eastern peoples are probably descended from the Sea Peoples?” ...... Uh, the Iranians????
#2. For a civilization that survived over 2000 years, that's hardly a "failure"...
Native Americans aren’t “Indians” - Colombus thought he reached India but was wrong.
you also need barracks for troops, art that celebrates martial prowess, tales about the same. Yet we don’t find this among the Harappans
Nope, nope and how do you know?
The barracks are not needed and a number of civilizations had a warrior culture with out them. Art is not necessary and since you can not read the language how do you know there are no tales of martial prowess? What script you have could be a list of body parts chopped off or a recipe on how to make soup with the hearts of your enemies.
#2 Art is there in every culture - even the Harappan - and they do not depict war. Every other civilized (city based) culture depicts war
#3 tales yes - because the tales of Harappa are the pre-Vedic Indic tales that one can find in the Tamil Sangam or the Puranas
Maybe it was something they regarded as necessary but not glorious. We have very little art in any culture showing people digging latrines.
Are you sure?
Someone who knew how to make war showed up.
.
We lack any credible evidence that they lasted 2000 years.
.
.
You’re on the right track.
Never accept assumptions.
.
.
Always a safe guess!
The ten tribes of northern Israel were hauled away and spread across the eurasian continent by Shalmanesser without sacking anything.
.
My theory about the Sea Peoples. Note the plural. Carthage was probably developed from the Philistines that the Israelis defeated. After Thera blew up around 1400 BC, the shore line shipping and craftsman at the water’s edge of Crete were probably destroyed and mostly killed. Ships that remained at sea survived. I think some artisans from Crete and those who had fled Thera 20 years earlier may have gone on to Egypt and contributed to the originality of art at Iknaten’s new city, Amarna. Other ship oriented people from Crete and those who had survived at sea may have joined Carthage and expanded their ship building capabilities. At any rate, Crete never recovered to the levels it had before the volcano.
One theory I have read regarding the fall of Harappa was that the trees needed for fuel were all cut down which eventually made life for quantities of people impossible. Deforestation may even have contributed to drought development. Deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia may cause similar problems now.
Here are many images regarding Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. See what you can find that seems to answer your military questions etc.
Artefacts, seals and children’s toys unearthed appear to show agricultural pursuits as paramount, there are no weapons, no fight scenes that I can find. The only reference to chariots seems to be:
https://www.harappa.com/content/wheels-indian-rock-art
quote:
Erwin Neumayer writes, “It so happens we are dealing with a very elusive object: We have cities as big as the late Bronze Age allowed, alas without horses, but carts and wheels in miniature, wheeled toys and marks of wheels on city roads, with cattle as draught animals alone. All we got from then is a number of toy carts made of clay and one a miniature bronze chariot from Daimabad, the find from an outlaying area of the Harappan Culture Region deep down in the Deccan. It is only this chariot which gives away enough on technological details to understand that the war chariot was known, but the draught animals are still long legged oxen. But there we also see a yoke fit for the neck of horses rather then cattle, and loops at the yoke serving as reign-sorters fit to guide crossed reign trains- a necessity for a fast moving chariot.” [Foreword, pp. 1-2.]
Norse, that's true, but they were a militarized society and you find war depictions in art and epics which one doesn't find in harappa's case
What you state about the sea peoples is true enough for Canaan and Egypt, but the hittite empire was heavily inland. The sea peoples (Sardinians etc.) would not have been able to traverse so deep. Just as later the Vikings didn’t conquer the interior of France or Germany
And the answer is:
The descendents of the Sea-Peoples are today:
The Sea Peoples disappear from history a scant few centuries after they come to fore. This is similar to Vikings or Varangians - they were warrior parties or small groups of elites that brought iron weapons, but were ultimately absorbed by the neighboring peoples
We hear nothing about the Philistines by the time of Israel's devastation by Assyria
The Philistines were assimilated by Judah, by Israel, by Egypt, by the Phoenician city states and by the Arameans before they were scattered by the Assyrians and Egyptians. The descendents of these mixed people were them assimilated by Greeks (some of whom later became Italian, merged into Albanians, Slavs etc), Romans(and under the blanket term Romans we have Celts, Italics, Spaniards, Britons etc who fought, married and moved back or around the empire)
The "palestinians" of today are a mix of arab, Jewish, Aramean, Assyrian, philistine, greek, Italian etc. blood - just as most of us are - remember that even today most "African Americans" have a lot of European blood and many Europeans have Genghis Khans genes!
the fact is that we can see weather changes in our own lifetime -- and we have seen in history other climate change events happeneing, from Europe's "little Ice age" in the 1600s (which is why crops failed, london burned and we had factors for the 30 years war) to the explosion of Krakatoa cooling temperatures globally by 2 C for a year or two
I don't believe the Al gore types, but I also believe we can create and use technology that gives us cleaner air without eliminating what we love -- look at SUV's for example, they are far more powerful and far cleaner than they were in the 80s or even the 90s for instance. We can focus and do this.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.