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4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time
- jimbokun 5mo agoMohenjo-Daro, the Norway of the Ancient World!
- drucat 5mo agoIt's bizarre that the Indian subcontinent is now known for poverty, high inequality and the caste system, when its ancient civilizational counterpart seemed to be the opposite. Genetically and linguistically, it's indisputable that the Indo-Aryan languages were transplants brought in by a small external group. This was followed by Islamic invasions and then British imperialism, followed by partition, and the recent ascendency of Hindu nationalism, yet the core people have been remarkably stable over thousands of years. Online, at least, the levels of hatred and resentment seem off-the-charts. China, on the other hand seems to be growing by leaps-and-bounds, while India seems to be getting consumed by internal hatreds, and Pakistan seems to focus on the security threat posed by India, enriching a corrupt political and military elite at the expense of its own development. I have to wonder if we'll ever find out the exact point where it all went wrong.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoPut away your tears. Amidst all the chaos India is doing remarkably well. If it can maintain its current growth rate for another 15-20 years it’s going to be a behemoth. They’ve been able to keep it going for 10-12 years so far so no reason to think that might not happen. The amount of infrastructure being built right now is incredible. Thousands of miles of roads and railways per year, hundreds of new airports, many terawatthours of new energy generation, lots of skyscrapers, large scale urban metros, a dozen new planned cities, hundreds of millions of people worth of poverty alleviation, free healthcare for a large part of the population, rapidly growing GDP, a dying caste system in urban areas, women emancipation, dams, huge megaprojects, the beginnings of semiconductor manufacturing, rare earth mining, military exports etc. There are a lot of wins, it’s going to take time.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoThat's what I've been hearing for the last decade or two but so far I haven't seen a huge change, especially compared to China.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoChina is in its own league but a decade is roughly right. Dive into it a bit, there’s a lot of good going on and I’m a cynic.
- mlmonkey 5mo agoChina had a ~25 year head start. A lot of the work going on currently (rail electrification, dedicated freight corridors, highways, deep water ports, etc) will pay off in the future.
- SanjayMehta 5mo agoWhere do you live? The city I live in was connected to the next city via a two lane road. Now it's a 6 lane expressway way with service roads on either side. The infrastructure between cities, including roads and airports has been drastically improved in the last ten years. The cities themselves are not improving at the same pace. Corruption, especially in the money making states like MH and KA, is still rampant.
- dwa3592 5mo agowhat a weird comment. did you make this account to sway the conversation from the actual article?
- drucat 5mo ago[flagged]
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- Ar-Curunir 5mo ago"Teetering on the brink of nuclear war" Sorry to be rude, but what exactly are you smoking?
- drucat 5mo ago[flagged]
- newaccountman2 5mo agoSo any society going well might go bad 4, 000 years and several conquests later? What is your point lol
- drucat 5mo agoUnlike other conquests, they have remained the same people. It wasn't linked to large scale migration or displacement.
- newaccountman2 5mo agoSo? Four thousand years and a bunch of history happened, why should anyone be surprised that things are different?
- komali2 5mo ago> Genetics isn't everything, but it's an indicator that the populations have remained extremely stable (no large scale migrations) while the culture shifted under them. This is why your comment is weird. You seem to be leaning on genetics a lot, when in aggregate, genetics are less than a rounding error for human behavior. Take a random human with random genes and drop them at childhood into another culture, and outside of that culture's reactions to them perhaps looking a bit different than the other kids, that person will grow up identifying with that culture.
- d_silin 5mo agoEntire civilization flourished for 2000 years and then disappeared without any clue why. I have a pet theory about Indus Valley script - inscriptions on the seals are so short and unique because they are just name signatures, to stamp other objects. Having to be durable, they were the only inscribed objects that survived.
- danans 5mo ago> Entire civilization flourished for 2000 years and then disappeared without any clue why. I think it's well understood that upliftment/desertification of the lower Indus valley resulted in many of the rivers the civilization was built around drying up. Ancient DNA studies (Reich et. al) have shown a scattering of Indus peoples in all directions after that - including back to the southern Iranian plateau where they came from originally, and across the Indian subcontinent, forming a substratum of various populations across South and Central Asia. They also reverted to smaller scale settlements, although with echoes of their previous material culture, eventually merging with later migrants and pre-existing indigenous populations. After that, they very likely played a significant role in the second great urbanization of the Indian subcontinent [1], which took place in the first millennium BCE in the Gangetic plain, and also possibly in the parallel development of Iranian civilization. It is thought they were the original inventors of the famous Indo-Iranian oven known the tandoor, which seems to have remigrated back into South Asia long after the Indus people took it to Central Asia. So while their original cities were abandoned, their influence was felt far and wide in the ancient world. 1. The first being the Indus Valley Civilization itself a few millenia earlier.
- delta_p_delta_x 5mo agoThey didn't disappear into thin air. Their culture syncretised with that of the incoming (or invading, depending on who you ask) Indo-Aryans, they moved southeast into the furthest bits of the Indian peninsula. The strongest hypothesis is that the IVC language, culture, and genetics is Dravidian, and the bulk of Dravidian culture today descends from the IVC.
- dwa3592 5mo agoIt's a pleasant finding but not surprising. In all the excavations done over time in indus valley, they never found any weapons or any signs of war. I have this book with pretty cool illustrations if anyone wants a light read on this topic - https://www.amazon.com/dp/014345532X?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title https://www.amazon.com/dp/014345532X?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_... I am not related to the author in anyway. i heard about this book on a podcast and bought it.
- pm90 5mo agothank you so much for this recommendation. I've been interested in this topic for a while; while I was looking for something a bit more substantial, I do love it when authors explain history in different ways! My original introduction to history was through the Amar Chitra Katha series; ever since I've always had an interest in learning history.
- rayiner 5mo agoI suspect that’s some noble savage mythologizing. Many Harrapan weapons have been found: https://www.allsubjectjournal.com/assets/archives/2015/vol2issue5/53.pdf https://www.allsubjectjournal.com/assets/archives/2015/vol2i...
- pegasus 5mo agoYes, they are exaggerations, similar things have been said about the Minoans. It's still true AFAIK that these societies were much less militaristic than the ones that followed them.
- dwa3592 5mo agomythologizing? What is myth about not finding military grade weapons or shields or large fortifications or artifacts on glorification of war and killing, like they found in other civilizations?? Did you even read the paper you cited or was it just a cheap attempt to find a critique bc of your own personal beliefs? - most of the weapons are tools (agri, hunting etc) and the time period is 1900-1400 BC when the civilization was in its last stage. granted IVC hasn't been excavated to the degree the other civilizations has been, but at this point no concrete evidence has been found of wars and bloodshed at the scale compared to other civilizations.
- marojejian 5mo agopaper: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10359 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10359 also: >the material record offers indirect evidence for distributed authority. Indus seals, small stone stamps that likely facilitated exchange and credit, were found primarily in private residences at Mohenjo-daro rather than in temples or central administrative buildings. Speculative, of course. But cool data & approach. And it doesn't have to prove anything, except that it's plausible there are other ways to structure societies, that can have different results.
- jnmandal 5mo agoA David Graeber inspired study!? In case you haven't heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
- rramadass 5mo agoThis is actually a thought-provoking book and a must read. History as taught today is very much misunderstood/skewed/euro-centric and many times plain wrong. The wikipedia page itself gives the highlights and worth reading. A very good example comes from India itself i.e. "The Paradox of Indian History" which is the dichotomy between Archeological Evidence (Indus Valley, Ashoka's inscriptions etc.) vs. Literary Evidence (Puranas, Itihasas etc.) Add to this the linguistic diversities, group/ethnic diversities and successive waves of invasions and displacements and it is enough to drive a Historian mad/happy depending upon how you look at it. The literary/linguistic evidence paints a picture of very advanced societies while the archeological evidence paints a distinctly different but again advanced societies. Hence studies like the OP's submission are very much needed and welcome.
- __rito__ 5mo agoSomething should be noted: equality didn't save them. They grew more equal, maybe. But that couldn't save them from barbaric hordes/drought/a combination of these or more. They became extinct. To an "educated", emotional mind guarded in a safe place, economic prosperity, the tenets of equality might show promise, but, they might ultimately be sans utility when seen from the lens of survival, thriving, etc.
- rramadass 4mo agoThe dichotomy between "Civilization" and "Barbarism" is longstanding. The writer Robert Howard said; “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” Here by "Civilzation" i mean explicitly; philosophical ideas/frameworks, societal beliefs/structures/traditions etc. far beyond what is needed for mere survival. For example, Buddhism took the idea of Ahimsa from Hinduism (where its limitations were known) and turned it into the utopian idea of complete non-violence which was then made state policy in kingdoms of North India and current-day Pakistam/Afghanistan. The result was that they fell easily to the islamic barbarians who played by a different set of rules. What we need is Civilization but with the necessary Barbaric tendencies assuring survival (i.e. procreation and societal self-defense) still maintained. Note here that this idea has been corrupted by western countries during their colonial rule time period. So you have to be careful to disambiguate legitimate ideas from overt/covert racism.
- pram 5mo ago"Trade practices show a similar pattern. Indus seals, used for business and administration, turned up in common homes across the city. Archaeologists did not find evidence showing rulers controlled access to these objects. Standardized weights and measures spread throughout the region as well, helping create consistent trade practices." I've done a lot of reading on this particular subject and I think the "stateless utopia" conclusion so many researchers seem to be fishing for (Graeber etc) is more nonsensical than they let on. They didn't have monumental temples or palaces, that seems to be it. Yet there is tons of documentary evidence "Meluhha" was engaged in a pretty sophisticated scale of commodity production (artisanal carnelian beads) and export trade with Dilmun and Sumer. Their standardized weight system was used for this trade, and they're found elsewhere in large numbers as the article says. They even had expats living in Sumer who were noted as translators (of the Indus valley seals??) This trade is where a lot of their obvious wealth probably came from, since they'd have copious silver revenue from Dilmun. "Archaeologists did not find evidence showing rulers controlled access to these objects." Like really, think about it. These weights were very precise. And they had to be, because "weight" was basically equivalent to "money." So there had to be a standard, and that standard had to be enforced when the weights were produced. And the weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade. Someone was obviously "in charge" lol
- Ar-Curunir 5mo agoA: Weights had to remain trustworthy as they were distributed elsewhere for use in the trade. B: Someone was obviously "in charge" lol B can imply A, but A does not imply B.
- bilbo0s 5mo agoI did some work for Halliburton in a past life. Most of the people selling LNG for instance, do not have any control over the definition of a "cubic meter". Even so, none of them cheat, because the US for example, very much does have its own definition of a cubic meter and it isn't going to pay you a penny more, nor a penny less, than what that cubic meter is worth. All that to say, you could probably try to cheat the system, but I'd imagine the people in Sumer and Akkad had what they considered to be a precise unit of weight with which to measure your delivery. It doesn't matter what someone in Mohenjo-daro said, you were only going to get a certain amount in trade for your freight in Sumer. So I could see a centralized authority for weights, (the customer), at the same time as having no one in charge of that unit of weight in Mohenjo-daro. I could see people agreeing to it essentially because that's all you're getting paid for. Because I saw the same behavior long ago at work with Halliburton.
- bradleybuda 5mo agoThis could also be a story of technological progress. A thought experiment - imagine you, an archaeologist, recovered the remains of our civilization, from roughly 1925 to 2025, but the only surviving artifact was televisions. You know that televisions are valuable - initially only wealthy families had them - so you used them as a proxy for riches and plotted the Gini coefficient using just the size, quality, resolution, color depth, etc. You could conclude that our society became less unequal over that period, because you miss that technology dramatically compressed the distribution of this resource and that household wealth was freed up to put to other purposes.
- goodmythical 5mo agoIf we had supporting documentation supporting "initially only wealthy families had them" why would we not also have supporting documentation supporting "eventually average families had them?" Seems like the entire "initially" premise kind of indicates the change, no?
- graemep 5mo agoArtifacts of any sort, especially technological ones, are subject to such changes over time. House size/living space is far more constant. It would make a good and proxy for riches in a contemporary society too.
- pm90 5mo ago> The study also raises broader questions about how early cities functioned. Archaeologists often link urban growth with centralized political power and rising social divisions. Mohenjo-daro points toward another model, one where collective governance and public investment shaped the city’s long-term stability. Fascinating. I hope that discoveries like this increase the interest of the public in investing in historical research... so much of our theory of the world is shaped by a narrow focus on the history of areas that were easier (relatively) to study.
- rramadass 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378159
- nephihaha 5mo ago[dead]