Indus Valley Civilization’s Collapse Explained
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
is a writing system at all, rather than the kind of ornamentation from a pre-proto-writing stage known in several other sites of ancient civilizations. (As a reality check, we can remember that several regions of the world had elaborate empires and cities with extensive trade routes but without writing.)
Some of the controversy about this issue arises because of the extreme sensitivity of cultural heritage claims in south Asia in a region that spans a heavily militarized border. A good popular book about the nature and origin of writing systems in general, worldwide, is Visible Speech by John DeFrancis,
http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Diverse-Interactions-Co...
and the definitive compilation of international research on writing systems to the date of publication is The World's Writing Systems
http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...
edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright and published in 1996. I haven't concluded absolutely that the Indus Valley Script could not be a writing system, but there is no sure evidence that it is, and the earliest attested writing system in a nearby region is the Brahmi script
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C4%81hm%C4%AB_script
that is much more recent in time (a few centuries older than the common era, that is approximately 2,300 years old) and unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165
You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please?
The real controversial implication, IMHO, of studying ancient Indian languages is that Sanskrit (used over thousands of years and refined by rigid grammar rules by e.g. Panini 500 B.C.) may actually be the language from which Latin, and hence many European Romantic languages, developed.
http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-eu...
That's probably worth diving into, if you are genuinely curious. As the Welsh linguist Sir William Jones said,
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."
[edit- link added and fluff redacted. :)]
Brahmi and Karoshthi (the two major origin scripts for the writing systems of the subcontinent) are generally accepted to be related to the Semitic writing systems.
Source: an undergraduate class in writing systems several years ago; also, the relevant Wikipedia pages agree, giving Aramaic as the parent script.
Yes. Again, this is a familiar issue to people who are familiar with linguistics, and one of the criticisms of the Rao et al. publication is that none of the authors are familiar with the methodology used in historical linguistics to solve comparable problems in other parts of the world. (I am able to read ancient Chinese and am intimately familiar with the history of the Chinese script, which is an illuminating example for comparing periods of early ornamentation, proto-writing, and full writing as that script developed with attested archeological finds.) I am also very familiar with the extent of the Indo-European languages and with the fact that many languages spoken in India (e.g., Tamil, a language spoken by many friends of mine) are not Indo-European. The links I already provided give much of the needed background information.
But here are a few more links, for onlookers who are curious about this issue and may be interested in responses to the Rao et al. publication.
http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf
http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf
http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao...
http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic...
(The link immediately above is by a former president of the Society for Computational Linguistics.)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011
(The review article linked above from the journal Computational Linguistics discussed the methodological issues involved.)
Rao's reply in Computational Linguistics: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusCompLing.pdf
Also other articles at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusResponse.html
Edit 1.
An aside:
Being a logic student who uses probabilistic machine learning, Farmer's use of the words refutation, proof etc. make me despair. This web page is an example:
http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html
Rao is much more careful and nuanced in his methods. Using time-tested logic and math. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/ScienceIndus.pdf
" As clearly stated in the last sentence of the paper, our results provide evidence which, given the rich syntactic structure in the script (and other evidence as listed below), increases the probability that the script represents language."
It's a little odd to describe the Rao paper as using time-tested logic and math when the idea of conditional entropy as an indicator of whether a given symbol system is linguistic is in no way time-tested. I'm not a professional linguist, and it may well be a valid and interesting technique, but it is not time-tested.
The problem is that there are plenty of kinds of markings that don't fall under either of these. Take for example Roman Numerals. You aren't encoding IX or VIIII as the word "nine" or equivalent in any language. Instead You are illustrating the number on a tally stick and the tally stick, rather than the spoken language, acts as the shared point of reference.
So I think one has to be careful about saying that these are the only two options. The script could have a communicative function and even a formally defined one (much like Roman Numerals do) without being writing in the sense of encoding spoken language in durable form.
Isn't Chinese an obvious counterexample? The Bible say in the beginning was the verb but for Chinese characters the main view is that the speech encoding part has been added later.
The blog you cite shows serious signs of crackpotterry, as do its comments.
My new favorite word!
The current thinking as far as I can tell is that Indo-Iranian (basically the ancestor of Sanscrit and Avestan) was the latest branch to break off of common Indo-European, though I think these models always oversimplify.
The most archaic attested Indo-European language is actually Hittite, possibly followed by Tocharian.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
But computer analysis and all was done recently to strongly suggest this is indeed a script rather than some kind of ornamentation.
Please refer to the following TED talk by one of the scientists who worked on it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...
The following two are Asko Parpola's contributions:
http://www.harappa.com/script/parpola0.html http://www.amazon.com/Deciphering-Indus-Script-Asko-Parpola/...
The Indus Valley script could have been, for example, a pictographic/ideographic labelling system without any real language-encoding function. But if I draw thee fish to indicate that you owe me three fish, is that writing? It's certainly encoded communications. I don't know that it is writing as we know it though.
It's amazing how quite advanced technologies (for a civilization that thrived from 5000 to 3000 years ago) were mastered only to be lost later over the course of history.
A mind-blowing example closer to us is the Antikythera mechanism [1]. Found in a Mediterranean wreck in 1900, the artifact was not analyzed until the 1950s, when it was found to be "a mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions" - except it was made in the first century BC.
Wikipedia notes that "Technological artifacts of similar complexity and workmanship did not reappear until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks were built in Europe."
It is the oldest known mechanical computer - and to my knowledge no comparable device was to be manufactured until the 17th century and the invention of the Pascaline [2]. That's 18 centuries of gap, right there.
The precision of the clockwork and the exactitude of the astronomical calculations made by the Antikythera mechanism only goes to show how much knowledge was lost in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Progress does not always follow a straight arrow.
It's actually not (too) hard to imagine something like this happening again: the process (probably) starts with nuclear weapons and ends with something like A Canticle for Leibowitz: http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp...
Not available for the Kindle!?
The site is a bunch of concentric T shaped monoliths - kind of like Stone Henge. Except the stones are cut more cleanly, covered in beautiful animal reliefs and it is nearly 8000 years older than stone henge. Activity suggest its origins could reach as far back as 20,000 years ago. And the reason the site has survived intact till this day is because whatever culture built the place decided to bury it. There are all sorts of theories as to whether a hunter gatherer society could really build such a place. Whatever the case, this discovery gives the typical timeline of history a very hard erm time.
Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient, and with such primitive quarrying tools. The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (Layer III) contains monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. Four such buildings have been uncovered, with diameters between 10–30 meters (33–98 ft). Geophysical surveys indicate the existence of 16 additional structures. Layer II, dated to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) (7500–6000 BC), has revealed several adjacent rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime, reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors. The most recent layer consists of sediment deposited as the result of agricultural activity.
At present, Göbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and rewarded or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society. We cannot "read" the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site; the variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic. As there seems to be little or no evidence of habitation, and the animals depicted on the stones are mainly predators, the stones may have been intended to stave off evils through some form of magic representation; it is also possible that they served as totems.[31] The assumption that the site was strictly cultic in purpose and not inhabited has also been challenged by the suggestion that the structures served as large communal houses, "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/musi-...
Uninterrupted?
If you think about it, there is a shockingly small number of people who know how to do things critical to society. How do you make a car axle? Sew complex stitching on an industrial scale? Build a CPU?
His thesis is that the primary driver of civilization collapse is actually complexity, and that as societies face problems, such as ecological problems, or invasions from outside, usually, they solve these problems by adding social complexity. For example Rome tried to solve the problem of diminishing agricultural returns by binding farmers to their land.
As Prof. Tainter puts it, these societies run into trouble when they have to make large investments in order to maintain their current way of life.
If this pattern holds out, it may be that the more advanced a civilization is, the more vulnerable it is to collapse due to pressures of this sort. In other words, at some point, the complexity becomes self-defeating and civilization crumbles.
http://news.discovery.com/history/collapse-river-civilizatio...
This theory is being slightly far-fetched. The Indus river is a perennial river and it doesn't dry up even in harsh summers because of the melting of glaciers. The river Indus supports nearly 18 crore people even today, can't it have supported a few thousand people 5000 years back? It looks like that there is some misinterpretation here.
There is a possibility that IVC never declined at all. These Indus Valley excavation sites are looking deserted because these sites were used as grave yards from time immemorial by various occupants of these lands.These sites have been wrongly identified as Metropolises, whereas in reality they were only Necropolises. This wrong identification is the reason for confusion surrounding theories like this about IVC. Follow the below given link for detailed information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/angkor-seat-of-the...
I wonder how sensitive our modern society is to similar agriculturally relevant factors.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wheat_yields_in_developin...
Additionally I would point out that famines today are almost never problems of global distribution but rather local breakdowns in distribution. I.e. a small nation falls victim of civil war and consequently famine happens as well.
There are very real and open questions what our current approaches to agriculture can do as oil continues to become more expensive.
Basically, I think the thing is that we humans tend towards as high a population as we can manage and expect famines to control our population. We've been pushing the envelope by utilizing vast amounts of fossil fuels for a while, and GMO's are often sold on the promise of being even more energy intensive (spray more pesticides and your crops will survive).
Edit: Edited for spelling
Clicked the link, wasn't disappointed.
Climate places real constraints on cultures but I am not sure that these are ones which necessarily dictate success or failure. If it did, Roald Amudsen should have suffered the same fate as John Franklin.
The fates of individual polar explorers is not particularly relevant to the fall of large city building cultures. And anyway Amundsen disappeared while on a rescue mission to find a crashed polar airship, so did suffer a similar fate, just a bit later.
The example he gives in his lectures is the so-called Byzantine Dark Ages which were a deliberate transformation of the Byzantine Empire in response to the Arab invasions (going from a professional army to peasant militias, etc).
But most cultures that I know of aren't even proximally wiped out by climate change. The Persians were conquered by the Romans on the battlefield, as were the Gauls. The Western Roman Empire appears to have collapsed primarily from inward pressures, not outward ones, and the agricultural failures there were the result of factors other than climate change or even man-made environmental damages.
Some cultures do fail due primarily to environmental reasons (Greenland and republican Iceland being the best examples), but I don't think they represent the general rule. Iceland never was a particularly fertile place to grow things (vast amounts of environmental damage were the result of grazing animals simply because there's not much else you can do in Iceland), and neither was Greenland even before the Little Ice Age....
Getting fresh food from any part of the world is (comparatively) trivial nowadays, but even 150 years ago, most food spoiled on the way to the local market a few miles down the road.
First there are a lot of foods that don't spoil that way (i.e. beginning to rot), such as fresh fruits, fresh veggies, grains, etc. Those are still relatively friendly to transport to market.
Secondly I have taken cheese, dry salami (salted, fermented meat), etc., backpacking and it is fine without refridgeration after a week even in the summer. These may sweat some of their fat but that's not the same as spoiling.
Third, I don't think meats spoil as quickly after slaughter as a lot of us think. I once accidently left a fresh/micro-slaughtered/micro-butchered roast in the back of my car and discovered it three days later. Cooked it and it still tasted fresher than anything I had ever bought at a supermarket. I don't know what the supply chains look like at the supermarket but I doubt they are very short.......
Edit: I could understand the argument that many of the things we would buy at our grocery store would have spoiled on the way to a local market. But if most food would have spoiled on the way to a local market that would have made cities fundamentally untenable. And yet London was a city of about two million people at that time.
London and other European cities were never as far from their food sources as American cities are. They also benefited from well-maintained road systems (i.e, paved roads) that lessened transit times.
Though as I said, "most" food spoiled on the way to market, not all. Food spoilage is still a problem today, but we have both minimized the spoilage, maximized production, and adopted certain techniques so that spoilage generally does not affect downstream food production or sales.
Note wilting is no the same as decaying. Most fresh veggies will wilt. It takes a lot longer to decay though.