The Indus River Civilization

right now I want to talk about an ancient lost civilization who doesn't love lost civilizations I would start out by saying that historically and that is for a couple of millennia at least we have understood there to have been three ancient old-world civilizations by that I mean the original places where human beings settled in civilization we defined in several ways one it involves domesticated animals domesticated crops it involves irrigation a writing system frequently it's organized government and organized religion but most especially it's the places where people first began to live in cities now all those other things like cultivated crops and domesticated animals were necessary in order for people to have sufficient food to be able to stay together in one place and not be nomadic herders which is what had existed previously but historically we had understood there to be three ancient cultures probably the oldest one according to most scholars is the Mesopotamian culture which is the north end of the Persian Gulf over to the Mediterranean Sea it's called Mesopotamia because that word literally means the land between the rivers it was between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers the oldest cities we believe in the world although there's some disagreement about that would have been the cities of air into her and guru in those areas second to that very close to it is the culture the ancient culture of Egypt the Egyptians obviously shortly after Sumer and the Sumerians had their own alphabet and writing the cuneiform was the original and then the Egyptians with hieroglyphics come along and the thing about Egypt is they have the longest continuous history in the world and so we know more about that much of the rest of history especially in the ancient Near East in this area we call the Middle East was based upon our knowledge of in history because the Egyptians with a long continuous written history would say and on this occasion I defeated King Ashurbanipal of Assyria well we knew exactly when that was in Egypt so then we know how when I sure monopole was so the Egyptian history has been very important the third great culture that we are aware of is in China it's a little bit later than the others according to most scholars although there's disagreement about all this stuff but the area between the the yellow and the NC rivers or the long haul and Yangtze rivers would have been one of the ancient cultures that's what we thought the ancient world looked like up until about a hundred years ago in fact a story of how this was all discovered in the discovery of this the fourth the Indus Valley Civilisation in India what is today partially India Pakistan in the corner of Afghanistan the discovery by the West was not made until the mid 1800s early mid eighteen hundreds nothing was done in terms of excavations or exploration of these areas until the 1920s was when it started we still don't know a lot about this culture but we we don't know for instance what they called themselves we tend to call it the Indus Valley Civilisation because like all of these you may notice Mesopotamia the land between the rivers Egypt was along the Nile the area between the Yangtze and yellow rivers in China and here in this it is along the Indus River and the the tributaries to the Indus River it's hard for us one of the things that's a challenge is for us to be able to know very much about any culture that lacked one of the two sources for historical knowledge there are two different ways we can know about the past one is by what is written the other is by what is found in terms of physical evidence that is archaeological evidence there are some cases like the Vedic culture which comes later in India where we have an astonishing amount of written material and almost no archaeological evidence in the case of the Indus civilization the Indus Valley Civilization we have an enormous amount of archaeological evidence and no writing to speak up on the dressed up a little bit later but the story of how this region this ancient civilization was discovered is it's himself in itself is quite a story a man who went by the name Charles Masson masam was a fascinating character he was British he had joined the East India Company which was a semi private company it was an arm of the British government that was involved in controlling India in this part of the world I'm going to talk about the East India Company later on you'll learn about that well he was a member of the East India Company but in 1927 he and a friend of his decided they didn't like taking orders anymore so they deserted his name actually had been James Lewis but the penalty for desertion from the East India Company like from the British military was death so rather than face the death penalty he changed his name went by the name Charles masses and claimed to be an American well he was still something of an adventurer so he travelled north and west into the Punjab region area of India which was not controlled by the British at that point and as he traveled around there he became something of an amateur archaeologist in fact he found at least 50 different ancient Buddhist sites that he uncovered he began to collect coins he was known as as a coin collector at one point when he before he went back to England he had collected over 47,000 points in his travels in the in the late 20s he was travelling in the area in the northwestern part of India and some local villagers there had a legend they in their town or just outside their town that the old town of Harappa it was called there was a castle at least the the remains of a castle and their story was that an old Raja an old King had lived there had offended the gods and the gods had destroyed his home and left the ruins well this was later like when you have visitors who come you always take him to the local sites well they would always take any visitors to see the ruins of this castle they told Masson when he visited there that these these rooms were 25 miles long well he went there and saw the ruins of an ancient brick city that no one previously had talked about at least not in the West he did a series of drawings this is one of them of what he saw when he was there later on he had a fascinating history he got a pardon for his desertion and then worked for British intelligence for a while eventually moved back to England and wrote several books one of the books that he wrote was called the narrative of various journeys in Balochistan Afghanistan and the Punjab and in it he included some drawings and he described this massive brick wall fortress and city that he had seen there nobody had ever heard about that in England so they come at that point people started getting interested in it we had several other explorers first English explorers and then in archaeologists and then later Indian come there to examine it unfortunately by the time they got there nothing like this existed because in the interim in late 1800 early nineteen hundred's the British were actively involved in extending the Indian railway lines because that's how they move goods from place to place and obviously they were there taking advantage of all of the extractive resources they could get out of India so in the process of building a 93 mile long rail line from Karachi to Lahore in modern Pakistan they they were having a problem there's no stone around there there was no gravel as they're building this railway they had to have something hard to make the rail beds well the locals sit well there's a whole lot of bricks right over here they ended up knocking down virtually all of the walls of this 4,000 year old city is using the bricks for the railway line that they laid the tracks over so without realizing that they were 4,000 year old artifacts so most of it by the time other other archaeologists have gotten there most of it wasn't standing anymore but there were still a lot of artifacts in the 1880s in English archaeologists and then again in the 1920s an Indian archaeologists started digging here and they discovered a lot of different things one of the things they discovered was an astonishing I'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute an astonishing water management system they also discovered an extraordinary number of seals meaning of items that would be it would have been used they were glazed in ceramic made out of clay it didn't have stone back again everything's made play that's why was a brick city but they would use these seals to stamp materials that they could then identify as theirs when they were trading but so Mason is the one who first saw this reported it in a book others started coming to their astonishment they began to discover because they're the Indus Valley Civilisation was trading with Mesopotamia they discovered artifacts in Harappa which was the name of the local town this is sometimes called the Harappan civilization because the first town they found that that Mason visited was called Harappa later on a indian archaeologist identified another town called movin movin movin Jarl mohenjo-daro I'll get it on the minute oho daro and mohenjo-daro ended up being even a larger city and they found some of the same types of seals and things there well this is the area we're talking about the brown area here they have now demonstrated is the the size of the Indus Valley Civilisation the reason they know that they have found over 1500 villages and a number five or six significant cities and they're still finding more the last significant findings in the exploration of the Indus Valley Civilisation were in 1999 and they're finding more stuff all the time so this is the Indus River here and then various tributaries of it this is Harappa the first place that was identified down here mohenjo-daro is the second city they believe in this area here there are at least four or five there's a short in this thing that is always doing that to me sorry that way no I think I'm gonna have to dance yeah okay Harappa Veigar mohenjo-daro and then there was a port city below fall as I say they have strong evidence now that these people were trading with areas of the Persian Gulf and also in in in Mesopotamia and then also over into the Red Sea because they have found some of these same seals in those areas and they have got artifacts from those cultures here in the Indus Valley or herethen civilization all of these towns here they found seals and berries other kinds of artifacts that have indicated to them that they were all part of this one large civilization or culture now the size of this makes it the largest of the ancient civilizations almost all of the towns were somewhere along one of the rivers or tributaries of the rivers there are a few outliers from that but they believe that the connection was by water they would many of these places were port towns they had port facilities that we've been able to identify since then so that it may have looked something like this along the river it's thought that the reason why this and there's a lot we still don't know about this culture obviously as I said we don't know for sure where the people came from how did they cluster in these cities now there's as many as five million people that were part of the Indus Valley Civilisation according to the best scholarship some of the cities were 40,000 50,000 people woman mohenjo-daro and Harappa now that doesn't sound like a whole lot to us but that would have made them among the largest cities in the ancient world and the to have kind of population they had to have an active trait system they had to have the ability to move wheat they have massive urban planning I'll talk about a few of these things they're baked bricks that they built things with sir have survived 4000 years obviously they do something about how to build things the things we still don't really understand about the sculpture is we don't know what their form of leadership is we don't know what their religious system was I say those two things because the standard thing we look for in any ancient cultures archaeologically our palaces and temples indications of somebody being in leadership and some religious practice we have no indication of any palaces and no education of any any sites of religion in any of any of the Indus Valley area we also don't know where they came from we believe that the people may have gathered here in these cities along the riverbanks from other areas perhaps further north in Afghanistan and elsewhere to the North because of era fication has felt in other words they got drier it was much wetter in ancient times than it is now many of the places we go to now like a lawn for instance some of us were just in Oman those who continued on from the last cruise much of Oman used to be much much greener much wetter than it is now it's believed that as this part of the world started getting drier people started moving toward the rivers and then moving along the rivers the Indus Valley River and it's tributaries and that that's what created the civilization as that process continued and this civilization began sometime we believe around 3300 BC the mature period as they call it probably began around 2600 and ran to about 1900 and then we see a very distinct decline happening from about 1900 on the cities are not as well planned we don't see as much evidence of trade there's clear and the cities are smaller they're parts of them that fell into disrepair according to archaeological evidence and so we believe it between 1900 and about 1500 BC it was a period of decline and that we don't know why we think that that problem lose because of further erina fication further drying up in fact we do know that one of the major tributaries of the Indus River that had in dissimulation cities on it completely dried up and went away and that people had to abandon those cities because of that the usual reasons why civilizations would die out is one lack of water second that for some reason their process started stopped growing you know there were either plant diseases or again because of arid conditions natural disasters we have no indication of earthquakes or anything else in this area or military conflict that somebody came in and conquered them and we one of the other weird things about this this civilization is we have no indication of weapons or of any military activity almost all of the ancient cultures seem to specialize in having images warriors and battle and victory we have no indication of that from the Indus Valley Civilization there were four they were fortified cities in fact Harappa was three and a half miles in diameter I mean that the outside wall and it was an enormous brick wall a wall that was 40 feet thick and its face when you build a brick wall you have to prepare for the fact that it's not going to be very stable so the base of the walls of Harappa were 40 feet thick and were intended to protect the town they were protecting them from because we have no indication of any kind of military activity so all of these are some of the things that we do not know about it but we do know that report towns we do know that they traded extensively there probably were I said that this was the largest of the ancient civilizations and covered about a quarter million square miles in total that area that I showed you 1500 city 1500 settlements most of them smaller towns with some large cities about 5 million people total so this was a very significant thing these are these this one on top and this our representations of what the cities might have looked like we're amazed looking at this ancient city particularly because we don't have any indication of an organized political structure there was no king we have no evidence we do have an indication that there were wealthier people and less wealthy people because of the size of some of the homes that would be in different parts of town but the cities were were clear examples of urban planning they are made in there set up along north-south east-west grids a clear grid north-south are larger streets was sometimes where as much as 30 feet wide the east-west streets were lanes much narrower sometimes nine feet wide so in every one of the lanes at the end of the lane so that you have one in each of the sections of town there were wells so there was public water available the grits were in clear 90-degree forms and all of them were built to very specific ratios in fact all of the bricks and everything else I will talk about the weight system in a minute the bricks were all that they had two sizes of bricks small bricks were used for homes large bricks were used for public buildings which they had quite a few of the bricks are all in a one two to four ratio meaning the thickness of the brick to the width of the brick to the length of the brick we're all like 2 inches by 4 inches by 8 inches now there they didn't use ancients but you get the idea the larger bricks would have been a multiple of that as well does the city blocks were in ratios similar to that we find that over and over and over again that they had a very clear now whether that was mandated by somebody in authority which we don't know about or whether it was just that that was the building custom that they had they figured out that worked well this is a long time prior to any of this kind of system in any other civilization that we're aware of we don't see the level of sophistication in building and in waterworks and things until the Romans come along 1,500 to 2,000 years later depending upon when you in accounting you sort of get if you can see this image here they had in addition to the Wells they had water running to most of the houses not all of them but most of them they had running water in the houses most of the houses had bathroom facilities because they had both fresh water coming in and they had a drainage system that drain into pipes there were underneath the streets and carried off they had drainage what am I trying to say trots along the sides of the roads and everything was angled at very exact angles in order to feed those they had roof drainage that would feed into the street so that would reach that nothing like this was is seen for another 1,500 to 2,000 years the fact that they had running water in houses is as you can imagine quite astonishing four thousand years ago and yet they did so the civilization this is actually a photograph of one of them most because they were rivers most of the cities were elevated someone they would create a platform usually a brick they used baked brick anytime that there might be water at all they sometimes use sundry trick as well but Baker who are much more substantial and you can imagine how substantial these bricks were because four thousand years later the British Army used it to provide the bed for railway trains so they would build up the city and then there would be higher levels yet and the highest level would be the area of a kind of a centralized fortress area but again we have no evidence that they have any military activity in most of the places now where there would have been the cynical there have been religious structures built particularly Buddhist stupas they're called which pain much much later because Buddhism didn't come along till till after the end of this civilization but astonishing city-planning astonishing water control very exact measurement we have we only have the first level of houses in ruins the British knocked them down and used the rest of the floor of the railway station railway lines but there are clear staircases that still exist so we know there were multiple level dwellings that people lived in there were smaller dwellings which would tend to be one room or two rooms they tended to be on the lanes the cross streets the east-west crust reads on the north-south Main streets they would have the larger houses and they would tend to be multiple kinds of rooms with a central courtyard so either collection of families or large family that would have more wealth but apart from that we see no indication in the civilization of any kind of social stratification we don't know what their social order was beyond you know what I've already said so this is an example of what the houses might look like with central staircases in order to keep dust down they never had their their doors or windows facing out on the Main streets but only on the side streets this is a representation of what one of the smaller single-family dwellings might have look like one of the one-room dwellings where you had the sleeping facilities on one side we actually have a couple very small examples of fabric of dyed cotton so we knew they were raising or trading at least for cotton we knew they have the ability to dye things so they were using fabric they we have a lot of ceramics so we knew they were doing in there indications are they had potter's wheel they had developed that technology cooking facilities etc so this is what we want the one-room houses would look like they were very thinkable brick walls so they tended to be cool in the hotter weather they were well sealed from all indication against undhiyo baked brick and they would seal it with ceramic seal just like they made the seals that they imprinted things with this is an example of the seal this is we found more of it we I wasn't there haven't been there yet but I hope to the archaeologists open thousands of these seals that are made out of clay beautifully carved as you can see you know most of them have animal representations on them many of them are bowls or things that we recognize some of them appear to be mythical animals unless maybe there really were unicorns back and rhinos and various other things we also have an alphabet or at least I mean it's not an alphabet it might be logographic in ancient languages there are two kinds of ancient language one is actually an alphabet system which represents sounds like what we have in English you know we have 26 letters and we commit represent sounds and we combine them to make words the logographic is much more like Chinese for instance where they have pictograms that work then actually visually represent things this is much more we believe a pictographic language there is some discussion as to whether they have an actual language or not at all because most of the time on the seals we don't have any written material there's no pathology there's no parchment or papyrus or anything like that none of that has existed only these clay seal ceramic and clay seals but usually they have four or five characters on them we think some sub scholars think these may have been like like a totem representation or something that would indicate the owner since mostly these were used for business they would use these to stamp goods that's why we found them in Mesopotamia in other areas as well there are a lot of these elephant a rhino a dewlap bull as you can see that we have a few symbols at the top here's an example of the civilization this was on a seal where we have people cultivating crops and gathering up crops animals being used in domestic service so we have various indications of what we we consider the marks of civilization there but on these seals we've never been able to we no one has ever been able to translate these symbols we don't have many of them they've identified a little less than 400 of these seal characters overall they've not been able to identify any sequence in them we believe they were written right-to-left because on some of them when you get over the left hand side they squeeze them in a little bit you know you've ever started making a sign you get to the right or the right hand letters have to be thinner because to fit well the indication is they wrote right to left because the left hand side is where you see the evidence of that but we have no one has ever been able to translate this because most times it happens in like five character sets the longest we have is 26 characters even though we've been able to identify what the characters are it's never been translated some scholars believe that it may not have been actually a language so much as just a commercial code like a you know like a barcode some some way to identify whoever the owner of this was for the purpose of commercial trading but we don't know we do have indications this is an example of a horn man in a lotus position a meditation position the end of civilization ended up being or was the foundation later on in the same area they developed the Vedic religion which became the foundation of Hinduism I'll mention that a little bit when I'm this happened want to talk about Hinduism but we have indications of yoga and obviously surrounded by big cats and water buffalos and various other creatures here but we've never been able to trance like that now this is not unique there are other ancient languages that we have a lot more examples of we've never been able to translate in the Minoan culture on Crete they have a language called linear a and we have a lot more of it than we do of the Indus characters they've never been able to translate that it was many many many years before they translated a language collinear beam which was the Mycenaean language and so we continue to have things in the ancient from the ancient times that we're not able to translate I mentioned the ratios virtually everything in this culture was built upon a very strict even scientific ratio these cubes have been found in the number of places in the ruins they are weights that were used in trade and they run on an exact ratio of weight 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 the sixteenth is the most commonly used apparently based upon where and the frequency that that's been found but these would have been used with a scale to weigh out the value you know the weight of something and therefore the value of something these same ratios were used in everything in designing their city grid and designing their bricks and everything else interestingly enough this same kind of idea came down to modern times because until India in the 1950s after gaining their independence from Britain until they re structured their money system there were 16 subunits 2 rupee because even as far back as the end of civilization the 16 was the most commonly used fraction now the weights of these don't match any weights we have today in terms of ounces or anything else but they have found examples of this weight system much much later in other parts of India because we believe that the once it began to collapse the people from the Indus Valley Civilisation traveled to the south and the East into other parts of India and we found evidence of that we also they were also a very artistic culture it's called the dancing girl of moyen mohenjo-daro and when this was first discovered the archaeologist could not believe that a civilization that existed thousands of years before modern time and in fact a long time before great art comes along could could be representative in this way this you know the stand the the fluidity the very human data characteristic of it was unheard of in ancient cultures in most ancient cultures like Mesopotamian culture they tended to draw what amounted to stick figures and you don't see anything like that this figure which is felled the priest King although we have no indication that they had priests or kings it was called the priests King seems to represent based upon the fact that he has a very beautifully patterned fabric across one shoulder he we believe that indicates somebody in a role of leadership they had as I said very active pottery ceramics various other kinds of things that we did not know and that came along as early as that various kinds of jewelry now I will mention that you see the swastika sphere the swastika was an ancient Indian and Asian symbol which meant goodness the fact that it got co-opted by the Nazis gives us a bad taste in our mouth whenever you see a swastika but it's very common in ancient Asian cultures particularly the pre Hindu and Hindu cultures because it was a sign of goodness in fact the the ancient peoples and we believe may be that people who found in the Indus River Civilization are called the areas which in the ancient language means Noble it has nothing to do with the Aryan things that the Nazis you know the Nazis have polluted a lot of those meanings for people we have a lot of toys there are indications obviously they had a wheel the streets are designed so that they could take wheel traffic we have parts we have - Barbie figures we know dolls and furniture for children to play with we have oxen that would leave the car some of the oxen are articulated their heads would turn and various other things so very sophisticated little toys other sculpture that some of which we believe may have been representative of fertility symbols because they're very similar and similar to ancient fertility cults and then a lot of jewelry they were very refined in so to speak in their metallurgy capabilities copper bronze tin nickel various other metals they worked with they mixed them they use them for creation of jewelry and practical tools and things of that sort so a very sophisticated culture four thousand years ago they also were as far as we know the first people to use dice they and they had games of chance and their dice are exactly like our dice there is no difference these were found at mohenjo-daro they also had a very ancient form of chess that they played we have found the chess pieces and the mores so they had leisure time and leisure time is another indication of civilization it was not until people settled down had reliable food sources and food storage there are large gregory's and Harappa and mohenjo-daro we know that they stored food and the granaries were very sophisticated in the way they were designed so that it allowed for ventilation so that the grain would not rot so a very sophisticated culture in that regard and they had free time a sign of civilization this is an example of one of the waterways in mohenjo-daro where they were able to channel water this is another water feature they had public baths we believe the baths might have had a ritual use where people would use them for ritual cleansing ritual cleansing then late becomes a very important part of the hindu faith where to bathe in the Ganges and to pursue other cleansing kind of ritual is very important to them this is like 30 I think it's 38 feet long if I remember correctly it's over 8 feet deep there is a shelf that goes around it so you didn't want to get in over your head you can still walk down in there and walk around we believe that and it's the group the bricks are all sealed with a ceramic seal so that it would have been waterproof there are wells as I told you at in each of the sections of town so that that was the well water was accessible for anyone who didn't have water leading into their house which many did and the houses had drains as I said later on various religious structures were built at these sites either Hindu religious structures are later on still after ashoka the great the great king who spread Buddhism comes along where they built the students but you can see the sophistication of all of this stuff centuries even millennia before we knew anybody had that kind of capability any questions I'll leave that up there for now any questions about that yes Jessica clarification you know you show the swatches picture side then it's going clockwise but the other one counterclockwise right it's used as said Buddhism symbol right witnessin uses a different direction again buddhism jainism sikhism all came out of hinduism and so a lot of symbolism that you will find in those and even some of their you know some of the original religious practice came out of Hinduism originally and Hinduism was based upon the Vedic writings that came in this region right after the Indus Valley Civilisation yes as you explain they're Indians given so did they export the technology since we have evidence that they traded Mesopotamia and elsewhere I'm not aware of any but I would be surprised if there wasn't some transfer of Technology because this area when we talk about the Silk Roads and spice Road which even would have affected this area is somewhat as well that's later but you know this would have been in part of those trade routes more important than the silk and the horses and the spices and things they trade it was the culture technology religion arts etc so I wouldn't be surprised at all that some of this kind of technology would have been communicated to other regions of the world where they were trading as well but I don't have the evidence of that if there isn't that's I'm just not aware of it other questions yes back in the back Oh so what other major cities are in this area now and what was the reservoir of knowledge what what give me where are they doing the work now well there are a lot of people involved in this now I'm not I'm not aware of which one center that is especially their accommodation of british and indian archaeologist since the very first the british investigated it because because masam printed his books in england and got some people interested they went checked it out and later on the english the british government hired some of their army surveyors and archaeologists to check it out and so the british got involved later on the india created an Indian Archaeological Society and they began to investigate it in the 1920s and so it's frequently been a combination of Indian and British I am not sure where the central repository of the various kind of researches now you can bet the British Museum is involved somewhere there but I'm not aware of them other cities that are in this area Lahore is just just north of this Karachi is on the south end of it beyond that I have a look at them out you know I don't know off the top of my head yes in any evidence of burial practices or human remains or that human side of it not that I'm aware of now mohenjo-daro then even the names Harappa they named the Indus civilization city after a local town that was close by the ones that first told messin about that the place mohenjo-daro means mound of the Dead but that was a name that was given to it much much later we have no idea that that was the name you know that they used in their time but I'm not aware of any remains of any kind that they had at that time various cultures have various ways of dealing with the dead and their way made them it's something that did not involve allowing for remains bones and whatnot to to stay the I'll talk about sorrow astron ism this afternoon for instance it's very ancient out of Persia that in the India the day pollution purity and pollution are two huge things to them they believe that a dead body pollutes and so therefore you're not allowed to bury a dead body or historically you are not allowed so instead the towers of silence where if you go on the spiritual legacy you'll see one in Mumbai they would put the dead bodies on the top and the vultures would eat them and once all of the skin was gone you know the bones would be would be ground-up disposed of and if they ever didn't have to bury anything they would have to seal it with a limestone seal so that there was no pollution of the soil because the earth was considered hoping so different cultures have different ways and they may have had a process that involved not leaving any remains that could be found yeah too bad because it's right we find a lot of evidence from human remains any other questions is this fascinating if you all why don't we just go let this turn around we'll go get our milk and check it all out as I say one of the major tributaries to the Indus dried up and we know that the city's there we think that may have been what happened to them but there's still a number of things that we don't know for sure about this culture we we still don't know where the people for sure came from we're still not sure how they develop such advanced technology or and if they trance trance furtive elsewhere we don't know what their language was we don't have written we can't decipher their written language we don't know what their social structure was whether they had rulers or priests what their religious beliefs were and we don't know for sure where they went and why we have indications of that because we have found some of what the artifacts in areas that are South and East in India so we believe they may have migrated because of their drying out well we don't know for sure fascinating place thank you all very much for your attention will be back to set between the car

Channel: LakesideInstitute

Views: 8,052

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Keywords: Windstar, Ross Arnold, Indus River Civilization, India

Id: GE1POy4qX-Q

Length: 40min 26sec (2426 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2017