Around 2500 BCE, a civilization flourished in the Indus Valley – present-day Pakistan and northwestern India. It included towns of 50,000 inhabitants with sewer systems, public baths, chalk-lined streets and a system of weights and measures standardized. It traded with Mesopotamia and Egypt. And it never needed an army, a royal palace or monumental temples to function.
What you will learn
- Why the Indus Civilization is considered the most technically advanced of its time – and the least understood
- What the absence of palaces, armies and temples says about its unique political organization
- Why his writing remains undeciphered 150 years after its discovery
A civilization that should not have existed according to our models
Historians of ancient civilizations have long worked with an implicit model: large cities require a strong central authority, a visible hierarchy, monuments of power, and military capacity to defend and expand.
The Indus civilization – also called the Harappan civilization after its main site – violates this model on every point.
Excavations carried out since the 1920s on the sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and analyzed in publications of theArchaeological Survey of India a you Journal of Archaeological Sciencereveal cities with remarkable urban planning. Streets oriented according to the cardinal points. Covered sewer systems connecting each house. Public baths including the Great Swimming Pool of Mohenjo-daro remains one of the first known monumental hydraulic structures.
No palace has been identified. No structure resembles a temple dominating the city. No arsenal, no significant defensive fortification.
Social equality without equivalent in Antiquity
What strikes archaeologists is the relative uniformity of the dwellings. Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia where palaces and elite quarters are immediately identifiable, Harappan houses vary in size but not as dramatically.
Osteological analyzes published in the Journal of Archaeological Science by a team led by Gwen Robbins Schug examined the skeletons found at these sites. Markers of nutritional stress and disease are relatively uniform between individuals – suggesting a more equitable distribution of resources than in contemporary societies of Mesopotamia or Egypt.
The Indus Civilization appears to have functioned for 700 years without documented warfare, a visible king, and monumental inequality. How such a complex society maintained its cohesion is a question to which archaeologists have no satisfactory answer.
A writing that no one has deciphered
The Indus civilization had a script – around 400 distinct signs found on thousands of tablets and seals. Despite 150 years of attempts at decipherment, it remains illegible.
The main problem is the absence of a Rosetta Stone – a bilingual text which would make it possible to establish correspondences between the Indus script and a known language. The available texts are short – rarely more than five characters – which makes statistical analysis difficult.
Researchers at the University of Washington applied natural language processing algorithms to these texts in work published in Science in 2009, concluding that the distribution of signs is consistent with a natural language – not a simple accounting system. But the underlying language remains unknown.
A brutal and still unexplained ending
Around 1900 BCE, the major cities of the Indus were abandoned within a few centuries. The population dispersed to the east and south. The sewage systems have ceased to be maintained. Commercial networks have collapsed.
Three main hypotheses have been put forward: climate change having dried up the rivers which supplied agriculture, the invasion of Indo-Aryan peoples from Central Asia, or epidemics. Isotopic analyzes published in PNAS suggest that the monsoon moved eastward during this period, making the land less arable.
A civilization that perhaps solved the problem of governance without violence or spectacular hierarchy disappeared without leaving legible texts to explain how it worked.
Sources
- Urban planning and sanitation at Mohenjo-daro — Archaeological Survey of IndiaMarshall
- Skeletal evidence for social inequality — Journal of Archaeological ScienceRobbins Schug et al.
- Computational analysis of Indus script — ScienceRao et al., 2009
- Climate change and Indus collapse — PNASGiosan et al.
