Pakistan's lost city of 40k people | Hacker News Reader

Pakistan's lost city of 40k people

bbc.com

184 pointspseudolus62 comments

The article focuses a bit too much on the city and not enough on the civilization that it was a part of. I guess the fact that it's in the Lost Civilizations series is an indicator?

Anyway, for those not in the know – the city at Mohenjodaro is part of the rather extensive Indus Valley/Harappan Civilization that was contemporary with the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations (~3000BC onwards). The reasons for its decline aren't particularly well understood.

The script [2] of the IVC is as-yet undeciphered as well.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

> The reasons for its decline aren't particularly well understood.

another victim of the bronze age collapse that we can't explain fully.

I have heard that it was a victim of the 200 year famine that hit most parts of the world during 2000-1900 BCE timeframe. At the same time, the mega river that streamed through central India dried up completely adding insult to injury. This MAY be the cause of the collapse of civilization.

As far as I have seen, this is the best plausible explanation for the collapse - so far.

That's a lovely script. Really quite mysterious. Reminds me of graph theory and topology.

I wonder if you can do some kind of weird frequency distribution analysis to classify what the extent specimens may be referring to.

I mean given some old civilization, is there a guassian like distribution of say X% documents being financial, Y% religious and so on?

And if there is, can you somehow classify these samples into camps and then maybe get to some confidence interval that one pile is likely say, political statements such as laws.

If you can get say a commerce/accounting pile, your known plaintext is pretty constrained. There's probably some bookkeeping and itemization and maybe some mathematics. Especially if there's addition or subtraction on there. It may not look anything like how we do it: could be concentric circles or something wild but arithmetic is generally the same. X + Y >= (X or Y) - even in systems where they just use a term "many", some really basic rules will still hold

For the religion you have feasts, calendars, holy days, etc. Maybe there's domain specific characters given this approach

The problem is with some cultures, we know that this approach does not work. There was.. is a tendency for example among pious muslims to burn all books except the quoran at the end of life, to express ones devotion.

So this approach would dig up only one book.

Now imagine a budhistic precursor, which shuns world possesions and clingyness to status, scribbling notes of debt on papyrus. And you simply get nothing, but mythologic temple inscriptions. Which only help you, if you can derive the follow up mythologies of the successor cultures. A connection you can only arrive after you know.

> There was.. is a tendency for example among pious muslims to burn all books except the quoran at the end of life, to express ones devotion.

Do you have an example of notable examples of this in history? or a source of such events? I've never heard of such a case before, so it's quite interesting.

Most of my information is from a book on the issue called "Sealed time".

Regarding the book as holy property, special item: https://sureshemre.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/on-the-late-adop...

One such example is the delay of book printing in the osman cultural sphere.

Rest is on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_desecration#Respectful_d...

And in various scholar articles. Notice that its also a attempt to have cohension and prevent the forming of sects and cults.

https://raseef22.net/article/1070179-book-burning-islamic-hi...

I am somewhat confused...

Your point was that pious people, even today, would burn all owned books except the Quran as a show of their faith.

> Sealed time

I can't seem to find this book. Do you have the author for it?

> Regarding the book as holy property, special item: https://sureshemre.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/on-the-late-adop...

This is more about scribes being attached to their jobs so preventing the use of printing-press. That's nothing holy or religion related. Good old protectionism.

> Rest is on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_desecration#Respectful_d...

I am also confused what this has to do with the original statement. Quran as a book has a form of disposal, yes, and it's by burning, sure. Your point was about non-Quranic books.

> And in various scholar articles. Notice that its also a attempt to have cohension and prevent the forming of sects and cults.

Similarly, again, that is about religious texts and religious books.

Honestly, I am not sure where you got your claim from. As far as I can research, there isn't some widespread practice of "tendency for example among pious muslims to burn all books except the quoran at the end of life" ...

Dan Diner Sealed Time or German "Versiegelte Zeit".

I also said "pious" and i think being deeply religous and a scholar of other sciences sort of exclude one another in modern times.

I’m highly sceptical about the claims around muslims burning non islamic books. They had their own golden age while Europe was in the dark ages.

We know from various sources that Islamic scholars made quiet a contribution to science back in the day. A cursory glance on google provided this compact guide https://www.metmuseum.org/learn/educators/curriculum-resourc...

In particular the bit around medicine. I’m sure there are more in depth references available.

Let's take that as true for the conversation

There's likely not countless deviations. Religious zealotry can yield a different distribution, ok now we have 2.

There's a lot of antiquarian languages and civilizations. Even if there's a third possibility, it's worth seeing if the documents can be clustered in various fairly predictable proportions.

I can't be the first to think of this, it's just too obvious

Have a look at this by Rajesh Rao of Washington: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_-obTZO6pY

As an ancient civilization with an undeciphered script, Indus Valley Civ. is mired in controversy and claims

Religion wise though article claims an Egyptian link which is new to me, it has some clear Hindu associations like the Pasupathinath seal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal

Script wise the contention and claim also comes from Tamil and Sanskrit. TED talk on this below

https://youtu.be/kwYxHPXIaao

Pashupati is much, much older than modern concept of Hinduism. Many cultures around the time had a "Master of Animals" motif depicted l in their cultural artifact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Animals

You could call Rudra/Shiva as modern versions of that motif. But calling the figure in Pashupati seal as depecting a Hindu deity is probably not correct. IVC was pre-vedic after all. No doubt later cultures adopted IVC deities into their own pantheon. But IVC religion was likely very far from what we recognize as Hinduism. And probably closer to religions in Mesopotamia at the time. Egypt does seem further culturally than Mesopotamia to me though. So I find the Egyptian connection a bit tenuous as well.

In particular pashupati is not mentioned in rgveda

Hinduism is Vedic + IVC + other indigenous belief systems

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This is called the “Hindu synthesis”.

Because there is no clear IVC integration and the integration of Buddhism is rejected by practicing buddhists.

There has been historic and ongoing synthesis which very often follows embrace, extend, extinguish pattern, so the GPs characterization is misleading.

Buddhism is not mentioned by GP, but there are many big differences between vedic religion and modern hinduism. for eg. animal sacrifice vs vegetarianism.

These ideas probably gain traction from the Sramana traditions which also gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism.

It is hard to tease apart the influences exactly, esp in the case of IVC where very little is known about the culture. But some iconography bears a striking resemblence iconography found in indian religions at a later date.

If you are in the Gujarat state, India, you can go visit Lothal (part of the same Indus Valley Civilization) and look at the fascinating seals in its museum. It is under 100Km from Ahmedabad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothal

https://www.harappa.com/blog/discovery-lothal

I find it interesting that the cities of the Indus Valley Civilization had sewage systems and most of the houses had toilets.

This knowledge seems to have gotten lost with the decline of their civilization. Some time the Indus Valley Civilization disappeared, some of their cities got reinhabited by other peoples, but they didn't use the sewage system and apparently didn't figure out what it was.

The same happened with the Romans where I live, in present-day Romania and the former province of Dacia. Back when they were here, around 100-200 AD, they used to have villas with heated floors.

Once they left for good, in the late 200s - early 300s, no-one around these parts of the world had houses with heated floors for at least 1500 years. I'd say that in the early 1700s a local ruler was the first one who had such a system installed in its Bucharest court, meaning the first one after the Romans.

Every Indian history textbook has had detailed overviews of the indus valley civilization ever since my parents were in school. (they’re in their late 60s).

I think entire generations of Indians (and presumably Pakistanis) know of this city / civilization.

Hardly “lost”, if lost means people haven’t heard of it.

“Lost” can also mean - no longer exists.

If someone says.. we lost 10 men in that battle, it doesn’t mean we never knew who they were.

The IVC is a vast civilization that at its peak was much larger in area & population than Egyptian, Mesopotamian. Mohenjodaro - modern day Pakistan - is one of the major sites, but there are plenty others: Lothal, Dholavira etc. The Mergarh civilization was even more ancient than IVC.

This is one of the greatest mysteries in human history. Cracking the IVC "script", historian aren't even sure it's a script, would be key to solving this puzzle.

Is Mohenjo-daro really something that most of people never heard of?

I admittedly forgot most of the details about it, but I remember it being mentioned in my history classes in the primary school (in 80s Yugoslavia)...

Yup, learned this at school too, along with the other ancient centers of civilization.

I definitely knew about it in Romania's pre iron curtain fall days. Maybe not from a school manual but from TV documentaries.

I'm confused by the dating in the article. It refers to an ancient Buddhist stupa towering over the streets, but later says the city was abandoned by 1700 BCE. This would be over 1,000 years before the founding of Buddhism. Or am I missing something?

> 1922 that R D Banerji, an ASI officer, believed he saw a buried stupa, a mound-like structure where Buddhists typically meditate. This led to large-scale excavations –...

The officer initially believed it to be a Buddhist stupa. Excavation revealed the true historicity. A platform is easy to be mistaken with a stupa, without more context.

Apparently there is a later built Buddhist stupa on the same site [1]. Props to 'ojbyrne for pointing this out to me in a discussion.

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[1] https://www.harappa.com/blog/buddhist-stupa-mohenjo-daro

Surely it was not officially called Mohenjo-Daro (Mound of the dead men) by its residents, in its heyday?

> While ancient writings often reveal the secrets of civilisations, this has not been the case with Mohenjo-daro, whose inhabitants used what's known as the Indus Valley Script. "It was a pictographic language with more than 400 signs. It is still not decoded," said my guide Solangi.

Unless a written record of its name can be found and deciphered, that name will probably endure.

The Article mentions it was on trade routes all over Central Asia. Its name must be mentioned in other languages in other ancient cities. Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc would have mentioned this place by name.

> Unless a written record of its name can be found and deciphered, that name will probably endure.

I think this still stands. Even if it has been mentioned, we'll have to find it and decipher. I would argue considering how famous it is in the nation, it'll be real hard to change the name even if the original is found.

There are Mesopotamian records that refer to various parallel states. But it's not easy to prove that a particular name refers to a particular area.

(If I'm remembering correctly, we do suspect a particular group mentioned in Mesopotamian records of being Harappan. It's still impossible to prove; you'd want a lot more evidence than "we think it was these guys" before renaming the culture. There is also no particular reason to believe that the Sumerian word for Harappans was related to the Harappan word for themselves.)

EDIT: found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meluhha

There are often cases where we know a dead civilization exists in the archaeological record in a particular place, but with no surviving texts buried there documenting the place's name; and we know that references to a place that sound like they're talking about that dead civilization, exist in other civilizations' surviving contemporaneous texts; but we can't be sure the references are talking about the particular place/civilization that we've found archaeological records of.

One good example: is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Punt the same civilization as / continuous with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Aksum ? There's a lot of "circumstantial evidence" for that conclusion, but nothing definitive.

A bronze age civilization had brick houses and but I wonder why until a few decades ago, south Asian villages still mostly had mud houses. Given such a long time, one would expect brick houses even in remote villages.

India. Not pakistan.

No. It’s in Pakistan. Double check your map.

It's Pakistan. I literally live 2 kilometers away from it . I can walk there.

I got interested in Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) while following a rabbit hole of trying to understand the population admixture of Indians. It is a truly fascinating civilisation. Here are some titbits that I found really interesting.

At it peak it was a spread over a truly gigantic geographical space. However the city architectures followed nearly same blue print. Which points to the existence of some kind of central planning.

It is known as a faceless civilisation because there wasn't an obviously kingly figure. No royal burials, no palaces, no extravagant houses etc., Of course there were rich and poor people but overall it seemed to be an egalitarian culture. Most houses are more or less uniformly well built.

The cities were divided into two sections; one part showing signs of more wealth than the other, suggesting ruling class of some sort. But again, it wasn't as if there was a king or as such.

There is no sign of war, destruction or violence. No weapons, no signs of burning/pillage etc.,

They traded with contemporary civilisations, predominantly with Mesopotamia.

Here's a good video but that's not easy find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s5EDxuL0Vs

Mr. Danino had written a wonderful book on this subject. Called "The Lost River". I suggest it as much as I can. I got interested in Indus Valley by reading this.

Get the book by David Reich from 2018. He basically has solved the question of Indian genetic origins.

In a nutshell, IVC is original inhabitants of India + Iranian pastoralists, today called dravidians.

Aryans came in to this mix about 2000 years later.

That is no longer the view of even David Reich.

Lets not conflate what is a fact and what is a theory. Aryans came in 2000 years later is not a fact but a theory and there are multiple holes in that theory. So, lets not flaunt that dubious theory when its not even substantiated with proofs.

That's interesting -- can you point me to a more up to date source where Reich reverses himself or significantly updates his views?

All Indian students below the age of 13 have heard of Mohenjo-Daro. I don't remember what year's textbooks it was in for us but the author assertion that it is a place that "most people have never heard of" has almost a billion rebuttals.

Add the almost 225 million or so Pakistanis too. About 1.5 billion people I'd say.

Yeah, Indian history education literally starts at the Harappan civilization. It's not possible to not know about it.

Need to add 3 billion more to that number to falsify the claim.

I still remember during my school days, the cover of history textbook was with Indus script on it.

If most of the roughly 7-billion other people on the planet have never heard of it, then yes, most people have never heard of it.

Am I the only one that when an article is about something I want to know more, I quickly drop it and go to Wikipedia instead?

I ended up on a long wiki walk reading all sorts of things about Pakistan, but only after I gave the article itself a once over.

The correct title should be - Ancient India's lost city of 40k people

The place is in today's Pakistan. The ancient culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation was present in what is today Pakistan and India.

Why? It's in Pakistan. The modern country of India didn't exist back then, and nor is the city even located in modern day India.

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