The Indus Valley Civilization: India’s Mysterious and Ancient Past
We know a lot about some ancient civilizations. We’ve dug up their ruins, deciphered their language, and understood their cultures at a deep level. Other ancient civilizations are a bit more mysterious. One of the most mysterious is the Indus Valley Civilisation. They were as old as Egypt but almost triple the area across India and South Asia. They had hundreds of sophisticated centrally planned cities, traded with Egypt and the other great ancient civilizations, and lasted for at least 2,000 years. However, we can’t really seem to find anything about their culture. They didn’t have any great tombs like Egypt or temples like Sumeria or really anything that indicates they had rulers at all. They may not have even had a written language. Instead, we find masses of small, well-crafted toys and jewelry. Let’s dive in, to the Indus Valley civilization.
The Indus Valley: The mystery
The Indus Valley civilization existed from 3,300 BCE to 1,300 BCE. It is named after the Indus Valley river system, where many of the first sites were identified. There are over one thousand known sites, with hundreds of them being major cities. The artifacts found across the sites are all remarkably similar – the same pottery, jewelry, toys – they clearly mass-produced and traded a lot of their wares. This was not a few random city-states that banded together, it was a sophisticated civilization.
At its height, the civilization seemed to cover almost all of South Asia from Turkey to India. The main site is the “Harappan” site, so they are sometimes referred to as the Harrapan civilization. They potentially had a population of up to 5 million, making them much larger than Sumer, maybe even larger than Egypt. The world only had about 20 million people in total at the time. That gives you a sense of how massive they were and how important to the story of humans on Earth they should be.
We know much less about the Indus Valley civilization than we know about Egypt and Sumer. For instance, we cannot read their language, as we can with Sumer and Egypt (see our post on Sumerian here). We know the Indus people had an intricate system of symbols, we find them on doorways and seals across all of their cities. However, if these symbols are a language, it is a really weird language. There seem to be over 600 of these symbols and most of these inscriptions are only four or five symbols in length. The longest inscription we have ever uncovered over their entire 2,000-year civilization is 26 symbols. They also wrote incredibly small, for some reason, they would often fit 20-ish symbols in a few centimeters on one of these stamps. This is all so weird that some researchers have genuinely suggested that maybe that didn’t have an actual written language, instead, this was a pseudo-labeling system, something like tribal symbols that operated as family crests. We really don’t know what is going on here.
Because of this lack of language, we also don’t know a lot about their Government, or how they ordered themselves. The cities are laid out in grids – very neat grids – suggesting they were well organized. The cities are also all quite consistent, implying that it’s quite likely they co-ordinated and traded a lot. The Indus people actually had some of the most precise weights and measurement systems in the world at the time – much further ahead of Egypt and Sumer. But we have no evidence of any specific kings or people or ruling structures – such as the Pharos in Egypt. There are no big central temples or tombs that signify a particular person was more important or some kind of leader. In fact, we don’t have a single thing we can reliably identify as a name in Indus Valley. But there must have been some? Somewhere?!? We don’t know. Archeology is hard.
The Indus Valley: What we do know
We have some beautiful art from the Indus Valley civilization. We know they had incredibly sophisticated craftsmen who worked in all sorts of materials, shells, ceramics, bronze, beads. The level of sophistication, and the amount of material means there must have been hundreds of these craftsmen in every city. They also made intricate jewelry, often from gold including necklaces and bangles. However, unlike a lot of other civilizations, none of the art is particularly “glorious” or imperial. It doesn’t turn up in big lavish tombs or graves, it just turns up around the city in different people’s houses. It seems to have all been, just owned by normal people. Small parts of beautiful, ordinary, human life.
Probably the only other thing we really know about the Indus Valley civilization is that they traded. A lot. Much of the raw material the Indus people used for their art was not found locally. Similarly, a lot of Indus art is found thousands of miles away in Egypt and Sumer. To facilitate this trade they had a large network of cities across Asia and lots of different technologies. They were probably the first culture to invent the wheel, having a large number of wooden carts pulled by an ox (a bit ahead of Sumer). They also had boats, lots of boats, and probably built and dredged a large number of canals to allow for trade up and down the coast.
This is something that is easy to gloss over. But let’s pause for a second. An ancient Indian civilization was trading with the ancient Middle East. This is incredible. We view distances very differently in the modern world. A lot of us have been on planes and trains so we think of going from one part of the world to another as a bit of a trivial thing. But in the ancient world, it was not. Moving goods from one place to another was slow and difficult – you would have had to go by boat or by a cart pulled by oxen.
Now, just because they were trading doesn’t mean that people from the Indus Valley regularly traveled to Egypt. What is more likely is just that there was a large trade network between Indus and Egypt, with people living along with it. One trader would take their goods a certain way along, then sell them, buy some of their own and take them back to the Indus Valley to sell. While this makes it sound more plausible, it also makes it more amazing – think how many people and cities are needed to stretch between Egypt and India? It is still incredible to think that even back 5,000 years ago, humanity was connected and talking.
The Indus Valley: What to take away
It’s really hard to write about the Indus Valley civilization – because of how little we know about them. But there are a few things we can easily take away.
Firstly, it is just incredible that there can be a 5,000-year-old civilization that lived for 2,000 years and most people don’t know about it. We like to think of ourselves as pretty educated and worldly in the 21st century. However, we clearly don’t know the history of our planet as well as we would like to think.
The English language has been spoken for about 500 years ago. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were even more recent. The Indus Vally civilization lasted for 2,000 years. That is four times as long. And despite that, they seem to have entered and exited the history books barely leaving a splash in popular consciousness. Obviously, it’s all pretty tricky when you can’t read the language. But really, that should make it more exciting, more mysterious.
Imagine how many other civilizations are out there? How many more ruins we have left to discover? The world is still so full of mystery and wonder. You just need to pay attention.
