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Science Unmasks New Knowledge about the Indus Civilization

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Charetha
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« on: July 21, 2008, 02:21:22 am »

Science Unmasks New Knowledge about the Indus Civilization
Posted on July 20, 2008





A recent cover story in the prestigious journal Science reports that the scientific view of the Indus Civilization, of how it compares to its other two contemporary civilizations (Mesopotamia and Egypt), and of what might have happened to it is undergoing a stark and important reconsideration. That scientists consider it to be “Boring No More” and, indeed, the emerging new understanding of the Indus Civilization suggests that it might have been “a powerhouse of commerce and technology in the 3rd millennium B.C.E.”

I must confess that I am late in reporting about, and nearly missed, the June 6 cover story by Andrew Lawler, titled “Unmasking the Indus” (Science, Vol. 320, p. 1276-1285). I have been traveling out of the country, nearly non-stop, for the last seven weeks and only just got to the stack of Nature and Science (two of my favorite magazines) that had piled up in the unread mail. Of course, one look at the cover - which depicts a “bearded, horned terra cotta mask, about 5 centimeters in height, found at Mohenjo Daro, Pakistan” - had me hooked on what is unusually detailed (10-page long, with 6 sub-reports) and gripping report on the exciting new knowledge and understanding of the Indus Civilization that is beginning to emerge; knowledge that is beginning to question our long-held assumptions about what the civilization was, or was not.

Of course, there is much written about the Indus Civilization, including fascinating and detailed reports in National Geographic, etc., but this Science report is different because it highlights how our scientific - in this case archaeological - knowledge on the subject is not only expanding, but changing. It really is worth reading in the full and I would encourage readers to do so.

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Charetha
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« Reply #1 on: July 21, 2008, 02:24:43 am »



The opening few paragraphs of the lead essay - “Boring No More, a Trade-Savvy Indus Emerges” - give a flavor of the key argument:

THAR DESERT, PAKISTAN–Egypt has pyramids, temples, and mummies galore. Ancient Mesopotamians left behind the dramatic saga of Gilgamesh, receipts detailing their most prosaic economic transactions, and the occasional spectacular tomb. But the third of the world’s three first civilizations had, well, good plumbing. Even the archaeologists who first discovered the Indus civilization in the 1920s found the orderly streetscapes of houses built with uniform brick to be numbingly regimented. As recently as 2002, one scholar felt compelled to insist in a book that the remains left behind by the Indus people “are not boring.”

Striking new evidence from a host of excavations on both sides of the tense border that separates India and Pakistan has now definitively overturned that second-class status. No longer is the Indus the plain cousin of Egypt and Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium B.C.E. Archaeologists now realize that the Indus dwarfed its grand neighbors in land area and population, surpassed them in many areas of engineering and technology, and was an aggressive player during humanity’s first flirtation with globalization 5000 years ago. The old notion that the Indus people were an insular, homogeneous, and egalitarian bunch is being replaced by a view of a diverse and dynamic society that stretched from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of the Himalaya and was eager to do business with peoples from Afghanistan to Iraq. And the Indus people worried enough about the privileges of their elite to build thick walls to protect them. “This idea that the Indus was dull and monolithic–that’s all nonsense,” says Louis Flam, an archaeologist at the City University of New York who has worked in Pakistan. “There was a tremendous amount of variety.”

… Even well-combed sites are still full of surprises: The city of Harappa may be 1000 years older and Mohenjo Daro far larger than once thought. And the dramatic “Buddhist stupa” adorning Mohenjo Daro’s high mound may in fact date back to the Indus heyday around 2000 B.C.E.

« Last Edit: July 21, 2008, 02:26:22 am by Charetha » Report Spam   Logged
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