Posted on 06/27/2023 3:35:31 AM PDT by FarCenter
A little over a century ago, British and Indian archeologists began excavating the remains of what they soon realized was a previously unknown civilization in the Indus Valley.
Straddling parts of Pakistan and India and reaching into Afghanistan, the culture these explorers unearthed had existed at the same time as those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and covered a much larger area.
It was also astonishingly advanced: sophisticated and complex, boasting large, carefully laid out cities, a relatively affluent population, writing, plumbing and baths, wide trade connections, and even standardized weights and measures.
What kind of a society was the Indus Valley Civilization, as it came to be known? Who lived there and how did they organize themselves? Archeologists and other experts ask these questions to this day, but the first explorers were already noticing some unique features.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, “much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on palaces and tombs of kings,” observed Sir John Marshall, who supervised the excavation of two of the five main cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, “but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud.”
In the Indus Valley, “the picture is reversed, and the finest structures were those erected for the convenience of the citizens. Temples, palaces and tombs there may of course have been, but if so, they are either still undiscovered or so like other edifices as not to be readily distinguishable from them.”
Egalitarian society
In its heyday, from about 2600 to 1900 BC, the Indus Valley Civilization created what may have been the world’s most egalitarian early complex society, defying long-held presumptions about the relationship between urbanization and inequality in the past.
Its large cities were expansive, planned, and boasted large-scale architecture, including roomy residential houses, and smaller settlements in the surrounding areas appeared to support a similar culture with a similar standard of living.
The most tantalizing feature of the ancient Indus Valley remains is what they appear to lack: any trace of a ruling class or managerial elite.
This defies the longtime theoretical assumption that any complex society must have stratified social relations: that collective action, urbanization, and economic specialization only develop in a very unequal culture that takes direction from the top, and that all social trajectories evolve toward a common and universal outcome, the state.
I agree that a small ruling class is better. I small ruling class accountable to the citizen is less a burden on the people.
In the last fort years our ruling class has grown out of proportion to the population.
Fifty years ago General Motors was the largest single employer in the US.
Today it is the Federal Government.
That tells you a lot about the state of the Nation.
Some time in the last fifty years the Republic died and the Empire of America was born.
This is sad:
Preservation work for Mohenjo-daro was suspended in December 1996 after funding from the Pakistani government and international organizations stopped. Site conservation work resumed in April 1997, using funds made available by the UNESCO. The 20-year funding plan provided $10 million to protect the site and standing structures from flooding. In 2011, responsibility for the preservation of the site was transferred to the government of Sindh.
Currently the site is threatened by groundwater salinity and improper restoration. Many walls have already collapsed, while others are crumbling from the ground up. In 2012, Pakistani archaeologists warned that, without improved conservation measures, the site could disappear by 2030.
To an Islamist-oriented government, there is no history prior to Mohammed. Even to acknowledge so, is blasphemy.
Kennedy assassination, Great Society, out of control inflation, gun control, Supreme Court rules on religion in school, abortion, all stem from this inflection point.
It strikes me this is when Progressive ideology changed from nationalist to internationalist.
Yes, and we can hope that Islam will be history.
>>Some time in the last fifty years the Republic died and the Empire of America was born.
The Empire of America was born with the War of Independence, which established the right of the colonies to expand westward into the Ohio Valley without hindrance by London.
The Westward expansion of the American Empire continued through the 19th century, and became global with the Spanish American War.
If I had to pick a tipping point in modern times it would be Wickard v. Filburn in 1942.
The USSC decided that Federal regulators could tell a farmer how much grain he could grew on his own land for his own use. This decision gave the Federal bureaucracy essentially unlimited powers.
But in all reality I put the end of the first republic of the US ended in 1865 when it was decided by force of arms that membership in union was not voluntary.
The second republic probably ended either with Wilson and the establishment of the Federal Reserve or with FDR and exponential growth of the the Feral government.
True it is outside the 50 years.
But, the point is, that Wickard made that growth possible.
But...without a “ruling class or managerial elite”...Who would build the roads?
Another decision, like Roe vs Wade, that ought to be revisited by SCOTUS - given they are slapping the commiefedregulators down a bit in recent cases.
“ Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”
Yes.
From the article:
“ At Mohenjo-daro, non-residential structures were built atop brick platforms that were as substantial as the structures erected on top of them, and would have required a great deal of coordinated action. It has been calculated that just one of the foundation platforms would have required 4 million days of labor, or 10,000 builders working for more than a year.”
That was just for one platform in one city. It’s only a matter of time before the huge serf/slave compounds are found, or some similar conscription of resident labor discovered.
Who says we need roads? There were societies where your fourth wall was my first and I just added 3 more. If I came over for a visit I really did drop in because everyones doors were on the roof and the sidewalk was the neighborhood rooftops. Some others were a series of tunnels creating human warrens.
Of course they didnt have conveyances but we do.
When transportation shows up spaces between buildings becomes more the standard. Sometimes people built to stay out of the path because they were tired of finding an ox in the hut, sometimes not.
Maybe I just dont want to be next to your house because the smell of your wifes recipe for chicken innards with yew bows makes my stomach turn.
Maybe I want to have travelers pass by my house and since there is no good room left on your side I build across the road so I can sell my much better chicken intestines.
Roads still appear. Maybe not logical, maybe not wide, likely confusing, maybe mud pools or rocky speed bumps, but they still appear.
You missed my joke.
A common criticism of libertarianism or radically limited government is “But...who would build the roads?”
My point was, and you rightly point out, that these people seemed to do just fine without a strong central government.
Sorry, ya. I wasnt on top of things.
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.