The Indus Valley Civilization: An Ancient Utopia?

[Judi Lynn]

In the Bronze Age, Harappans had nothing to kill or die for and no religion.
Updated March 16, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

Neel Burton M.D.

India’s first civilization was astonishingly advanced.

But more interesting is what they did not have: no king, army, or religion.

The Indus Valley Civilization undermines the Enlightenment idea of historical progress as global and linear.

In the mid-1850s, a few years after the British annexation of the Punjab, some railway builders stumbled upon an ancient mound of terracotta bricks at Harappa in the valley of the Ravi. Despite reports of their antiquity, they carted off the bricks for track ballast to support nearly 100 miles of railway between Multan and Lahore.

In 1920, John Marshall, the director of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), ordered a full excavation of the site. Around that time, he heard of another site some 400 miles to the south, which locals called Mohenjo-daro ("The Mound of the Dead&quot after the human and animal bones that lay strewn among the artifacts. Initial digs at Mohenjo-daro uncovered striking similarities between the two sites, and it became apparent that they belonged to an ancient civilization that pushed back the history of India by several thousand years.

In an article for the 24 September 1924 issue of the Illustrated London News, Marshall wrote:

Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenæ, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long forgotten civilisation. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.

Around 1,000 sites have since been reported, including five major urban centres (Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and three more). The territory, which straddled the modern India-Pakistan border, stretched some 900 miles along the banks of the Indus and its tributaries, covering an area larger than that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), or Harappan Civilization, as it came to be called, also had extensive terrestrial and maritime trade connections with, among others, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula.

More:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/hide-and-seek/202403/the-indus-valley-civilization-an-ancient-utopia

[erronis]

1. Thanks for posting this. I was gratified to see that the Psychology Today article was open -

no paywall. Will read more later.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. First civilization in an area has no competitor, hence no army. Maybe police and rangers. . . . nt

[Voltaire2]

3. It seems that there were many different paths

of civilization development. Hierarchical societies were only one possibility. The Indus Valley civilization was not the only example of non hierarchical ancient cities.