Indus Valley Civilization

I'm pretty skeptical of glorification of a prior era. As if people back then had it all figured out, were more functional than we could imagine from our toxic modernity. Lost gardens of paradise. The way I see it, the walls constituting our memories, collective and individual, have been far too graffitied to accurately make out the original mural. That place, and what it was really like, is now inaccessible, buried forever beneath layers of time. I think nostalgia for a better epoch is dangerous. 

My curiosity about how our predecessors lived, however, remains unbounded. As of late I've been intrigued by the Harappans of the Indus River Valley. 

We don't hear much about them because nobody knows much about them. Their writing is indecipherable, their remnants more sparse than those of contemporaries in the Middle East. But these South Asians were on the forefront of human possibility. Around 5,000 years ago, the level at which they were farming and organizing and trading was matched only by the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.

 

I don't think South Asian civilization is thought of, generally, as one of those legendary ancient agrarian civilizations. But it's older than China, the Mesoamericans, the Greeks. It was also larger than anything else had ever been, spanning from arid Balochistan (western Pakistan) to the Yamuna River (near Delhi).

 

Harappans had cutting edge urban planning, standardized units of weight and measurement, granaries to store surplus barley and wheat from irrigated fields, and networks of trade reaching the other wealthy clusters in Iraq and Egypt.  

Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, their two most famous cities, are notable for their impressive infrastructure. They had sewage drainage systems, trash collection, public baths, street grids, and tens of thousands of residents. Their ruins were uncovered during British railroad construction in 19th century colonial times when workers began unearthing oddly uniform bricks. These were Harappan bricks, and their repetitiveness indicated the existence of an ancient shared mathematical system across the region; people had developed uniform standards to measure and build over vast swaths of land. They were trading raw materials and finished goods like metals and precious stones, timber, textiles, and animals throughout the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, laying the foundations for the Indian Ocean trade networks that have flourished for thousands of years since. 

But what really caught my attention about the Harappans is what they didn't have. There was a degree of wealth inequality, as seen by different-sized houses, but there is no evidence of a centralized political entity, a King or ruling religious elite, in any of their excavated sites.

In these grand cities and alluvial plains, archaeologists have found no temples or palaces, no great monuments, no signs of an army, no lavish burials. No artwork revering such institutions or powerful individuals. No sign of any of it.  

 

Those are the first things we come across in ancient ruins. Monuments to religion and state are the first things people will come across in the ruins of DC and Beijing and Moscow and every other major city inhabited today. People in the Indus Valley seem to have lived relatively equally and peacefully, especially compared to Babylon and Pharaonic Egypt. Even though they had the resources and technical prowess, they weren't building grandiose structures to a god or a divine ruler.

Could there really have been a flourishing group of more than 5 million people across thousands of square miles, in contact with other strong states, with metallurgic technology and standard brick sizes and written language, without centralized, political religion? Worship of the military? A King or warlord? Is this possible? A civilization that lasted around 2,000 years? 

 

Nobody really knows how the Harappans lived or were governed. I'm not suggesting this was an egalitarian utopia. But it seems clear from what we do know that their priorities, what they dedicated resources to, were not the same as other similarly-complex societies. Their mystery may persist until the end of time.