Indus Valley cities

Indus Valley cities store many unsolved mysteries. Today, just no one knows how this civilization was actually called. It is not known how the people who called themselves these cities called themselves. His language is unknown, and the Indian hieroglyphs still remain undeciphered... But, with good reason, one can argue one thing: it was one of the most highly developed civilizations of the Ancient world.

Indus Valley cities store many unsolved mysteries. Today, just no one knows how this civilization was actually called

It all began in 1856, when the British John and William Brighton built the East Indian Railway between Karachi and Lahore. They needed material for adding the gauge, and the locals suggested that there was a huge hill near the village of Harappa, literally stuffed with some ancient brick buildings. Thus began the opening of the cities of the Indus Valley.

I must say that in 1834 the traveler Alexander Berne visited here, who later wrote that the town of Harappa is about three miles long. On the shore there is a destroyed citadel, and in general, Harappa is the realm of chaos, and there is not a single whole building in it; the bricks of the ancient buildings went to the construction of a small modern village, bearing the old name. According to legend, the death of Harappa occurred about 1300 years ago. But, only in 1921, the Indian archaeologist Rai Bahadur Daiya Ram Sahni began excavations in Harappa. As a result, the world was revealed the ruins of a vast city, built in 3 millennia BC!

Approximately four hundred miles from Harappa, near the village of Mohenjo-Daro ("City of the Dead"), in 1922 an archaeological expedition led by R.D. Banerjee discovered another settlement, a twin of the first. Mohenjo-Daro was better preserved than Harappa, and from the very beginning it attracted more attention to him. It was Mohenjo-Daro that became the main excavation site. The excavated area of Mohenjo-Daro is 260 hectares. In ancient times, the city was undoubtedly more. Its outskirts today are buried under the muddy deposits of the Indus.

The cities of the Indus Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa valleys were built of bricks - but not of raw material used by the Sumerians, but of baked bricks. They were built according to the same plan and probably at the same time. There is even a hypothesis that these cities are the twin capitals of one state. The cities of the Indus Valley are carefully planned and landscaped. The simplicity and clarity of the lines is what characterizes them. Wide - 10-12 meters - the streets were straight as an arrow. They intersected at right angles, dividing cities into flat square blocks, while the corners of many buildings that stood at intersections were rounded so that carts would not get caught on bends. Not a single house came forward beyond the "red line" of buildings. Dead ends and back streets, characteristic of old cities and in the West and in the East, were not here at all. The houses were mostly single-storey, but they also met two-, three-story, with flat roofs. Everywhere, except perhaps the poor hovels, there were bathrooms. Baths, like houses, were made of brick, and they stood in each apartment.

The arrangement of the cities of the Indus Valley looks so “frozen” that it seems as if they were built once and for ages: archaeologists practically do not catch any changes in the urban structure over the whole millennium of the existence of these cities! The only thing that scientists were able to detect is the "growth" of urban structures upwards. The cities of the Indus Valley were built in regular quadrangular quarters, with wide main streets. Everywhere there were high-tech water supply and sewage. Nowhere in the ancient world this was not.

Thanks to the findings of archaeologists, today we can quite accurately imagine what these cities were like during their lifetime. Various crafts were highly developed here: making bronze and copper tools, pottery and jewelry, weaving, construction. Throughout the territory of the Indian state there was a single hexadecimal system of weights and measures.

A feature of the cities of the Indus Valley was the almost complete absence of temples and other religious buildings, as well as palaces or any other structures that could be the residence of the ruler. It seems that the cities of the Indus Valley were settlements of approximately equal in material and social terms of the townspeople, which were the dominant layer. They were subordinated to those who lived outside the city walls - peasants-farmers, shepherds, fishermen, etc., and the slaves did all the dirty work in the city itself.

The cities of the Indus Valley were not isolated: on the contrary, they were involved in the most active ties with all the states of the Ancient World. The threads of these connections stretch to the west - to Troy and Crete, to the east - to China. But the closest link existed between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia.

However, the cities of the Indus Valley little resemble the ancient city of Sumer. Facts prove: Indian culture originated regardless of the influence of Mesopotamia and has come a long way of development.

In addition to Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the territory of the Indian civilization extended to other, smaller cities and towns. Since the 20s of the 20th century, large-scale excavations have been carried out at Changhu Daro and Cote Diji in present-day Pakistan. In Lothal, Rangaur and Kalibangan, in other cities and areas of present-day India, numerous small settlements of the time were excavated. Now they revealed more than a hundred.

The decline of the cities of the Indus Valley begins in the 17th and 15th centuries BC. There are many versions of the reasons for their sunset, but all their authors agree on one thing: the cities of the Indus Valley died in different ways and did not disappear at the same time.

Around 1500 BC In the Indus Valley, Iranian-speaking tribes came from the northwest and called themselves "Aryans". The Aryans were carriers of a different culture, which has come down to us in the form of first oral, and subsequently recorded legends and myths. It is only known for certain that the Aryan tribes that came to India found an already declining civilization here.

But a great civilization never disappears without a trace. Residents of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro could not revive their civilization, which has long been prone to decline. But they could learn a lot from the aliens. And the extensive knowledge of the inhabitants of pre-Indo-European India was passed on to the Aryans, in order to live long and long millennia.

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