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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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