then write about your favourite civilization indus valley
Answers
The Indus civilisation seems to have flourished for 700 years without armour, weapons, inequality or royalty.
Its 54 cities are governed by educated officials and an elected-for-life prince. Although war hasn’t been abolished, it is used only as a last resort. People see no glory in fighting, and capture enemies rather than kill them. This is the original Utopia – the pagan, communist and pacifist world sketched out exactly 500 years ago in Thomas More’s eponymous work of fiction.
More’s book has exerted a powerful pull on our imaginations – not least through utopian science fiction. But in a world of autocracy, fanaticism and terrorism, it seems as far from reality as ever. Indeed, arguments still rage about his true intention. His title, derived from the ancient Greek ou-topos – meaning “no place” – is a pun on eu-topos, “good place”. Was More proposing a blueprint of an ideal society or satirising the self-interest, greed and military exploits of the hereditary monarchies
One mysterious, ancient society might give the lie to that. The civilisation of the Indus valley is the most enigmatic of the four great early civilisations. But while Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt and ancient China gloried in warfare, it seems absent from the Indus valley.
The Indus civilisation flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BC. More than a thousand settlements have been found covering at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan, India and Afghanistan (see map), yet its remains were only discovered in the 1920s. It is now regarded as the beginning of Indian civilisation and possibly the origin of Hinduism.
Indus craftsmen created complex stone weights for commerce and long, precision-drilled carnelian beads for jewellery. Thousands of small sealstones have also been found; worn around the neck, merchants would have used them to stamp their identity on clay tags. Each one is carved with an exquisite but mysterious script, which has provoked more than a hundred published attempts to decipher its language – with little consensus.
Other aspects of the civilisation are even more perplexing. The chief cities show no clear signs of being fortified. No armour and no indisputably military weapon – as opposed to knives, spears and arrows designed for hunting animals – has been found. Nor is there evidence of the horse, an animal well suited to raiding parties, which later became common in the region. In nearly a century of excavations, archaeologists have uncovered just one depiction of humans fighting, and it is a partly mythical scene showing a female deity with the horns of a goat and the body of a tiger
The Indus civilisation had extensive lands ranging from river plains and coastlines to hills and mountains. Copious water flowed year-round down the Indus river and its four main tributaries, unlike the unreliable annual Nile inundation in Egypt. Raw materials were plentiful, including timber, semi-precious stones, and copper and other metals. And two growing seasons, arising from its winter cyclonic system and its summer monsoon system, would have provided abundant food. Egypt and Mesopotamia weren’t so lucky.
So what eventually happened to the Indus civilisation? In the late 1920s, a group of 14 skeletons was unearthed in Mohenjo-daro, apparently caught in the act of fleeing the city. The discovery led to theories that migrants from Central Asia had attacked the Indus civilisation and initiated its decline: after flourishing for seven centuries, the peace-loving people met a violent end. But forensic study in the 1980s revealed that these victims died from malaria or other diseases, rather than massacre.