amazing discoveries

www.mysteryofindia.com in the 19th century india was regarded as themother of civilizations but the great civilizations could only be the middle eastern, egyptian. mortimer wheeler, one of the great british archaeologists in india called india "the cinderella civilization" because it was the last born. some even thought it a pale copyof mesopotamian civilisations before it was realised that it was in fact unique

when the archaeologists started to dig they found nothing resembling the mesopotamian civilizations. but they soon realised they were uncovering huge cities some sites cover 200 to 300 hectares. in area, mohenjodaro area is probablythe largest of all ancient cities. big rivers were vital to the growthof the indus civilization as they areto all agrarian civilizations. the rivers facilitate agriculture. which then feeds the cities

where a new,non-peasant population appears, a population of labourersand craftsmen.. in the past, indusspread across a huge plain which was cultivated the risk of one's fieldsdisappearing every year. we have a fairly good ideaof the strength of their economy. the great cities of the indusespecially harappa and mohenjo daro. had well-developed crafts that produced items only this civilization could make

like particular types of near-industrial ceramics not to mention all that's been lost. the indus civilization must haveproduced a lot of textiles. of food processed using the technologies of the time. no traces remain of all thateverything disappeared. but today, some of its productswuold qualify as industrial-quality merchants hung them around their neckand they were widely used. one problem with the indus civilization is that its people wrote

we know that we have thousands of documents but they wrote on perishable media so we don't have thier writings only what we'd call street signs signs on key rings everything that remained solid while the other media disappeared. so we do not know.we have no text.

so we saw a civilizatione emerge that had writing but we thoughtit was just for magic rituals when in fact it probably had a political and administrative system like egypt and mesopotamia. clearly, so long as we can'tdecipher the writing which means findinga text that is long enough to decipher with the classic techniques we won't even knowwhat language they spoke. the maritime tradeof the indus civilization

has been studiedover the past 20 years or so. we know that rivers were usedfor trade between the indus cities. its maritime trade is more is tricky we know that the items from the indusreached the oman peninsula. that is, today's united arab emiratesand oman as well as bahrain and mesopotamia. more than that wetexts of mesopotamia a text by sargon of akkadfrom around 2300 bc saying that in his harbour were ships from dilmun

which is the quwait-qatar regioncentered on bahrain... boats from mogantoday's oman penisula and from meluhhathe land of indus. it was probablymultilateral a trade involving people from whole region it seems that the firstpeople tp take the sea were not the people from the indus. we must bear in mind that today's indus delta is subject to hude tides

its exteremely difficult to navigate and its sea coastis also very difficult to navigate but at some stage everyone took the sea and at that time in the middle of the third milennium bc a time of increasedinternational trade like the trade in jewellery for example, large carnelian beads which only people from indusknew how to make it

but also the trade in fabricsincluding precious fabrics produced and exchanged in both the indus and mesopotamia. and also all sorts of goods that came from afar like combs made of ivoryand all sorts of other items from as far as the jungles of the ganges valley how did these people communicate? a sumerian text from mesopotamiaaround 2000 bc mentions a translator from meluhha who spoke the languages of the indus and sumeria.

pity, he didn't leave dictionary but we must imaginethat this whole ancient world where people constantly exchanged things it was multilingual. it's in our world that people now speak a single language ​​plus english. in that ancient world a language was often spoken by just a few thousands people. the neighboring group spoken a different language.

so all these peoplehad to be able to communicate. how did the indus civilization vanish? first, it did notsuddenly disappeared. what we know is that from a certain date that can be established around 2000 bc something we call "regionalisation" occured. this vast cultural unity was replaced by regional entities that lasted quite a while large cities were abandoned. that's certain.

that happens quite often. and the reason that big citiesare abandoned is that the way society funtions can no longer support them economically. but this does not meanthe people just left. it means they have started live differently iin a manner less visible to archaeology. the problem that archaeologistscan't see everything.