8 ms·

Indus Valley Civilization’s Collapse Explained

143 points by daegloe 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago
The interesting submitted article refers to "and as-yet undeciphered writing," but there is considerable controversy about whether or not the Indus Valley script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script is a writing system at all, rather than the kind of ornamentation from a pre-proto-writing stage known in several other sites of ancient civilizations. (As a reality check, we can remember that several regions of the world had elaborate empires and cities with extensive trade routes but without writing.) Some of the controversy about this issue arises because of the extreme sensitivity of cultural heritage claims in south Asia in a region that spans a heavily militarized border. A good popular book about the nature and origin of writing systems in general, worldwide, is Visible Speech by John DeFrancis, http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077 http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co... and the definitive compilation of international research on writing systems to the date of publication is The World's Writing Systems http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/dp/0195079930/ http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d... edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright and published in 1996. I haven't concluded absolutely that the Indus Valley Script could not be a writing system, but there is no sure evidence that it is, and the earliest attested writing system in a nearby region is the Brahmi script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script that is much more recent in time (a few centuries older than the common era, that is approximately 2,300 years old) and unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East.
- rd108 14y ago
  Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing vs. "a kind of ornamentation"? Your comment smacks of condescension but I'm sure you can just provide citations. Your (wikipedia) article contains some arguments based on relative frequency of symbols, but is controverted by studies of modern pictographic languages with similar characteristic (e.g. Chinese.) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165 You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please? The real controversial implication, IMHO, of studying ancient Indian languages is that Sanskrit (used over thousands of years and refined by rigid grammar rules by e.g. Panini 500 B.C.) may actually be the language from which Latin, and hence many European Romantic languages, developed. http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-european-languages-says-prof-dean-brown/ http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-eu... That's probably worth diving into, if you are genuinely curious. As the Welsh linguist Sir William Jones said, "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." [edit- link added and fluff redacted. :)]
  - meepmorp 14y ago
    > You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please? Brahmi and Karoshthi (the two major origin scripts for the writing systems of the subcontinent) are generally accepted to be related to the Semitic writing systems. Source: an undergraduate class in writing systems several years ago; also, the relevant Wikipedia pages agree, giving Aramaic as the parent script.
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing Yes. Again, this is a familiar issue to people who are familiar with linguistics, and one of the criticisms of the Rao et al. publication is that none of the authors are familiar with the methodology used in historical linguistics to solve comparable problems in other parts of the world. (I am able to read ancient Chinese and am intimately familiar with the history of the Chinese script, which is an illuminating example for comparing periods of early ornamentation, proto-writing, and full writing as that script developed with attested archeological finds.) I am also very familiar with the extent of the Indo-European languages and with the fact that many languages spoken in India (e.g., Tamil, a language spoken by many friends of mine) are not Indo-European. The links I already provided give much of the needed background information. But here are a few more links, for onlookers who are curious about this issue and may be interested in responses to the Rao et al. publication. http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao-et-al-really-do.html http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao... http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic-formula.html http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic... (The link immediately above is by a former president of the Society for Computational Linguistics.) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011 (The review article linked above from the journal Computational Linguistics discussed the methodological issues involved.)
    - naveensundar 14y ago
- sunwooz 14y ago
  Wasn't there a mathematical study that concluded that the Indus script has the structure of a language? I found an article on it http://grimoires.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/grim-writing-the-indus-script-and-computer-science/ http://grimoires.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/grim-writing-the-i...
  - pavanky 14y ago
    Ah I didnt see your comment, but I added the TED talk which talks about this in the thread, up above. I hope this doesn't constitute spamming, but here is the link. http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_stone_for_the_indus_script.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    "structure of a language" is a pretty vague claim. Arguably one could conclude that Roman Numerals have the structure of a language too, but I wouldn't conclude from such a claim that roman numerals encode spoken language in durable form. Rather they are communicative in function, but through an illustrative rather than spoken frame of reference (Roman Numerals illustrate positions on a tally stick).
- pavanky 14y ago
  Well, there is some controversy, not considerable. But I think that mostly stems from the fact that no one has been able to decipher it yet. But computer analysis and all was done recently to strongly suggest this is indeed a script rather than some kind of ornamentation. Please refer to the following TED talk by one of the scientists who worked on it. http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_stone_for_the_indus_script.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
- tmbsundar 14y ago
  Since these are all hypotheses, and no one has cracked the script yet for good, (at least where in all are in consent), I would suggest that these are looked from the Proto-Dravidian hypothesis as well. See the following links: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500.htm http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500... The above is Iravadham Mahadevan's view. The following two are Asko Parpola's contributions: http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html http://www.amazon.com/Deciphering-Indus-Script-Asko-Parpola/dp/0521430798 http://www.amazon.com/Deciphering-Indus-Script-Asko-Parpola/...
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Part of the problem is determining what we mean by writing. Keep in mind we don't see any long inscriptions of the sort we see in early Sanscrit or Hittite. Only a few areas are attested including stamp seals, pottery and the like. The Indus Valley script could have been, for example, a pictographic/ideographic labelling system without any real language-encoding function. But if I draw thee fish to indicate that you owe me three fish, is that writing? It's certainly encoded communications. I don't know that it is writing as we know it though.
- teyc 14y ago
  I wonder if it is possible to tell ornamentation from writing from the degree of entropy present. For instance, if it is easily compressed, then it is probably writing, as opposed to ornamentation - which will like be random.
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    Why would ornamentation be random? Actually, a lot of ornamentation (patterns on rugs, clothing, buildings, etc) one sees is more regular than writing.
kinkora 14y ago
original article (Discovery): http://news.discovery.com/history/collapse-river-civilization-harappan-climate-change-120529.html http://news.discovery.com/history/collapse-river-civilizatio...
othello 14y ago
"They had cities ordered into grids, with exquisite plumbing, which was not encountered again until the Romans" It's amazing how quite advanced technologies (for a civilization that thrived from 5000 to 3000 years ago) were mastered only to be lost later over the course of history. A mind-blowing example closer to us is the Antikythera mechanism [1]. Found in a Mediterranean wreck in 1900, the artifact was not analyzed until the 1950s, when it was found to be "a mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions" - except it was made in the first century BC. Wikipedia notes that "Technological artifacts of similar complexity and workmanship did not reappear until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks were built in Europe." It is the oldest known mechanical computer - and to my knowledge no comparable device was to be manufactured until the 17th century and the invention of the Pascaline [2]. That's 18 centuries of gap, right there. The precision of the clockwork and the exactitude of the astronomical calculations made by the Antikythera mechanism only goes to show how much knowledge was lost in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Progress does not always follow a straight arrow. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline
- jseliger 14y ago
  It's amazing how quite advanced technologies (for a civilization that thrived from 5000 to 3000 years ago) were mastered only to be lost later over the course of history. It's actually not (too) hard to imagine something like this happening again: the process (probably) starts with nuclear weapons and ends with something like A Canticle for Leibowitz: http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp/0060892994?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp...
  - opminion 14y ago
    There it is, I have been trying to remember that title for a while. Not available for the Kindle!?
- kingofspain 14y ago
mmanfrin 14y ago
Has anyone got a recommendation for a book on this topic? Amazon is pulling up nothing.
- arethuza 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the book and TV series "The Story of India" has a section on the Harappan civilization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_India
- prakashk 14y ago
  Ancient India: A History of Its Culture And Civilization (http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/B000WUC0CY http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/B000WUC0CY), by D. D. Kosambi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.D._Kosambi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.D._Kosambi)
- aarghh 14y ago
  Michel Danino's "Lost River: On the Trail Of The Saraswati" is a pretty good survey of this view of climate change and eastward migration. http://www.amazon.com/Lost-River-The-Trail-Sarasvati/dp/0143068644/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338789233&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Lost-River-The-Trail-Sarasvati/dp/0143... Edit: Edited for spelling
droithomme 14y ago
LOL. Before clicking on the link I said out loud, "This will be yet another article blaming the 'collapse' of an 'ancient civilization' on 'climate change'." Clicked the link, wasn't disappointed.
- scribu 14y ago
  If you think about it, climate change is actually the most obvious cause for the disappearance of a civilization completely dependent on agriculture.
- ktizo 14y ago
  I think you might be conflating the current issue of anthropogenic climate change with the historic fact that many different cultures' success or failure has been almost entirely subject to the whims of climatic variation.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    When someone pins climate change as the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, I tend to wonder what bridge they are selling. Climate places real constraints on cultures but I am not sure that these are ones which necessarily dictate success or failure. If it did, Roald Amudsen should have suffered the same fate as John Franklin.
    - ktizo 14y ago
      Not the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, but one of the main causes of many cultures' fall, often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes. The fates of individual polar explorers is not particularly relevant to the fall of large city building cultures. And anyway Amundsen disappeared while on a rescue mission to find a crashed polar airship, so did suffer a similar fate, just a bit later.
      - einhverfr 14y ago
        I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement "often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes." In other words, the social complexity makes a culture vulnerable, and climate/agriculture pressures can essentially cause failure where none was possible before. That's close to Prof. Tainter's thesis, actually, and he points out that there are very few cases of large-scale cultures addressing these problems by simplifying but when they do they can survive. The example he gives in his lectures is the so-called Byzantine Dark Ages which were a deliberate transformation of the Byzantine Empire in response to the Arab invasions (going from a professional army to peasant militias, etc). But most cultures that I know of aren't even proximally wiped out by climate change. The Persians were conquered by the Romans on the battlefield, as were the Gauls. The Western Roman Empire appears to have collapsed primarily from inward pressures, not outward ones, and the agricultural failures there were the result of factors other than climate change or even man-made environmental damages. Some cultures do fail due primarily to environmental reasons (Greenland and republican Iceland being the best examples), but I don't think they represent the general rule. Iceland never was a particularly fertile place to grow things (vast amounts of environmental damage were the result of grazing animals simply because there's not much else you can do in Iceland), and neither was Greenland even before the Little Ice Age....
sigil 14y ago
A similar (but perhaps self-induced fate) may have befallen the Khmer empire in Cambodia. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/angkor-seat-of-the-khmer-empire-wilted-when-water-ran-low.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/angkor-seat-of-the...
zeteo 14y ago
The researchers have discovered some ancient changes in the hydrologic regime of rivers in north-west India. There's a big step from here to actually explaining civilizational collapse. Particularly, two factors argue against such a narrow explanation. First, the region was still agriculturally quite fertile after these changes in the monsoon pattern; the later Mahajanapadas did quite well in this area. Second, the contemporary Sumerian civilization was not destroyed, despite being affected with even more serious ecological problems (its heartland is now a mixture of marsh and desert). Its center simply shifted north, and it gradually transformed into the Babylonian civilization. With no shortage of fertile areas in the Indian subcontinent, the reasons why the Indus Valley civilization failed to either adapt or shift its center of gravity and instead completely disappeared from history are still, I believe, an open problem.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  One of the most interesting books out there on civilization collapse is "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations" by Joseph Tainter. His thesis is that the primary driver of civilization collapse is actually complexity, and that as societies face problems, such as ecological problems, or invasions from outside, usually, they solve these problems by adding social complexity. For example Rome tried to solve the problem of diminishing agricultural returns by binding farmers to their land. As Prof. Tainter puts it, these societies run into trouble when they have to make large investments in order to maintain their current way of life. If this pattern holds out, it may be that the more advanced a civilization is, the more vulnerable it is to collapse due to pressures of this sort. In other words, at some point, the complexity becomes self-defeating and civilization crumbles.
harichinnan 14y ago
Watch Story of India in Netflix if you are interested in Indus valley civilization and India's history in general. It's pretty unbiased, coming from BBC.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Original article abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/24/1112743109.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/24/1112743109.abst... I wonder how sensitive our modern society is to similar agriculturally relevant factors.
- hollerith 14y ago
  Vastly less sensitive because humans have become vastly more skilled at getting what they want and need from the planet and the biosphere.
  - yk 14y ago
    But we also depend on vastly higher yields. [1] IMHO it is not clear, that additional agriculture in currently cold areas could offset all losses in warmer areas. Additionally we are already not very good at the distribution of food on a global scale. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wheat_yields_in_developing_countries_1951-2004.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wheat_yields_in_developin...
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      Indeed, and we are dependent on natural gas (for fertilizer) and petroleum supply (all manner of chemicals, fuels, etc) to grow things now. Additionally I would point out that famines today are almost never problems of global distribution but rather local breakdowns in distribution. I.e. a small nation falls victim of civil war and consequently famine happens as well. There are very real and open questions what our current approaches to agriculture can do as oil continues to become more expensive. Basically, I think the thing is that we humans tend towards as high a population as we can manage and expect famines to control our population. We've been pushing the envelope by utilizing vast amounts of fossil fuels for a while, and GMO's are often sold on the promise of being even more energy intensive (spray more pesticides and your crops will survive).
r_jeyakumar 14y ago
This above mentioned Monsoon failure theory is a doubtful correlation. This Monsoon decline theory is absolutely fine,there is no objection to that theory at all. But, only problem is that this monsoon decline theory is being correlated to the fall of Indus Valley Civilization,which is a kind of illogical correlation. This theory is being slightly far-fetched. The Indus river is a perennial river and it doesn't dry up even in harsh summers because of the melting of glaciers. The river Indus supports nearly 18 crore people even today, can't it have supported a few thousand people 5000 years back? It looks like that there is some misinterpretation here. There is a possibility that IVC never declined at all. These Indus Valley excavation sites are looking deserted because these sites were used as grave yards from time immemorial by various occupants of these lands.These sites have been wrongly identified as Metropolises, whereas in reality they were only Necropolises. This wrong identification is the reason for confusion surrounding theories like this about IVC. Follow the below given link for detailed information. https://sites.google.com/site/induscivilizationsite https://sites.google.com/site/induscivilizationsite

143 points by daegloe 14y ago

The interesting submitted article refers to "and as-yet undeciphered writing," but there is considerable controversy about whether or not the Indus Valley script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script is a writing system at all, rather than the kind of ornamentation from a pre-proto-writing stage known in several other sites of ancient civilizations. (As a reality check, we can remember that several regions of the world had elaborate empires and cities with extensive trade routes but without writing.) Some of the controversy about this issue arises because of the extreme sensitivity of cultural heritage claims in south Asia in a region that spans a heavily militarized border. A good popular book about the nature and origin of writing systems in general, worldwide, is Visible Speech by John DeFrancis, http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Comparisons/dp/0824812077 http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co... and the definitive compilation of international research on writing systems to the date of publication is The World's Writing Systems http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/dp/0195079930/ http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d... edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright and published in 1996. I haven't concluded absolutely that the Indus Valley Script could not be a writing system, but there is no sure evidence that it is, and the earliest attested writing system in a nearby region is the Brahmi script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script that is much more recent in time (a few centuries older than the common era, that is approximately 2,300 years old) and unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East.

rd108 14y ago
Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing vs. "a kind of ornamentation"? Your comment smacks of condescension but I'm sure you can just provide citations. Your (wikipedia) article contains some arguments based on relative frequency of symbols, but is controverted by studies of modern pictographic languages with similar characteristic (e.g. Chinese.) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165 You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please? The real controversial implication, IMHO, of studying ancient Indian languages is that Sanskrit (used over thousands of years and refined by rigid grammar rules by e.g. Panini 500 B.C.) may actually be the language from which Latin, and hence many European Romantic languages, developed. http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-european-languages-says-prof-dean-brown/ http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-eu... That's probably worth diving into, if you are genuinely curious. As the Welsh linguist Sir William Jones said, "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." [edit- link added and fluff redacted. :)]
- meepmorp 14y ago
  > You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please? Brahmi and Karoshthi (the two major origin scripts for the writing systems of the subcontinent) are generally accepted to be related to the Semitic writing systems. Source: an undergraduate class in writing systems several years ago; also, the relevant Wikipedia pages agree, giving Aramaic as the parent script.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing Yes. Again, this is a familiar issue to people who are familiar with linguistics, and one of the criticisms of the Rao et al. publication is that none of the authors are familiar with the methodology used in historical linguistics to solve comparable problems in other parts of the world. (I am able to read ancient Chinese and am intimately familiar with the history of the Chinese script, which is an illuminating example for comparing periods of early ornamentation, proto-writing, and full writing as that script developed with attested archeological finds.) I am also very familiar with the extent of the Indo-European languages and with the fact that many languages spoken in India (e.g., Tamil, a language spoken by many friends of mine) are not Indo-European. The links I already provided give much of the needed background information. But here are a few more links, for onlookers who are curious about this issue and may be interested in responses to the Rao et al. publication. http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao-et-al-really-do.html http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao... http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic-formula.html http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic... (The link immediately above is by a former president of the Society for Computational Linguistics.) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011 (The review article linked above from the journal Computational Linguistics discussed the methodological issues involved.)
  - naveensundar 14y ago
sunwooz 14y ago
Wasn't there a mathematical study that concluded that the Indus script has the structure of a language? I found an article on it http://grimoires.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/grim-writing-the-indus-script-and-computer-science/ http://grimoires.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/grim-writing-the-i...
- pavanky 14y ago
  Ah I didnt see your comment, but I added the TED talk which talks about this in the thread, up above. I hope this doesn't constitute spamming, but here is the link. http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_stone_for_the_indus_script.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
- einhverfr 14y ago
  "structure of a language" is a pretty vague claim. Arguably one could conclude that Roman Numerals have the structure of a language too, but I wouldn't conclude from such a claim that roman numerals encode spoken language in durable form. Rather they are communicative in function, but through an illustrative rather than spoken frame of reference (Roman Numerals illustrate positions on a tally stick).
pavanky 14y ago
Well, there is some controversy, not considerable. But I think that mostly stems from the fact that no one has been able to decipher it yet. But computer analysis and all was done recently to strongly suggest this is indeed a script rather than some kind of ornamentation. Please refer to the following TED talk by one of the scientists who worked on it. http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_stone_for_the_indus_script.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
tmbsundar 14y ago
Since these are all hypotheses, and no one has cracked the script yet for good, (at least where in all are in consent), I would suggest that these are looked from the Proto-Dravidian hypothesis as well. See the following links: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500.htm http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500... The above is Iravadham Mahadevan's view. The following two are Asko Parpola's contributions: http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html http://www.amazon.com/Deciphering-Indus-Script-Asko-Parpola/dp/0521430798 http://www.amazon.com/Deciphering-Indus-Script-Asko-Parpola/...
einhverfr 14y ago
Part of the problem is determining what we mean by writing. Keep in mind we don't see any long inscriptions of the sort we see in early Sanscrit or Hittite. Only a few areas are attested including stamp seals, pottery and the like. The Indus Valley script could have been, for example, a pictographic/ideographic labelling system without any real language-encoding function. But if I draw thee fish to indicate that you owe me three fish, is that writing? It's certainly encoded communications. I don't know that it is writing as we know it though.
teyc 14y ago
I wonder if it is possible to tell ornamentation from writing from the degree of entropy present. For instance, if it is easily compressed, then it is probably writing, as opposed to ornamentation - which will like be random.
- randallsquared 14y ago
  Why would ornamentation be random? Actually, a lot of ornamentation (patterns on rugs, clothing, buildings, etc) one sees is more regular than writing.

kinkora 14y ago

original article (Discovery): http://news.discovery.com/history/collapse-river-civilization-harappan-climate-change-120529.html http://news.discovery.com/history/collapse-river-civilizatio...

othello 14y ago

"They had cities ordered into grids, with exquisite plumbing, which was not encountered again until the Romans" It's amazing how quite advanced technologies (for a civilization that thrived from 5000 to 3000 years ago) were mastered only to be lost later over the course of history. A mind-blowing example closer to us is the Antikythera mechanism [1]. Found in a Mediterranean wreck in 1900, the artifact was not analyzed until the 1950s, when it was found to be "a mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions" - except it was made in the first century BC. Wikipedia notes that "Technological artifacts of similar complexity and workmanship did not reappear until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks were built in Europe." It is the oldest known mechanical computer - and to my knowledge no comparable device was to be manufactured until the 17th century and the invention of the Pascaline [2]. That's 18 centuries of gap, right there. The precision of the clockwork and the exactitude of the astronomical calculations made by the Antikythera mechanism only goes to show how much knowledge was lost in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Progress does not always follow a straight arrow. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline

jseliger 14y ago
It's amazing how quite advanced technologies (for a civilization that thrived from 5000 to 3000 years ago) were mastered only to be lost later over the course of history. It's actually not (too) hard to imagine something like this happening again: the process (probably) starts with nuclear weapons and ends with something like A Canticle for Leibowitz: http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp/0060892994?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp...
- opminion 14y ago
  There it is, I have been trying to remember that title for a while. Not available for the Kindle!?
kingofspain 14y ago

mmanfrin 14y ago

Has anyone got a recommendation for a book on this topic? Amazon is pulling up nothing.

arethuza 14y ago
I'm pretty sure that the book and TV series "The Story of India" has a section on the Harappan civilization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_India
prakashk 14y ago
Ancient India: A History of Its Culture And Civilization (http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/B000WUC0CY http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/B000WUC0CY), by D. D. Kosambi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.D._Kosambi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.D._Kosambi)
aarghh 14y ago
Michel Danino's "Lost River: On the Trail Of The Saraswati" is a pretty good survey of this view of climate change and eastward migration. http://www.amazon.com/Lost-River-The-Trail-Sarasvati/dp/0143068644/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338789233&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Lost-River-The-Trail-Sarasvati/dp/0143... Edit: Edited for spelling

droithomme 14y ago

LOL. Before clicking on the link I said out loud, "This will be yet another article blaming the 'collapse' of an 'ancient civilization' on 'climate change'." Clicked the link, wasn't disappointed.

scribu 14y ago
If you think about it, climate change is actually the most obvious cause for the disappearance of a civilization completely dependent on agriculture.
ktizo 14y ago
I think you might be conflating the current issue of anthropogenic climate change with the historic fact that many different cultures' success or failure has been almost entirely subject to the whims of climatic variation.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  When someone pins climate change as the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, I tend to wonder what bridge they are selling. Climate places real constraints on cultures but I am not sure that these are ones which necessarily dictate success or failure. If it did, Roald Amudsen should have suffered the same fate as John Franklin.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    Not the sole cause of cultures' rise or falls, but one of the main causes of many cultures' fall, often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes. The fates of individual polar explorers is not particularly relevant to the fall of large city building cultures. And anyway Amundsen disappeared while on a rescue mission to find a crashed polar airship, so did suffer a similar fate, just a bit later.
    - einhverfr 14y ago
      I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement "often due to those particular cultures becoming deeply interconnected and unprepared for large scale changes." In other words, the social complexity makes a culture vulnerable, and climate/agriculture pressures can essentially cause failure where none was possible before. That's close to Prof. Tainter's thesis, actually, and he points out that there are very few cases of large-scale cultures addressing these problems by simplifying but when they do they can survive. The example he gives in his lectures is the so-called Byzantine Dark Ages which were a deliberate transformation of the Byzantine Empire in response to the Arab invasions (going from a professional army to peasant militias, etc). But most cultures that I know of aren't even proximally wiped out by climate change. The Persians were conquered by the Romans on the battlefield, as were the Gauls. The Western Roman Empire appears to have collapsed primarily from inward pressures, not outward ones, and the agricultural failures there were the result of factors other than climate change or even man-made environmental damages. Some cultures do fail due primarily to environmental reasons (Greenland and republican Iceland being the best examples), but I don't think they represent the general rule. Iceland never was a particularly fertile place to grow things (vast amounts of environmental damage were the result of grazing animals simply because there's not much else you can do in Iceland), and neither was Greenland even before the Little Ice Age....

sigil 14y ago

A similar (but perhaps self-induced fate) may have befallen the Khmer empire in Cambodia. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/angkor-seat-of-the-khmer-empire-wilted-when-water-ran-low.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/angkor-seat-of-the...

zeteo 14y ago

The researchers have discovered some ancient changes in the hydrologic regime of rivers in north-west India. There's a big step from here to actually explaining civilizational collapse. Particularly, two factors argue against such a narrow explanation. First, the region was still agriculturally quite fertile after these changes in the monsoon pattern; the later Mahajanapadas did quite well in this area. Second, the contemporary Sumerian civilization was not destroyed, despite being affected with even more serious ecological problems (its heartland is now a mixture of marsh and desert). Its center simply shifted north, and it gradually transformed into the Babylonian civilization. With no shortage of fertile areas in the Indian subcontinent, the reasons why the Indus Valley civilization failed to either adapt or shift its center of gravity and instead completely disappeared from history are still, I believe, an open problem.

einhverfr 14y ago
One of the most interesting books out there on civilization collapse is "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations" by Joseph Tainter. His thesis is that the primary driver of civilization collapse is actually complexity, and that as societies face problems, such as ecological problems, or invasions from outside, usually, they solve these problems by adding social complexity. For example Rome tried to solve the problem of diminishing agricultural returns by binding farmers to their land. As Prof. Tainter puts it, these societies run into trouble when they have to make large investments in order to maintain their current way of life. If this pattern holds out, it may be that the more advanced a civilization is, the more vulnerable it is to collapse due to pressures of this sort. In other words, at some point, the complexity becomes self-defeating and civilization crumbles.

harichinnan 14y ago

Watch Story of India in Netflix if you are interested in Indus valley civilization and India's history in general. It's pretty unbiased, coming from BBC.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Original article abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/24/1112743109.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/24/1112743109.abst... I wonder how sensitive our modern society is to similar agriculturally relevant factors.

hollerith 14y ago
Vastly less sensitive because humans have become vastly more skilled at getting what they want and need from the planet and the biosphere.
- yk 14y ago
  But we also depend on vastly higher yields. [1] IMHO it is not clear, that additional agriculture in currently cold areas could offset all losses in warmer areas. Additionally we are already not very good at the distribution of food on a global scale. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wheat_yields_in_developing_countries_1951-2004.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wheat_yields_in_developin...
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    Indeed, and we are dependent on natural gas (for fertilizer) and petroleum supply (all manner of chemicals, fuels, etc) to grow things now. Additionally I would point out that famines today are almost never problems of global distribution but rather local breakdowns in distribution. I.e. a small nation falls victim of civil war and consequently famine happens as well. There are very real and open questions what our current approaches to agriculture can do as oil continues to become more expensive. Basically, I think the thing is that we humans tend towards as high a population as we can manage and expect famines to control our population. We've been pushing the envelope by utilizing vast amounts of fossil fuels for a while, and GMO's are often sold on the promise of being even more energy intensive (spray more pesticides and your crops will survive).

r_jeyakumar 14y ago

This above mentioned Monsoon failure theory is a doubtful correlation. This Monsoon decline theory is absolutely fine,there is no objection to that theory at all. But, only problem is that this monsoon decline theory is being correlated to the fall of Indus Valley Civilization,which is a kind of illogical correlation. This theory is being slightly far-fetched. The Indus river is a perennial river and it doesn't dry up even in harsh summers because of the melting of glaciers. The river Indus supports nearly 18 crore people even today, can't it have supported a few thousand people 5000 years back? It looks like that there is some misinterpretation here. There is a possibility that IVC never declined at all. These Indus Valley excavation sites are looking deserted because these sites were used as grave yards from time immemorial by various occupants of these lands.These sites have been wrongly identified as Metropolises, whereas in reality they were only Necropolises. This wrong identification is the reason for confusion surrounding theories like this about IVC. Follow the below given link for detailed information. https://sites.google.com/site/induscivilizationsite https://sites.google.com/site/induscivilizationsite