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Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
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Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#32I'm confused by the dating in the article. It refers to an ancient Buddhist stupa towering over the streets, but later says the city was abandoned by 1700 BCE. This would be over 1,000 years before the founding of Buddhism. Or am I missing something?
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#33As an ancient civilization with an undeciphered script, Indus Valley Civ. is mired in controversy and claims Religion wise though article claims an Egyptian link which is new to me, it has some clear Hindu associations like the Pasupathinath seal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal Script wise the contention and claim also comes from Tamil and Sanskrit. TED talk on this below https://youtu.be/kwYxHPXIaao
Pashupati is much, much older than modern concept of Hinduism. Many cultures around the time had a "Master of Animals" motif depicted l in their cultural artifact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Animals You could call Rudra/Shiva as modern versions of that motif. But calling the figure in Pashupati seal as depecting a Hindu deity is probably not correct. IVC was pre-vedic after all. No doubt later cultures…
Hinduism is Vedic + IVC + other indigenous belief systems
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#34I find it interesting that the cities of the Indus Valley Civilization had sewage systems and most of the houses had toilets. This knowledge seems to have gotten lost with the decline of their civilization. Some time the Indus Valley Civilization disappeared, some of their cities got reinhabited by other peoples, but they didn't use the sewage system and apparently didn't figure out what it was.
The same happened with the Romans where I live, in present-day Romania and the former province of Dacia. Back when they were here, around 100-200 AD, they used to have villas with heated floors.
Once they left for good, in the late 200s - early 300s, no-one around these parts of the world had houses with heated floors for at least 1500 years. I'd say that in the early 1700s a local ruler was the first one who had such a system installed in its Bucharest court, meaning the first one after the Romans.
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#35I got interested in Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) while following a rabbit hole of trying to understand the population admixture of Indians. It is a truly fascinating civilisation. Here are some titbits that I found really interesting. At it peak it was a spread over a truly gigantic geographical space. However the city architectures followed nearly same blue print. Which points to the existence of some kind of cen…
Get the book by David Reich from 2018. He basically has solved the question of Indian genetic origins.
In a nutshell, IVC is original inhabitants of India + Iranian pastoralists, today called dravidians.
Aryans came in to this mix about 2000 years later.
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#36I'm confused by the dating in the article. It refers to an ancient Buddhist stupa towering over the streets, but later says the city was abandoned by 1700 BCE. This would be over 1,000 years before the founding of Buddhism. Or am I missing something?
> 1922 that R D Banerji, an ASI officer, believed he saw a buried stupa, a mound-like structure where Buddhists typically meditate. This led to large-scale excavations –...
The officer initially believed it to be a Buddhist stupa. Excavation revealed the true historicity. A platform is easy to be mistaken with a stupa, without more context.
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pashupati is much, much older than modern concept of Hinduism. Many cultures around the time had a "Master of Animals" motif depicted l in their cultural artifact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Animals You could call Rudra/Shiva as modern versions of that motif. But calling the figure in Pashupati seal as depecting a Hindu deity is probably not correct. IVC was pre-vedic after all. No doubt later cultures…
Hinduism is Vedic + IVC + other indigenous belief systems
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This is called the “Hindu synthesis”.
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While ancient writings often reveal the secrets of civilisations, this has not been the case with Mohenjo-daro, whose inhabitants used what's known as the Indus Valley Script. "It was a pictographic language with more than 400 signs. It is still not decoded," said my guide Solangi. Unless a written record of its name can be found and deciphered, that name will probably endure.
The Article mentions it was on trade routes all over Central Asia. Its name must be mentioned in other languages in other ancient cities. Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc would have mentioned this place by name.
There are often cases where we know a dead civilization exists in the archaeological record in a particular place, but with no surviving texts buried there documenting the place's name; and we know that references to a place that sound like they're talking about that dead civilization, exist in other civilizations' surviving contemporaneous texts; but we can't be sure the references are talking about the particular place/civilization that we've found archaeological records of.
One good example: is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Punt the same civilization as / continuous with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Aksum ? There's a lot of "circumstantial evidence" for that conclusion, but nothing definitive.
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#39Is Mohenjo-daro really something that most of people never heard of?
I admittedly forgot most of the details about it, but I remember it being mentioned in my history classes in the primary school (in 80s Yugoslavia)...
Re: Pakistan's lost city of 40k people
#40The article focuses a bit too much on the city and not enough on the civilization that it was a part of. I guess the fact that it's in the Lost Civilizations series is an indicator? Anyway, for those not in the know – the city at Mohenjodaro is part of the rather extensive Indus Valley/Harappan Civilization that was contemporary with the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations (~3000BC onwards). The reasons for its d…
> The reasons for its decline aren't particularly well understood.
another victim of the bronze age collapse that we can't explain fully.