Villages in the Indus Valley

I have been reading on the Indus Valley Civilization for the last few years. I share highlights with friends and relatives on whatsapp. 

But perhaps they are not all interested in so much detail. So I decided to record some of my readings here. 

Read a study of four village sites of the Indus Valley (there are nearly 1100 of them spread over 1.5 million sq kms !). These village sites are in Haryana and Rajasthan. 

The study concluded that the villagers had access to high quality luxury goods in small nos. - articles made from gold, lapus lazuli, etc. Such items have been found at other village sites too. So these articles were not limited to the cities. 

Agate, lapis lazuli, gold and carnelian beads
 from two of the villages. 

The study goes into details of the pottery that must have been produced in these villages. It found designs, materials and process different from that found in large cities, though related. This has been observed at other sites as well. So there was a trend for regional aesthetics and preferences. 

The study concluded that the villages were production centres for goods other than agriculture as well. They were not isolated from the cities but not totally dependent on them as well. 

Many such villages are also laid our in grid pattern with wide streets, public buildings and fortified walls. So size of the settlement did not limit the essential features of the indus valley civilization. 

The False Notions Peddled in India about Westerners

This is a fantastic story of a woman who started giving away excess garden produce for free and then others started also leaving their excess produce for others - poor or just sharing people, to take as they need. Lou Ridsdale started "Food is Free" 6 years ago in Ballarat in  Victoria and its still going strong.

Our friend sent this little video from Australia. 

I had never bothered to travel abroad before 2014... I was also told by elders that all civilization, all culture, all history, was really only in India, and not elsewhere ! 

I bought the crux of this thinking, but began to Q this recieved wisdom when about ten years ago, i deeply read about WW2 and its aftermath in Europe. 

Mainland Europe - and Britain, were in 1945 at the end of the war, bombed out ruins over large parts.. Agriculture, sewage, water systems, train stations and bridges were destroyed.. 

1 % British, 6 % of Austrians, 8 % of Germans, 9 % of Greeks and Yugoslav people and 17 % Poles were dead as a result of the war. 

All other countries in Europe had also lost large nos. of their people. 

There were large food shortages in Europe towards the end of the war and after it, even resulting in mass starvation in a few countries.

India had suffered too ofcourse, with 2 million dead in the Bengal famine in 1943 because of British mismanagement, and a further 2 million dead during the partition riots in 1947 (0.5 % of the population of undivided India). 

A lakh soldiers from India had also perished in WW2, fighting on the British side. 

So Europe set to rebuilt itself, and so did India, 2 years apart - 1945 and 1947. But the difference, even between the poorer economies of East Europe, and India, is vast. Even if they did have a head start on industrialization, and had exploited other regions of the world, this did not fully explain to me, why we were so much behind.

I decided to travel to these countries to get a better sense of this.. so my family and I went to England, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and mainland Europe in different trips from 2014-2017. These were in the nature of study tours.. I had Qs I wanted answered.

Ofcourse these trips of 2 weeks each to a country were too small for in-depth study, but I did get some answers to Qs on farming, attitude to water supplies, degraded land, and the work ethic. And public transportation systems, urban planning et al..

But the most important learnings were about people.. I had been told Westerners did not value family life - which was patently false in my experience. The people we met also had meaningful friendships where they did a great deal to help each other out. 

Most impressive was, that I have not met a single person in these nations who DID NOT volunteer frequently for causes they believed in.

The very elderly also in New Zealand and Britain, some of them on wheelchairs, volunteered in churches, changing flowers, guiding people, and collecting money to train guide dogs to help disabled people.

If we stop our emissions today, we won’t go back to the past

In 2017, there’s been a stunning decrease in Antarctic sea ice, reminiscent of the 2007 decrease in the Arctic.

What would happen to the climate if we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide today, right now? Would we return to the climate of our elders?

The simple answer is no. Once we release the carbon dioxide stored in the fossil fuels we burn, it accumulates in and moves among the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and the plants and animals of the biosphere. The released carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Only after many millennia will it return to rocks, for example, through the formation of calcium carbonate – limestone – as marine organisms’ shells settle to the bottom of the ocean. But on time spans relevant to humans, once released the carbon dioxide is in our environment essentially forever. It does not go away, unless we, ourselves, remove it.

In order to stop the accumulation of heat, we would have to eliminate not just carbon dioxide emissions, but all greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide. We’d also need to reverse deforestation and other land uses that affect the Earth’s energy balance (the difference between incoming energy from the sun and what’s returned to space). We would have to radically change our agriculture. If we did this, it would eliminate additional planetary warming, and limit the rise of air temperature.

A scientist writes : "As a professor of climate and space sciences, I teach my students they need to plan for a world 4℃ warmer. A 2011 report from the International Energy Agency states that if we don’t get off our current path, then we’re looking at an Earth 6℃ warmer. Even now after the Paris Agreement, the trajectory is essentially the same. It’s hard to say we’re on a new path until we see a peak and then a downturn in carbon emissions.

If we stop our emissions today, we won’t go back to the past. The Earth will warm. And since the response to warming is more warming through feedbacks associated with melting ice and increased atmospheric water vapor, our job becomes one of limiting the warming."

Acknowledgement : Sourced entirely from this link.

Production in the Indus Valley Civilization..

Agrarian base

A stable system of agriculture, supplemented by animal husbandry, hunting and plant gathering, provided economic sustenance to urban networks.

Well at Indus Valley Civilisation site, Rupnagar,
Punjab / Harvinder Chandigarh / CC-BY-SA 4.0

A ploughed field was revealed through excavation at Kalibangan. The Kalibangan field contained two sets of furrows crossing each other at right angles, thus forming a grid pattern, and it is likely that two crops were raised in the same field. In modern fields in that zone, mustard is grown in one set of furrows and horse gram in the other. Mixed cropping is suggested by other evidence as well as, for instance, in the mixture of wheat and barley at Indus sites. Such mixed cropping is practiced even today in many parts of north India as an insurance against weather hazards so that if wheat fails to ripen, the hardier barley is sure to yield a crop.

Cultivated crops included wheat, barley, rice, millets, peas, lentils, chickpeas, sesame, flax, legumes and cotton. Cattle meat was the favourite animal food of the Indus people and cattle bones have been found in large quantities at all sites that have yielded bones. In addition to their meat, cattle and buffaloes must have supported agricultural operations and served as draught animals. Mutton was also popular and bones of sheep/goat have been found at almost all Indus sites. Hunting of animals was also carried out. 

Manufacturing and Trade

Bullock cart, 2000 BC / Yann / CC-BY-SA 4.0

Inhabitants of the ancient Indus River Valley developed new techniques in metallurgy—the science of working with copper, bronze, lead, and tin. Harappans also made intricate handicrafts using semi-precious gemstone Carnelian. They worked on shells, and shells used in their crafts have origins from as far away as the coast of modern-day Oman.

Several constructions have been identified as workshops or industrial quarters and some of the buildings might have been warehouses. An Impressive workshop, recognized as Bead Making Factory, was found at Channu Daro city, which included a furnace. Shell bangles, beads of many materials, stealite seals and metal works were also manufactured at Channu Daro. Harappan seals were made generally in bigger towns which were involved with administrative network.

Statue production, and skilled metal working (in both bronze and precious metals) has been uncovered in Rakhigarhi. A gold foundry with about 3000 unpolished semi-precious stones has been found here.

Mold of Seal, Indus valley civilization, 2500 BC
Ismoon / CC-BY-SA1.0

Signs of flourishing trade can be seen by the excavation of stamps, jewellery and 'chert' weights. 

Trade focused on importing raw materials to be used in Harappan city workshops, including minerals from Iran and Afghanistan, lead and copper from other parts of India, jade from China, and cedar wood floated down rivers from the Himalayas and Kashmir. Other trade goods included terracotta pots, gold, silver, metals, beads, flints for making tools, seashells, pearls, and colored gemstones, such as lapis lazuli and turquoise.