10/19/2023 0 Comments Oid civilization v background![]() Marshall speculated, like Cunningham, that the civilization was likely only perhaps 1,000 years old. He excavated at Harappa and then later, in 1924, at Mohenjo-Daro ("the mound of the dead" in the Sindhi language), a site that was brought to his attention by local people. (Image credit: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)Ī British archaeologist named John Marshall continued the work begun by Cunningham when he became director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1904. It measures 4.8 by 9 inches (12.2 by 23 centimeters). He is credited with being the first scholar to discover and comment on the famous Indian seals, which contain the still much-debated Indus Valley script.Īn Indus Valley Civilization ceramic vessel decorated with four ibex, circa 2800 B.C to 2500 B.C., Pakistan, probably Quetta. He also argued that the origins of the city were likely due to contact with people from the Near East, possibly the inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Cunningham based this conclusion on what local inhabitants of the area told him about the site's traditional folklore. For example, Cunningham argued that the city was probably only 1,000 years old, much younger than its real age of 2600 B.C., according to. Spurred on by Masson's findings, Cunningham excavated at Harappa in 1872 and in 1873 and wrote an extensive interpretation of his findings, though many of his conclusions were speculative and incorrect, Belcher said. When he returned to the United Kingdom, Masson published a book called " Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and the Punjab," which caught the attention of a former British army officer and engineer named Alexander Cunningham, who was the head of the Archaeological Survey of India. Masson had no idea how old the city was or who built it - he attributed it to Alexander the Great, according to World History Encyclopedia. Most of the city was buried by that time, but Masson made a record of the city's ruins in his field notes, which included drawings. ![]() His travels eventually took him, in 1829, to the Indus city of Harappa, in modern-day Pakistan, where he looked for coins and other artifacts. He was an avid coin collector, and he excavated ancient Indian archaeological sites looking for coins. Masson was a soldier of artillery who deserted the British army in 1827 and subsequently roamed the Punjab region. The first of these, according to World History Encyclopedia, was a man who went by the alias of Charles Masson (his real name was James Lewis). "The Indus Valley Civilization first came to the attention of the world through the work of British officer-archaeologists during the mid-1820s," Belcher said. Discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization Although archaeologists don't know the exact number of inhabitants that these cities contained, the larger urban centers, like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, might have had between 30,000 and 40,000 people, or possibly more, Belcher said. Many of the roads were broad avenues that were paved in baked brick with elaborate drainage systems. ![]() Indus Valley Civilization cities were characterized by sophisticated urban planning and included water control systems and grid-focused neighborhoods, with roads and alleyways laid out on the cardinal directions. Other Indus Valley Civilization cities are located in northwest India, and a few additional cities are in northeastern Afghanistan, near archaeological sites where tin and lapis lazuli, a blue metamorphic rock, were mined. Today, much of this area is part of the Punjab region, which is translated as the "land of the five rivers" in what is now Pakistan. Other Indus Valley Civilization cities were located next to different major rivers, such as the Ghaggar-Hakra, Sutlej, Jhelum, Chenab and the Ravi rivers, or on the alluvial floodplains between rivers. Many of the Indus Valley Civilization's large, well-planned cities, such as Mohenjo-Daro, Kot Diji and Chanhu-Daro, were situated along the course of the Indus River, which flows from the mountains of western Tibet, through the disputed region of Kashmir and southwestward before emptying into the Arabian Sea near the modern city of Karachi, Pakistan. The Indus Valley Civilization derives its name from the Indus River, one of the longest rivers in Asia. ![]() (Image credit: Vasant Shinde / Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute) The yellow labels indicate two sites where a minority of buried individuals yielded ancient DNA matched that of the Rakhigarhi individuals. This map depicts the geographical span of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), showing the location of Rakhigarhi (blue), other significant IVC sites (red), and sites to the north and west from other archaeological cultures (other colors).
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