In 1820, British explorer Charles Mason came across mysterious ruins.
He has discovered the first evidence of the existence of the lost city of Harappa.
Thirty years later, in 1856, railroad engineers found bricks along the route,
but ignored them and moved them to continue railroad construction.
In the 1920s, archaeologists finally began excavating and uncovering the sites of the cities of Harappa,
Mohenjo-daro, and Lothal.
A long-forgotten Indus Valley civilization has been discovered.
Modern scholars refer to these cities as the metropolises of antiquity.
The latest scientific discoveries show that the Indus Valley Civilization,
also known as the Harappan Civilization, is older than the Egyptian Civilization,
which dates back to between 7000 - 3000 BC.and Mesopotamian from 6500 - 3100 BC.
Scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (ASI) claim that the Harappan civilization
arose at least 8,000 years ago, and not 5,500 years ago, as previously thought.
The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
"We recovered what is probably the oldest pottery in the world, using optically stimulated luminescence technology,
from potsherds left by this culture 6,000 years ago, and also from material
excavated from cultural layers over 8,000 years old,"
says the head of the department in Geology and Geophysics at ASI Anindya Sarkar.
The Harpian civilization is said to have occupied an area of about 800,000 sq km (497,097mi),
vastly exceeding the territories of the early states of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
In the valley of the Indus, archaeologists have found traces of an even more ancient civilization
that existed before the Harappan for about a thousand years.
"At the excavations, we saw beautifully preserved all the cultural layers of the preceding Indus Valley
Civilization phases from 9000-8000 BC.
to a level we classified as early 8000–7000 BCE, and then the mature Harappan civilization
of 3500–2200 BCE,” says Sarkar.
But the Harappan civilization is still shrouded in mystery. Many questions remain unanswered.
Why can't experts decipher the found writing?
Scientists still do not understand the reason for the sudden disappearance of the Harappans.
They do not know where the people of this advanced civilization have gone.
Stay till the end of the video to find the answers to these questions.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Let's first go back about 11,000 years in time and see where the Harappans came from.
Also known as the Saraswati Sindhu Civilization, it flourished in the Indus River Valley.
Until now, it has not been precisely established to which race
the representatives of this civilization belonged or what language they spoke.
Some scholars suggest that the inhabitants of the Indus Valley were a Semitic people similar to the Sumerians.
Others believe that the Harappan civilization was ethnically close to the Indo-Aryans,
who settled in the territories of India much earlier - not around 2000 BC, but around 3600.
But most historians are opinion that the Saraswati Sindhu people were Dravidians,
that is, representatives of the Negro-Australoid race.
Today, the Dravidians live only in the southern part of India.
Before the discovery of Harappa, it was believed that when the Aryans invaded Hindustan, the Dravidian peoples,
very backward in their development, were pushed to the south,
and in the north they submitted to the invaders.
The Dravidians became agriculturists and servants and the Aryans became the elite of society.
However, if the Harappan civilization was indeed created by the Dravidians,
it disproves all theories that claim that they were semi-savage jungle dwellers.
Perhaps the story of the Aryan invasion of India would be more like a comparison,
not a story of conquest, but of the destruction of the Roman Empire by the barbarians.
The architectural development of this ancient civilization has been compared to that of Paris in the 20th century.
We take a look at how this ancient civilization lived.
The ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro show that the civilization was technologically advanced with
knowledge of effective municipal administration and town planning.
The architecture shows the world's first urban sewage systems.
The cities also have a sewage management system
that is much better than many places in India and Pakistan today.
The well-planned street network and complex drainage system indicate
that the inhabitants of the ancient cities of the Indus Civilization were skilled urban planners
who placed importance on water management.
The towns have open wells and almost every house has a clearly marked bathing area and a covered drainage system.
Of particular interest is the great bath of Mohenjo-Daro - a water basin built on a mound,
surrounded by walls of baked bricks.
This pool and another one at Dolavira show that the locals valued hygiene highly.
There are even small changing rooms that surround the Grand Bathroom,
with a bathroom area in each room!
A commercial network is developed in the cities.
Seals and weights for drawing goods recovered from the ruins of several cities give an indication
of a very high level of commercial activity.
Barter trade was very important to the Indus civilization and their main trading partner Mesopotamia.
There is evidence that people in Mesopotamian cities, such as Ur, possessed Harappan luxury goods
such as beads, pottery, weapons, and small carved bones.
The grain granaries, massive buildings with strong brick foundations
and nests for wooden superstructures, which were found in the excavations of Harappa,
Mohenjo-Daro and Rakhigarhi, prove that agriculture was developed.
All barns were built near the river bank so that with the help of boats the grain could be easily transported.
The Great Granary at Harappa has a series of circular brick platforms which were probably used for threshing grain.
The city's prosperity and growth is evident in the artifacts: beads, jewelry, and pottery found in almost every house,
as well as the city's baked brick constructions themselves.
Not everyone was rich, but even the poor probably had enough to eat.
The absence of a large quantity of weapons indicates that the Indus people had few enemies
and preferred to live in peace. Numerous artefacts speak of a rich cultural life – terracotta,
steatite and metal figurines of girls in dancing poses show the presence of skillful craftsmanship
in creating the small sculptures.
The most interesting and famous figurines recovered from the Indus Valley
excavations are the bronze dancing girl, the steatite bearded priest-king, and the terracotta cart.
This civilization had 2 centers, which are supposed to have a population of more than
100 thousand inhabitants each: the cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.
It is not clear whether they were the capitals of two different states or two major cities of one state.
The question of exactly how they were organized remains open.
On the one hand, archaeological finds show great inequality in these cities.
Rich neighborhoods where the elite lived and poor shacks strictly separated from the neighborhoods of the rich.
Clearly there was a class structure in society.
But the question of who lived in these barracks - free and poor serfs or slaves - remains unanswered.
Moreover, there is no evidence that power was in the hands of a single ruler.
There is a theory that the cities had a republican system.
the Harappan script has not yet been deciphered.
A huge number of written texts have been discovered,
the structure of which indicates a high degree of development of written culture.
The Harappan writings use about 400 symbols, some of which denote sounds and syllables,
some of which represent words, like Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It is impossible to decipher this writing, if only because it is completely
incomprehensible what language it was and what language group it belonged to.
Even assuming that the Harappans were Dravidian,
the huge problem is that the Dravidian languages did not have a written language until the Middle Ages.
That is why today it is difficult for scholars to imagine the Dravidian languages even thousands of years ago.
The problem can be solved by finding a bilingual symbol or text. But so far this has not happened.
This advanced civilization began to crumble around 1700 BC.
Archaeologists have long wondered about the sudden decline of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Pottery fades, new buildings in cities are smaller than old ones,
construction no longer follows the same strict plans, but is chaotic.
From here, archaeologists and those familiar with the Harappan civilization have dozens of theories.
We will share with you only a few of the most common ones.
Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts
believe that the Harappans began to leave the big cities en masse.
The inhabitants left the Indus Valley and settled in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The specialists analyzed data on deposits along the Pakistani coast.
Fragments of ancient DNA were identified,
on the basis of which they compared the nutrient content of seawater during the summer and winter seasons.
During winter monsoons that blow in from land, organic matter rises from the ocean depths to the surface.
This leads to active reproduction of plant and animal organisms.
In summer, the winds weaken significantly.
According to the scientists, from 2500 BC,
deposition began to decrease during the summer monsoons that blow from the ocean.
Conversely, the winter monsoons intensified. The drought had its adverse effect on agriculture.
Farmers were forced to move to the foothills of the Himalayas, where water was less, but there was no drought.
Another version is that rivers like the Indus and the Gahra-Hakkar change their courses.
It shares an unfortunate combination of climate change and an outbreak
of an epidemic of tuberculosis and other viral infection as a result of which people begin to flee from large megacities.
This leads to cultural decline as we see violence on the order of street fights, gangs,
starvation and fewer and fewer examples of writing.
There is no evidence that the city of Harappa was ever burned, flooded,
besieged by an army, or taken by force from within.
Until we decipher the writing of the Harappan civilization,
we will hardly ever know exactly what led to the collapse of one of the most advanced ancient civilizations,
which existed for several millennia without wars.
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