How did the thousands of years old Indus Valley civilization, considered 'advanced and modern', end?

 

How did the thousands of years old Indus Valley civilization, considered 'advanced and modern', end?

 

Multi-storey brick houses, uniform streets and an excellent drainage system and flushing toilets...

These may seem like signs of a modern city to you, but in fact they are signs of the Indus Valley Civilization thousands of years ago, which is said to have existed at the same time as the civilization of ancient Egypt.

But we know less about the Indus Valley Civilization than we do about the civilization of ancient Egypt.

Many experts believe that this society (the Indus Valley Civilization) was better than many societies in the world at that time and its way of life and innovation distinguished it from other civilizations.

The Indus Valley Civilization is said to have flourished between 1900 and 2600 BC.

Dr. Sangaralingam Ramesh, a lecturer at the University of Oxford and University College London, says that this civilization existed even before 4000 BC.

Its center was the area around the Indus River in what is now Pakistan and India. It consisted of rural farming communities as well as more than 1,400 towns and cities, the largest of which were Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.

Dr. Ramesh says that the Indus Valley Civilization was much larger than the civilizations of ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). This civilization, consisting of 80,000 settlements, had about 1 million inhabitants and was considered very advanced for a number of reasons.

According to Dr. Ramesh, the Indus Valley Civilization was one of the first civilizations to start building houses using bricks, and these people used bricks of the same size to build houses.

He says that cities here were built on the same streets and right angles. There were also wells here, while houses had latrines (bathrooms) and an excellent sewage system was also present.

Dr. Ramesh says that the construction style of the bathrooms and the sewage system shows that this civilization was aware of diseases caused by dirty water and emphasized cleanliness.

The spread of urban population in this civilization showed that the means of transportation were active here, which also paved the way for trade.

Dr. Ramesh says that ‘the people of the Indus Valley Civilization traded wood, pearls, copper, gold and cotton with ancient Mesopotamia.’

Communal government

Ramesh says that the artifacts show that there was a good urban government here, similar to urban areas.

‘This is evidence that it was a well-functioning urban authority, which was responsible for maintaining and building the infrastructure of cities and settlements.’

He says that their style of governance was not limited to a single individual, that is, there was no ruling elite, but rather it showed a sense of collectivism, that is, more and more people were managing the government.

According to him, this thing distinguished the Indus Valley Civilization from other societies and civilizations.

The artifacts show that there was no ruler like the Pharaohs or the kings of Mesopotamia in Egypt, nor were there any large royal palaces or buildings.

According to Dr. Ramesh, power in Egypt and Mesopotamia was concentrated in one person, and this is reflected in the old buildings of these civilizations, where the element of bureaucracy and royal display was also prominent.

Peaceful region

There is evidence that there was some degree of social hierarchy in the Indus Valley, but it was very low compared to other societies of the time.

Ramesh says that ‘it is easy to detect social hierarchy through the relics of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in Sindh there is a difference in the size of houses, but it is difficult to identify how wide the class difference was here.

Ramesh says that archaeologists have found some human structures that provide some evidence of violence, but some experts believe that the Indus civilization was more peaceful than other societies.

Ramesh says that there are no signs of any major wars here, although it was common in other ancient societies.

But Dr. Ramesh admits that ‘if we do not find signs of any violence, it does not mean that it never happened here. According to him, if a society does not highlight its wars or there is no sign of it in history, we can make a mistake in understanding whether they were peaceful or not.

Mysterious remains

But we still do not know much about the Indus Valley Civilization. Ramesh says that not much excavation has been done yet.

He says that such sites are still being searched for in western India, because this ancient civilization extended to Afghanistan and due to the current situation in Afghanistan, it is very difficult to excavate ruins related to this civilization at this time.

Ramesh says that it was easy to collect information about the civilizations there from the remains of the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, because they left durable stone monuments there. But on the other hand, the Indus civilization used mud bricks and baked bricks on a large scale.

"It is difficult to know much about the Indus civilization without large stones, palaces or royal tombs, and this is also difficult because we have not been able to fully understand the script here," he says.

What happened to this civilization?

One of the main theories for the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization is environmental change.

“These sites began to be abandoned around 1900 BC, and archaeologists and climate change experts attribute this to changes in the monsoon season,” says Ramesh.

He says excavations at Moen Jo Dardo have also found evidence that people were trying to reduce the effects of floods before the civilization’s demise.

Ramesh believes that understanding the Indus Valley Civilization could have implications for modern societies, because if the Himalayan glaciers melt rapidly today, history could repeat itself.

According to him, the consensus-based governance prevalent in the Indus civilization was not enough to save them. But modern societies today can take much better measures to avoid climate change.

According to Dr. Ramesh, “The people of the Indus civilization did not have the technology to know what was actually happening. "But today we have this technical capability. We can use our technology more wisely so that our culture can survive."