Harappa

So we can't make a direct connection.

What we do know is beginning shortly after the downfall of the huge settlements in the Indus River Valley civilization, Harappa and Mohenjaro, 1500 BC, around this time, people in northern India composed sacred hymns, prayers, verses that were carefully memorized and passed from one generation to the next.

These teachings eventually became a collection of sacred texts.

They called these the Vedas, which basically means knowledge.

these guys don't have fur or are not in the time frame that I wanted.

Yeah, tie the Tasmanian Devils after Harappa the Rapper.

Oh, yeah, sorry.

Harappa.

I'm Jamalami.

Vector Man.

for a civilization that lasted two thousand years and covered an area larger than ancient egypt and mesopotamia combined we know almost nothing about how they actually lived think about that for a second the harappan civilization as archaeologists call it had a population estimated at five million people at its peak five million that's more people than lived in all of ancient egypt during the old kingdom they built over one thousand four hundred settlements including massive cities like mohenjo-daro and harappa with populations reaching forty thousand or more these weren't primitive villages these were planned cities with grid layouts advanced drainage systems public baths and multi-story buildings they were doing urban planning that wouldn't be matched in europe until the roman empire and yet when you walk through a museum and look at egyptian artefacts you can read the hieroglyphs understand the religious texts know the names of pharaohs and the stories of their gods But when you look at Indus Valley seals with their mysterious symbols, all you get is silence.

Beautiful, intricate, maddeningly silent.

The archaeological evidence of Harappan sophistication is everywhere once you start looking.

Take Mohenjo-daro, probably the best preserved Harappan city.

the name means mound of the dead in scindi which tells you nothing about what its inhabitants actually called it everything we know about them comes from what they left behind and what they left behind is extraordinary the city was built on a grid pattern with streets intersecting at right angles not random organic growth like most ancient cities but deliberate planning main streets running north-south secondary streets running east-west creating uniform city blocks buildings constructed with standardized fired bricks all in the exact same ratio of dimensions this wasn't just one architect's vision this was a civilization wide standard that lasted for centuries across hundreds of settlements some one had to establish those standards some one had to enforce them but we have no idea who no palaces no temples clearly identified as religious centres no monuments to powerful kings no inscriptions proclaiming great victories or divine authority and then there's the drainage system every house in mohenjo-dara was connected to a sophisticated network of covered drains running along the streets bathrooms with toilets wells for fresh water the great bath a massive public bathing complex with waterproof walls and a complex drainage system This level of civic infrastructure suggests centralised planning and maintenance.

You don't build city-wide sanitation systems without administrative organisation, without taxes or labour systems, without someone making decisions about where drains go and how they're maintained.

Other researchers remain skeptical, pointing out that short texts can produce misleading statistical patterns.

Machine learning algorithms have been trained on the available inscriptions, trying to identify grammatical rules or predict missing symbols in damaged texts.

We give Egypt several billion every year, and Egypt needs the The Suez Canal tolls to survive.

It's these are very shaky places as they were at the end of the Bronze Age, both Pakistan's ancestor, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.

And then, of course.

The Egyptians with the Nile, they're very fragile places.

The water trap appears in 1775, but the Minoans had covered drains 3,000 years earlier.

The flush appears in 1596, but Harappa had it in 2600 BCE.

What's new

is the scale.

It's not just one era or that era or this era.

But I wanna go back to Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

Can you explain to us what exactly happened? Because there's a lot, lots of now cross theories coming up and down.

Uh, it was a fertile North India, then they moved from there to the Deccan, because it's more fertile in the Deccan.

There's no war, there's no I- Indo-Aryan charge or anything.

No.

So see, there is this civilization, the Harappan civilization, uh-

Advanced

Some cities of the Indus Valley may have been as large as, or even larger than, their counterparts in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

We are going to talk about Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, two urban sites that did not leave behind giant stone monuments, but each may have had between three thousand and sixty thousand inhabitants.

This was an enormous population for the third millennium BC.

Feeding so many people required a network of surrounding villages and extensive areas of farmland.