What Was The Indus Valley/Harappan Civilisation?

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In British India in the 1920's odd stone seals kept popping up at ruins near Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro along the Indus river valley. They baffled everyone, with their inscriptions in a never before seen written language. Archaeologists, intrigued by this, started excavating these previously ignored sites.

They soon uncovered a 4,500-year-old civilisation. A civilisation completely absent in the historical record. One of the earliest urban civilizations in human history. It flourished alongside Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China around 3300-1900BCE but was bigger than all of them. A civilisation that built wonders not to gods or kings but to sanitation. A civilisation without war. Made up of massive planned cities built in brick. Masters of bronze and sculpture. They created their own writing system, traded across the vast sea, and possibly invented the world’s first indoor toilets and then vanished for reasons still not understood.

So what was this civilisation in the Indus Valley, what did they achieve, and what does it have to do with rubber duckies? Well let’s find out.

Head to https://www.harappa.com/ to learn more!


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India’s Ancient Past by R.S. Sharma - https://amzn.to/3etINtj
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Climate change and the course of global history a rough journey by John L Brooke - https://amzn.to/2Am2LaE
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Allchin, Bridget, and Raymond Allchin The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan - https://amzn.to/3dqDDOZ
Bellwood, Peter First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies - https://amzn.to/2XegYQb


https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/42/4/339-342/131549
https://www.nature.com/news/two-hundred-year-drought-doomed-indus-valley-civilization-1.14800#b1
https://phys.org/news/2014-02-decline-bronze-age-megacities-linked.html
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https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/an-ancient-civilization-upended-by-climate-change/?_r=0
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https://archive.org/details/peacefulrealmri00mcin
https://www.sciencealert.com/climate-change-likely-caused-the-collapse-of-an-ancient-civilisation-4-000-years-ago
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-we-still-cant-read-the-writing-of-the-ancient-indus-civilization
https://www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5892/
https://web.archive.org/web/20110903114242/http://asi.nic.in/asi_exca_2007_dholavira.asp
Belcher, William R. 1997. “Ancient Harappa in 3-D.” www.harappa.com/3D/index.html.
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. 1996. “Around the Indus in 90 Slides.” www.harappa.com/indus/indus0.html.

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