In previous articles I mentioned my relative ignorance in regards to the Indus Valley civilization and its subcontinental successors. I’ve been attempting to remedy that, but ran into two issues. First was the ignorance of the archaeological community at large given the small amount of collected data. Second was the ignorance of the archaeological community at large due to fanciful projection of utopian ideas on the gaps in the collected data. Because of the additional sites south and east of the Indus valley, the name Harappan civilization is starting to supplant the older Indus Valley civilization. Some have suggested longer, clunkier names to cover more river valleys rather than refer to the city where the civilization was first identified. But these are long and clunky, and not very useful as a quick identifier.
The problem is, the area that the civilization in question resided in – Modern Pakistan and Northern India – was wet at the time the time and still gets annual monsoon rains. This means that pretty much all of the wood, textile, and leather artifacts of the Harappans have rotted away, leaving us with finds of stone, brick, and bone. Most of the bone found was from trash heaps where it gave an indication of their diet. So at the very least, the fabulists can’t claim that the Harappans were vegan, we know better. The bones we don’t have many of are human.
So, before I start on my hypothesis based upon literal minutes of thought, what is it I am proposing is wrong? Academics and armchair archaeologists have looked at what we do have – cities built to precise ratios and mathematic progressions, uniform brick houses with indoor plumbing, no positively identified palaces – and gone off the deep end. They have made assertions that these people were peaceful and egalitarian to downright pacifist or socialist. In short, they are taking absence of evidence as evidence of absence. They see a shortage of weapons and armor and go “they must not have had warriors”. They see uniform brick houses and infer egalitarianism. They cite the fact that we have not yet found palaces or slums as meaning a lack of social classes or central authorities.
Quite frankly, all these assertions strike me as absurd. Not just from an understanding of human nature, but because of the world in which the Harappans lived. They were contemporaneous to the Sumerians, the Elamites and a civilization along the Oxus. Not only that but have been shown to trade with these. If any of their neighbors saw a large, prosperous area with neither arms nor central organization, they’d go “Jackpot” and invade, looting, plundering, and conquering. After all, well-armed and organized enemies didn’t deter them from the same activity on their other borders.
So how do I propose to account for these gaps in the archaeological record? Overlooking the fact that less than five percent of all Harappan sites have been excavated, and the largest excavations have never scoured more than twenty percent of those where focus was concentrated, I have a simple hypothesis. I propose the Harappans practiced cremation.
Why would this explain away all the oddities in one fell swoop? It wouldn’t, but it covers a lot of them. Much of what we know about the culture and military exploits of other civilizations comes from two sources – the written record, and grave goods. We haven’t translated the Harappan script, so we have no written records, and we don’t seem to be able to find Harappan tombs or graveyards. True, these could be hiding in the massive unexcavated portion of their sites, but so could the palaces and armories. But, if the dead were burned and the ashes scattered in the sacred rivers, you find fewer human remains, and there would be no such thing as grave goods due to a lack of graves. Instead of being buried for future archaeologists to find, weapons and armor would get passed down, reused or even melted down to make other goods. They would simply walk off when the sites are eventually abandoned, carried to new areas to continue in the purpose generations of Harappans had put them to.
The handful of spear points that have been found were dismissed offhand as weapons of war due to a lack of a medial ridge. But you don’t need that feature for it to work as a weapon. In a bronze speartip, a medial ridge is there to aid in piercing armor. You can slay enemy foot soldiers without it, as wicker or wooden shields are the extent of the armor most footsloggers had in this era.
What about the supposed egalitarian nature of this society?
This is based entirely on inference from extremely planned settlements. The defining character of the sites studied is that they were built on ground that had been razed flat and done to exacting proportions with a grid of streets whose widths were exact multiples of the narrowest type of street. The houses were all near-identical square courtyarded sites with terra cotta pipes bringing in water. This reeks of a centrally planned city built to the aggrandizement of… something or someone. In fact, in some sites they have found the older settlement underneath the mature site. It is identifiable by using a different size and proportion of brick, and in having been flattened when the new city was built right on top of it.
This is the sort of architecture and urban renewal you get when someone with a strong sense of order is given a great deal of authority. Sure, whoever was billeted in those houses was probably on par with their neighbors, but it could easily be the warrior elite being rewarded by their king. The slums, if not hiding in the unexcavated area, could just as easily have been made of wood, cob, or wattle and daub style architecture, getting washed away by the elements down to easily missed post holes in the soil.
This certainly doesn’t imply such a severe aberration from the broad strokes of other cultures.
I can’t say for certain that my hypothesis is correct, since I do remember that we simply don’t have all the data needed.
The defining character of the sites studied is that they were built on ground that had been razed flat and done to exacting proportions with a grid of streets whose widths were exact multiples of the narrowest type of street. The houses were all near-identical square courtyarded sites with terra cotta pipes bringing in water. This reeks of a centrally planned city built to the aggrandizement of… something or someone.
Or military base.
I thought the default whenever something wasn’t known was to say it “appears to have been important for ritual and religious reasons.”
The Roman model before Rome would be interesting.
The degree of standardization in ratio was a noted feature of these sites. They found what turned out to be ancient rulers marked with finger-witdh units of measure which proved to be 1/108th of the common denominator of the street widths, where 108 had some sacred value in Hinduism, and 108 of these units was also about the height of a man.
Or military base.
My thoughts went that way as well.
Would just floating the bodies down the Indus also work?
Not so much when much of the civilization was actually along the Sarasvati* and Ganges. Plus, that would leave more bones to be found.
*now dried up, leaving a desert where sites have been better preserved
It’s just that intact bodies float better than bones do. Of course if either was placed on a funeral raft, it wouldn’t much matter.
It would still tend to reach a spot where the currents will deposit most of them.
I went with cremation because A: it’s still commonly practiced, and B: there were evidence of pyres uncovered, so there was evidence I could point to.
“Exact ratios” are easy to build to if you use a piece of cordage as your measuring device. See also: crop circles.
Actually kind of timely as I’m watching a video where academics insist they know the full story and shut down any attempt to conduct further research. I’ve brought up the ancient civilization debate before on here with some stopping just short of calling me a crackpot. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The problem is that whenever evidence is found, there is a concerted effort to dismiss (and not in an academic debate sort of way) or even stop the attempt to gather more evidence. So, I take you to Indonesia where Gunung Padang may be 27,000 years old. I say may because excavation attempts were halted after an outcry from supposed academics in the field of archaeology demanded they be halted. Why? Something something we know the full story something something nationalism hergle gurgle arrgh.
I’m not attempting to hijack any thread. Just a general point on what passes for academia. These are not open minds. These are not even particularly clever minds. Just kind of dull NPC types who are incredibly protective of their little fiefdoms. It’s an insular little clique and if you aren’t part of it, you better shut the fuck up and sit down or be labeled a Nazi spreading disinformation.
I know fuck all about ancient India and Pakistan. But land being given as a reward for military service was incredibly common in the ancient world. And the Greeks, Romans, and many others founded military colonies throughout their territories to defend it and to reward citizens for service.
The Romans had very precise methods for allocating plots of land and the layout of colonies, if I’m not mistaken. I’m sure the Greeks had the same.
Basically, it’s called the Roman model above, but the practice definitely predates the Romans. The Persians did it, and they were right next door here. The Phoenicians did it. It’s kind of the no-brainer method of protecting your territories and keeping your followers loyal.
My favorite cruel contrarian physicist on why she’s stepping off the Dark Matter bandwagon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpKZ8HI6Ixc
Since it is only her and myself I was hoping she would be cute. Damn.
There are too many examples to name of us making shit up out of thin air (get it?) to explain gaps in our knowledge.
Ok, too obscure. I was referring to the aether.
Dark matter my. ass. Maybe we need to take a closer look at our measurements.
Thanks for the article. Excellent topic imho.
Semi-relatedly, here’s (well I hope it pastes right) a link to a short old archaeological satire that I read as a kid, and then ordered to have my own copy. Check it out if you’ve never seen it.
https://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-Macaulay/dp/0395284252
I remember bits of that. Wasn’t everything buried under heaps of second-class mail?
Yep. It’s a good little book. Macauley’s a good artist and story-teller.
Yes. I remember that book. I like the bit around “sanitized for your convenience”.
It’s a good book.
“… fanciful projection of utopian ideas on the gaps in the collected data.”
This is a huge problem, not just in archaeology but across the board. In the same way we seek magical cures to things we have little or no control over we also tend to fill in gaps in our knowledge with fanciful nonsense.
“This is Og. He lived 742,192 years ago. He was 5’9″, a bit swarthy, loved blondes and liked faster beat music, while his wife liked the slower stuff. His children became expert hunters…..”
Me – “How do you know all of this?”
“Because this partial tooth we found.”
The Why Files (look it up, for anyone interested in conspiracies and ancient civilizations) covered Neanderthals recently. Basically, a new idea circulating is that Neanderthals were super predators who nearly hunted humans to extinction. I don’t know if the evidence is there for that, but it’s a backlash to the attempt to humanize them that we’ve seen in the last half century or so.
Archaeology assumes a lot with very little sometimes. My biggest annoyance is with the evolutionary psychologists, though.
+1 Just So Stories
Once upon a time in the Pleistocene, Og the Caveman…
I can’t believe that sociologists and psychologists still are confident enough to say anything beyond “We’re not totally sure.” You would have expected that the replication crisis would have humbled them. Apparently they don’t teach self-reflection in colleges anymore
“Fake it until you can no longer collect grant money.”
Tenure or retirement, whichever comes first.
If they are talking about earlier human migrations into Europe, then it’s possible, though I’m not aware of any definitive evidence for them being hunted to extinction. But it does look like the Neanderthals carried on unhindered, while those new humans died off. At least until some new group that apparently had something different about them started spreading all over the world, with Neanderthals disappearing everywhere they showed up.
The timing of the disappearances of earlier non-neanderthal appearances in the north tends to coincide with glacial maxima.
I wonder why.
I suppose it would make sense, being less adapted to the cold.
I’ve often wondered if the bow & arrow is what finally put humans over the top. To our current knowledge, Neanderthals never developed or learned to use them.
In the levant region, the human population was supposedly reduced to ~50 humans according to DNA evidence.
The Neanderthals were most likely killed off by a massive volcanic eruption, and not by humans.
There is a saying in academia; Science advances on death at a time.
Retirement parties for the win!
“Also, it’s not his tooth.
It’s a hypothetical model of what his tooth would have been, based on fragments of other teeth we’ve found.”
based on fragments of other teeth we’ve found from a 400 square mile area and from 75 distinct individuals.
The answer is magic . . . .
Lol.
I’m actually paying a company for the time they’re going to need to quote me a project (writing an operating system/UI for a new tool I’ll be building). They asked me if there were any standards their software would need to conform to. I have no idea. And the entire IT department is set up around answering questions about extant software and preventing non-approved software from getting used. Trying to find someone who even knowns who to ask is kind of hilarious. Though not as much as the first contact, “John Livingston Anandaraj.”
I live in that world as well. I hate it. “Pay us for a quote” and then the absurd questions get dragged out to ensure you pay as much as possible. Nobody hands over a nice neat form anymore. There is no money in that.
I’ve been on the flip side of that as well.
“Why are the calls staying in the queue?”
“You said you didn’t want to have any closed hours on the call flow.”
“But we didn’t want calls to stay in when we’re not open!”
“Why didn’t you bring this up when we were going over the design document?”
“We just assumed it would handle those calls.”
Until the script is deciphered, there’s only so much that can be known from other kinds of evidence. The script has been found on artifacts found in Mesopotamia, so they must have had trade or diplomatic relations with them.
For an unknown language or cipher system, a sample text of at least 130,000 words is needed for decryption.
On a side note, weather reports used to be sent in code. The subscribers would pay for the key to decrypt the reports.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkqBJYiBto
The Harappan script tends to appear only in small, isolated snippets on seals. There are currently no extant texts of any great length to work from.
Well there’s your problem, Vern…
It is still not settled whether the Harappan script represents a full-blown written language. As you said, most of it only appears in small snippets of fewer than 10 characters. The longest known string, IIRC, is about 78 characters long. See (a href=”https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/ejvs/article/view/620″> “The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization” The article is from 2004, but I don’t think much has changed on this topic.
Goddammit. If someone with editing magic can fix the beginning of my link tag, I would be ever so grateful.
I know some historians project silly proto-utopian ideas on the Indus Valley civilization, but no serious historian does that. The Aryans were part of the Harrian Culture and they were extraordinarily violent. The Vendas are one animal sacrifice to the next.
I think it’s interesting to consider the overlap between Zoroastrian belief (with no animal sacrifice) with early Hindu belief (with a ton of animal sacrifice) and how the same peoples (Aryans), allegedly inspired two distinctly different faiths with completely different ceremonies
I had another hypothesis regarding the Aryan Migration, but I haven’t done my fact-checking yet, since I’m also quite ignorant there, but I saw some contradictions, and a possibility that people appeared to be pointedly ignoring.
Oddly enough my next Nietzsche piece will go into this, as he makes some really bad arguments about Teutons that do in fact read like proto-Nazi bullshit.
My hypothesis has nothing to do with anything west of Persia, or later than 1000 BC.
Ah, it was discussion of Aryan migration that triggered my thought.
Yes. One of the more retarded of theories regarding human migration. The fetishization of the Aryans in the mid-19th century to the early 20th century was rather stupid. I suppose if I were the descendant of barbarians I would also come up with a cooler origin story, but the Aryan hypothesis was a silly reach.
One of my lines to the kids in the right circumstances: “Remember that historically/tribally, you’re a Barbarian. You need to be able to act like it.”
If you are not capable of great violence, you are not peaceful. You are harmless.
Well said. The notion that any people are the direct descendants of previous ancient people is fanciful. I understand that all nations to a degree do this (Lebanon and the Phoenicians; Israel and ancient Jews; Italians and the Romans; etc.), but it’s extremely tentative and ignores the long intermixing of all these people throughout the centuries.
Interesting, UCS. I’ve been watching Youtube videos re: the History of Europe, China, etc. They are based on some finds, speculation and SWAGs but I don’t care. Still entertaining . Unlike the IRS pubs that have no relationship to anything other than providing jobs for those unemployable children of other DC patrons.
Excellent article! I like it when you write these up.
Now I must snark:
“The bones we don’t have many of are human.”
It was the Greys. Nasty little aliens who love probing bottoms. The only thing you’ll find are bones that don’t test as human, and lots and lots of oblong stone things. You know what they used them for. Total freaks, those guys.
So, you’re saying it was Aliens?
So are you saying you are an authority on aliens who engage in anal probing?
That is funny, right there.
In 2020 and beyond, the Greys stopped the practice of anal probing because the humans enjoyed and celebrated it, depriving the Grey’s of their watercooler talk on the spaceship on Monday mornings.
Also true. Those dirty little monkeys!
READ THE SKY
RECOGNIZE THE SIGNS
AVOID THOSE MOTHERF*CKERS
Dude. I’m dying.
Obligatory: SPACE SMITH CONFIRMED.
Derpy from the ded-thred: Adjusting for inflation, the median income would be $56,700 today.
Median family income today: $74,580 (2022)
Question – was Derpy’s number the Family median, or the Individual median?
Big difference in those two.
Family, so the median individual income at the time would have been less than $56,700 in today’s dollars.
Just today I saw a headline switch out the comparisons in itself. From memory it was “The average household spends %amount% on bills each month, but the median household income is only %second amount%.”
People are better off in material terms for sure. Yet fertility, divorce, suicide and other rates continue to trend in a bad direction.
At some point, there will be a regression to the social mean.
No doubt, our material existence is bountiful, and our meaningful existence is approaching naught.
The fact that most women work at least part time today accounts for most of the income difference vs 1960.
***
Despite the widespread sentiment against women, particularly married women, working outside the home and with the limited opportunities available to them, women did enter the labor force in greater numbers over this period, with participation rates reaching nearly 50 percent for single women by 1930 and nearly 12 percent for married women. This rise suggests that while the incentive—and in many cases the imperative—remained for women to drop out of the labor market at marriage when they could rely on their husband’s income, mores were changing. Indeed, these years overlapped with the so-called first wave of the women’s movement, when women came together to agitate for change on a variety of social issues, including suffrage and temperance, and which culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 guaranteeing women the right to vote.
Between the 1930s and mid-1970s, women’s participation in the economy continued to rise, with the gains primarily owing to an increase in work among married women. By 1970, 50 percent of single women and 40 percent of married women were participating in the labor force. Several factors contributed to this rise. First, with the advent of mass high school education, graduation rates rose substantially. At the same time, new technologies contributed to an increased demand for clerical workers, and these jobs were increasingly taken on by women. Moreover, because these jobs tended to be cleaner and safer, the stigma attached to work for a married woman diminished. And while there were still marriage bars that forced women out of the labor force, these formal barriers were gradually removed over the period following World War II.
***
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/
Cool topic.
I love to watch the show Unearthed on the Science Channel.
I don’t recall them covering the Harappans, but looking at images of the ruins, that would be a good one.
I do always wonder at how much of the CGI imaging is accurate and how much is based on conjecture.
Lot of conjecture.
It’s funny how “conjecture” basically means to throw something out there.
Well, they do know how much trouble they would get in for “Dicks Out for Harappi”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/pa-man-wins-2-25b-case-against-monsanto-after-developing-cancer/ar-BB1huWO4
JFC.
$2.25B
These lawsuits have to be reigned in to reality levels. What company will do business here when juries and the courts are handing out crazy settlements?
My SIL is part of a class action suit. She got two kinds of cancer. She was practically bathing in the stuff when she worked for our local parks department while in college.
Supposedly an egalitarian society of nonwarriors eh? In the days of conquer or be conquered and mass slavery of the conquered? Sounds like wish fulfillment on the part of modern academics to me because the world was just as sink or swim then as during the Roman days and they would’ve lasted a week.
Even that seems generous.
It takes time for the invading army to cross that much land.
You watched Apocalypto too, huh?
That movie might not have been accurate, but it is one of my favorites.
The dude with the jawbone helmet was a great bad guy.
That was one of the few movies I’ve seen in a theater by myself. It’s one of my favorites too.
Last movie I saw alone was when I was 20, it was Gladiator, and I watched it twice in a row.
I do not recall the last time I was in an actual theater.
I was last in a theater in 2008. My Dad was visiting and wanted to go. We saw Crystal Skull. I’ve not been back since.
Obligatory.
Oh Lord! I don’t think any movie I could recommend would take the sting of paying for Crystal Skull from your head.
One of the things that really did happen when Cortez landed was that every who had a beef with the crazy human-sacrificing regime flocked to his side.
Foreign power who will work you to death and rip your heart out, or foreign power who will work you to death…
A real world example of that: the Māori extermination of the Moriori.
***
Early Moriori formed tribal groups based on eastern Polynesian social customs and organisation. Later, a prominent pacifist culture emerged; this was known as the law of nunuku, based on the teachings of the 16th century Moriori leader Nunuku-whenua.[12] This culture made it easier for Taranaki Māori invaders to nearly exterminate them in the 1830s during the Musket Wars. This was the Moriori genocide, in which the Moriori were either murdered or enslaved by members of the Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama iwi,[13] killing or displacing nearly 95% of the Moriori population.
The Moriori, however, were not extinct, and gained aroha and recognition as New Zealand’s second indigenous people during the next century.
***
So they bounced back with the white devil’s help.
How’d they manage with each other before white folks showed up en masse? Was there always genocidal desire but the largescale propagation of firearms allowed that to be fulfilled or was there another dynamic?
It was the guns mostly. Guns increased competition for land and slaves, and so it became worthwhile to conquer a relatively distant and poor tribe.
Think of it like panic buying. The Moriori were like the nearly expired milk at the back of the cooler.
Dude, before the white man showed up, they lived in complete harmony. Then honkey-san showed up with his tricknology, and forced brother to kill brother.
You kid, yet the myth of the noble savage refuses to die.
Also, the Māori, like many similar tribes, had a much higher death rate from violence than industrialized societies.
***
From the Classic period warfare was an important part of Māori culture. This continued through the contact period and was expressed during the 20th century by large groups of volunteers in the First and Second world wars.[236][237] Currently Māori men are over-represented in the New Zealand Army, Navy and private military organisations.[238][239] New Zealand’s army is identified as its own tribe, Ngāti Tūmatauenga (Tribe of the War God).[240]
***
Sorry, hippies. Game over. Insert coin and try again.
I know when I’m tired, cold, and hungry I’m not exactly a peaceful kind of guy. When that is your default state just think of how peaceful you would be. Or in the words of Quark from DS9
Quark : “Let me tell you something about hu mons, nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time, and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.
Mencius said human nature is like water: it takes the shape of the container it’s in.
I agree with that mostly. There are always a few renegades.
It is weird how they were peaceful and non-warlike and yet they imparted a faith that distinguished people by caste and made warriors the highest caste.
My UK counterpart, some 40 years ago, was anthropologist Richard Leakey’s brother in law. He told a few tales about competition in the academic ranks that involved destruction of reputations and actual assault over interpretations of a bone shard.
Wait! That’s not a bone fragment!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/feb/20/its-not-a-darning-tool-its-a-very-naughty-toy-roman-dildo-found
The Vindolanda phallus is 16cm long but, researchers say, was probably larger because archaeological wood is prone to shrinkage and warping.
It was COLD.
Also, people were smaller.
Hell, a famous paleontologist named Walcott helped forge Langley’s flying machine to keep the Wright brothers’ plane out of the Smithsonian:
***
In light of the Wright brothers patent war and to discredit the Wright brothers, Glenn Curtiss in 1914 helped Walcott secretly make major modifications to a failed aerodrome built in 1903 by Professor Samuel Langley to make it appear able to fly. After the flight demonstrations, Walcott ordered the Langley machine be restored to its 1903 condition to cover up the deception before it was put on display.[10][11] It took until 1928 for the Smithsonian Board of Regents to pass a resolution acknowledging that the Wright brothers deserved the credit for “the first successful flight with a power-propelled heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.”[12][13]
***
Yeah, the real one folded up and dunked poor Manley in the river. Damn shame though, that engine he designed was incredibly powerful for the time.
Your hypothesis is as good as anyone else’s. It should be out there, getting tested.
Bro brought up how strong the desire is to suppress alternate theories. I often thought that was people trying to protect their grant money instead of trying to find the truth. I think that issue has wrought tremendous destruction on all branches of science since WWII.
I often thought that was people trying to protect their grant money instead of trying to find the truth.
Incentives – how do they fucking work, so well.
Starbucks has learned nothing from the Olestra debacle.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/30/lifestyle/starbucks-olive-oil-oleato-drinks-dubbed-laxative-launch-in-us/
Olive oil? In coffee? Some of you more cultured people will have to explain that to me.