Marriage in Harappan Times

At Harappa, there is evidence for matrilocality - where husbands go to live with their wives' community. 

Nearly all cemetery inhumations conform to a similar layout that is not readily differentiated into distinct social classes.

Joe Ravi, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia

The skeletons found are generally healthy people which indicates an improved access to resources. A study found that the few burials that have been found (only 600 so far across hundreds of years of urbanized living across hundreds of settlements) may have related to first generation immigrants. These burials show they were respected and that mobility between villages and cities existed as also trade. 

A study from Farmana, in present day Haryana, showed trade links with present day Punjab in Pakistan, and Gujarat as well. There were signs of matrimonial linkages as well. 

More burials found at Rakhigarhi at Haryana have unearthed a man and a woman together, possibly in a matrimonial relationship. This may point to the earliest marriage (4700 years ago) for which evidence has been found. 

Uptill now historians believed the earliest marriage had taken place about 4400 years ago, in Mesopotamia. 

Historians believe that some of the beautiful painted jars found at various sites may have been used as marriage gifts. 

A bangle found at Susa in ancient Mesopotamia was made from materials found only along the Indus coast. Historians have speculated that 'it is possible that the woman wearing this bangle was part of a marriage alliance with a distant trading family in Susa. Such long distance marriage contracts can be documented historically and ethnographically. In the absence of strong state control, long distance kin relationships would have been a form of insurance in trade relations.'

A high degree of planning is evident in Indus Valley Cities' Infrastructure

Please note : the text following is from a variety of internet sources that i did not at the time bookmark. Nothing original below - just mix and match from various creditable historians. 

Terracotta pipes used for washing basins and manholes constructed by the Indus Valley people are still in good condition after nearly five thousand years.

Almost all houses in Mohen Jodaro had a bathroom, always constructed at the side of the building adjacent to the street for the convenient disposal of wastewater into the street drains. Latrines found in the houses were placed close to the street wall for the same reason. 

Ablution places were placed adjacent to the latrines, thus conforming to one of the most modern of sanitary maxims. Bathrooms and latrines situated on the second floor were drained using terracotta pipes with a fitting valve placed in the boundary wall of the building.

The street lights system, watch and ward arrangement at night to outwit the law breakers, specific places to throw rubbish and waste materials, public wells in every street, well in every house etc. revealed the high sense of engineering and town planning of the people.

The corners of the street rounded off perhaps to enable the heavy carts to take turn easily. The streets intersected in right angles and so arranged that the prevailing winds could work as a sort of suction pump and thereby clean the atmosphere automatically. 

No building was allowed to be constructed arbitrarily and encroaching upon a public highway. The owners of the pottery kilns were not allowed to build the furnaces within the town obviously to save the town from air pollution.

Devices known from Persia as “wind catchers” were attached to the roofs of some buildings which provided air conditioning for the home or administrative office.

All of thes Indus civilization cities had been pre-planned. Unlike those of other cultures which usually developed from smaller, rural communities, the cities of the Indus Valley Civilization had been thought out, a site chosen, and purposefully constructed prior to full habitation.  

Scholar John Keay comments: “Our overwhelming impression is of cultural uniformity, both throughout the several centuries during which the Harappan civilization flourished, and over the vast area it occupied.” 

The ubiquitous bricks, for instance, are all of standardized dimensions, just as the stone cubes used by the Harappans to measure weights are also standard and based on the modular system. Road widths conform to a similar module; thus, streets are typically twice the width of side lanes, while the main arteries are twice or one and a half times the width of streets. Most of the streets so far excavated are straight and run either north-south or east-west.

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 Only Disease Eradicated in the History of Mankind has been a Virus !

Only one disease has been completely eradicated so far - small pox - caused by a virus !

What follows is the story of how humanity did it...

A Virus Humanity Won Over

In 10,000 BCE, a deadly new virus emerged in Northeast Africa, killing indiscriminately and causing a disease we now know as smallpox. 

Around 180 AD, Small pox killed an estimated 5.5 million people in the Roman Empire, including the Emperor, and hastened its decline.

Smallpox kept revisiting countries and continents periodically with global migration patterns : China in the 4th century, Europe in the 7th century - and continued to kill millions of people. Generations watched helplessly as their children succumbed to the disease or were disfigured or blinded by it. 

The Japanese smallpox epidemic of 735–737 is believed to have killed as much as one-third of Japan's population.

Between 1868 and 1907, there were approximately 4.7 million deaths from smallpox in India.

During the 20th century, it is estimated that smallpox was responsible for 300 million deaths worldwide.  For perspective, the flu is supposed to have killed a 100 million people in 2018-2020. 

In the early 1950s an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year. As recently as 1967, 15 million people contracted small pox and two million died from it that year.

For Centuries, Inoculation was the only cure for Small Pox

Inoculation was likely practiced in Africa, India, China and Turkey long before the 18th century, when it was introduced to Europe. In China, powdered smallpox scabs were blown up the noses of the healthy. People would then develop a mild case of the disease and from then on were immune to it. There are hints of the practice in China from the 10th century.

Inoculation referred to the subcutaneous instillation of smallpox virus into non-immune individuals. The inoculator usually used a lancet wet with fresh matter taken from a ripe pustule of some person who suffered from smallpox. The material was then subcutaneously introduced on the arms or legs of the non-immune person. 

There were problems with inoculation though – some percent of the people still died, and some developed syphilis or other disorders due to the contamination that occurred in the procedure. 

A self-taught inoculator from Scotland, Notions found success in treating people from at least the late 1780s through a method devised by himself, despite having no formal medical background. His method involved exposing smallpox pus to peat smoke, burying it in the ground with camphor for up to 8 years, and then inserting the matter into a person's skin using a knife, and covering the incision with a cabbage leaf. He was reputed not to have lost a single patient despite inoculating thousands.

Establishing the idea of Vaccination

Edward Jenner, an Englishman, was the first to demonstrate that vaccination offered a reliable defense against smallpox. It was also a reliable defense against other illnesses, such as poliomyelitis, measles, and tetanus, although this was not known in Jenner's lifetime. 

It was 1796 before Jenner made the first step in the long process whereby smallpox, the scourge of mankind, would be totally eradicated - he vaccinated a small boy against small pox. 

In those years and throughout history, small pox killed 30% of those it infected and left nearly all the rest of its victims disfigured, or blind, or both. Some of its variants killed 100% of those they infected. 

Although he received worldwide recognition and many honors, Jenner made no attempt to enrich himself through his discovery. He actually devoted so much time to the cause of vaccination that his private practice and his personal affairs suffered severely. 

But his efforts bore fruit and soon most countries in Europe and in Americas had taken up national vaccination programmes around the beginning of the 19th century.

Many scientific discoveries were needed  to make large scale vaccinations possible

Until the end of the 19th century, vaccination was performed either directly with vaccine produced on the skin of calves or, particularly in England, with vaccine obtained from the calf but then maintained by arm-to-arm transfer. 

At that time, an Englishman, Sydney Copeman, found that vaccine suspended in 50% chemically-pure glycerine and stored under controlled conditions contained very few "extraneous" bacteria and produced satisfactory vaccinations. All vaccinations supplied by the Government were subsequently from Copeman. 

In early 1950s, Leslie Collier, an English microbiologist developed a method for producing a heat-stable freeze-dried vaccine in powdered form. The dried vaccine was 100% effective when reconstituted after 6 months storage at 37 °C, allowing it to be transported to, and stored in, remote tropical areas.

Benjamin Rubin, an American microbiologist developed the bifurcated needle. Easy to use with minimum training, cheap to produce, using four times less vaccine than other methods, and repeatedly re-usable after flame sterilization, it was used globally.

The Final Push for Eradicating Small Pox

In Northern Europe a number of countries had eliminated smallpox by 1900, and by 1914, the incidence in most industrialized countries had decreased to comparatively low levels. In the 1950s, a number of control measures were implemented, and smallpox was completely eradicated in Europe and North America.  

The first hemisphere-wide effort to eradicate smallpox was made in 1950 by the Pan American Health Organization. The campaign was successful in eliminating smallpox from all countries of the Americas except four. 

In 1958 Professor Viktor Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health for the USSR, called on the World Health Assembly to undertake a global initiative to eradicate smallpox. At this point, 2 million people were dying from smallpox every year. Overall, the progress towards eradication was disappointing, especially in Africa and in the Indian subcontinent. 

In 1966 an international team, the Smallpox Eradication Unit, was formed under the leadership of an American, Donald Henderson, who was trained at the CDC. In 1967, the World Health Organization intensified the global smallpox eradication effort. Under Henderson’s leadership, the WHO established a network of consultants who assisted countries in setting up surveillance and containment activities, which were as crucial as vaccination in containing small pox. 

Early on, donations of vaccine were provided primarily by the Soviet Union and the United States, but by 1973, more than 80 percent of all vaccine was produced in developing countries.

Victory – after 3500 years of the first proven disease case !

After two years of intensive searches, what proved to be the last endemic case anywhere in the world occurred in Somalia, in October 1977. A Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication chaired by Frank Fenner examined the evidence from, and visited where necessary, all countries where smallpox had been endemic. In December 1979 they concluded that smallpox had been eradicated.

On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly announced that the world was free of smallpox and recommended that all countries cease vaccination: 

“The world and all its people have won freedom from smallpox, which was the most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest times, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake”.

The cost of the eradication effort, from 1967 to 1979, was roughly $300 million US dollars. Roughly a third came from the developed world, which had largely eradicated smallpox decades earlier. The United States, the largest contributor to the program, has reportedly recouped that investment every 26 days since in money not spent on (a) vaccinations and (b) the costs of incidence. 

Dunkirk !

 I am watching a week by week recreation of WW2. 

In week 44, June 1940, Nazi Germany had overrun most of Europe, and USSR had annexed Eastern European countries.

The Netherlands and Belgium had surrendered to the Nazis in May, and France in June.

Dunkirk: 9 Lesser-Known Facts - HistoryExtra

Allied forces were beaten back to Dunkirk in France, just across the English Channel from Britain. To prevent their capture by the Nazis, a desperate operation was launched to rescue them via sea to take them back to England.

2 lakh british and 1.4 lakh mainly french soliders were rescued, but 0.8 lakh were left behind in Dunkirk (half of them British and the other half French) to hold off the Nazis while their compatriots escaped.

But all the equipment had to be left behind, desperately needed by Britain which now faced the Nazi war machine alone. The US had refused to be drawn in the war, despite British requests. 

The operation commenced after large numbers of Belgian, British, and French troops were cut off and surrounded by German troops during the six-week Battle of France.

Winston Churchill, Britain's Prime Minister during World War II, called Dunkirk a "miracle of deliverance".

Initially it was thought the Germans would reach the beach within two days, allowing time for only 45,000 troops to be brought to safety.

But thanks to a combination of German confusion and Allied bravery, enough British and French troops were saved to see out the rest of the war.

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the British sent in troops to defend France. However, as Nazi Germany moved forward into Belgium and the Netherlands in May 1940, the allies made a near-fatal error.

The French-German border was defended by a series of barriers and weapons called the Maginot Line, but the area to the north was only blocked by a forest.

The forest was thought to be too thick to require heavy defence, but the Germans found a way through.

They marched around the back of the Allies in France and forced them over into Belgium, where they were faced with more Germans to the north.

The only option left was to retreat to Dunkirk, where they could be taken back to England.

With the majority of Britain and France's entire armies in one area - surrounded by the Germans - this could have been the turning point of the war. But Hitler ordered his troops to halt for three days. Attacking the trapped BEF, French, and Belgian armies was left to the Luftwaffe - Germany's air force. 

Evacuations from Dunkirk commenced on 26th May 1940, while 40,000 men of the French First Army fought a delaying action against seven German divisions.

The Allies were gifted with time. Naval ships, vehicles, passenger ferries, fishing boats, yachts and boats owned simply for pleasure were assembled.

A handful of civilians even joined the mission, sailing out into the Channel voluntarily.

Over the course of nine days this fleet, supported by British planes overhead, was able to rescue most of the troops.

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.