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Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

> 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.

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