this video is sponsored by purity stream get access to my streaming video service nebula when you sign up for curiosity stream using the link in the description it's British India in the 1920s and over the last few decades these odd stone seals keep popping up at ruins near Harappa and mohenjo-daro along the Indus River Valley they baffle everyone with their inscriptions in a never-before-seen written language archeologists intrigued by this started excavating these previously ignored sites they soon encored a four thousand five hundred year old civilization a civilization completely absent from the historical record one of
the earliest urban civilizations in human history it flourished alongside ancient Egypt Mesopotamia and China around 3300 to 1900 BCE or was bigger than all of them a civilization that built wonders not two gods or two kings but to sanitation a civilization were at war made up of massive planned cities built in brick masters of bronze and sculpture they created their own writing system traded across a vast sea and possibly invented the world's first indoor toilets and then vanished for reasons still not completely understood so what was this civilization in the Indus Valley what did they
achieve and what does it have to do with rubber duckies well let's find out [Music] the Indus civilization existed from around 3300 BCE to around 1300 BC give or take a few centuries but do you really prosper at around 4,500 years ago between 2600 and 1900 BC it covered an area of over 1 million square kilometers that's about one Bolivia or two spain's or even better 6250 Lichtenstein's it had the largest population and territory of all the Bronze Age civilizations like Mesopotamia Egypt and ancient China like almost all early civilizations the Indus civilization developed around
dank river valleys there farmers were able to grow a massive food surplus along the banks of the Indus and Gengar hacker rivers today the Indus is still a powerful River the gag our hacker has almost completely dried up back then the gag our hacker River may have actually been more productive than the Indus we found much more settlements along the Geiger hakura than we have on the illness since the gag our hacker was much more powerful in the past people think it actually might be the ancient lost saraswathi river of Hindu literature since this civilization
wasn't just based on the Indus and since Indus Valley Civilisation is a bit of a mouthful the term Harappan civilization is often used since Harappa was the first city of there as we discovered so I'll use that for the rest of the video the Harappans weren't like other Bronze Age civilizations the other ancient states like ancient Mesopotamia Egypt and China all had the following ingredients a strict hierarchy of classes state monopolized use of violence power focus on individual leaders like kings and Pharaohs centralized state controlled economies monumental of religious and political structures a powerful religious
institution with its own hierarchy and a strong sense of elitism and exclusivity but we have no evidence of kings or priests or priests kings for the Harappans there are no royal tombs or palaces no evidence for a state religion no temples pyramids or ziggurats no signs of an army weapons slaves or powerful political capital now the Harappans weren't some peaceful utopia a state can't exist without violence but it seems that they had no actual enemies and they themselves seemed more interested in trade than conquest all her up and citizens seem to have lived relatively equal
lives to rather than building palaces and temples that happen seem to focus on building public baths and sewage systems we have no idea how the Harappan government worked but the Harappan civilization may have been split up into a number of different domains each governed by a major city rather than Kings there may have been village town city and then regional councils all overseen by a supreme Harappan council so rather than a her rapid Empire or Harappan kingdom it was probably a Harappan Federation which kind of makes them sound very futuristic one of the defining features
of her app and culture is how well-planned their cities are they tended to focus on three main aspects one water water drainage and bathing held an almost religious significance in her up in City Planning every Harappan home had a dedicated bathing floor used daily built with watertight brick floors these floors sloped towards a small drain usually cut into the house wall and this drain brought dirty water out of the house and into a brick lined sewage system underneath the main streets and channeled water out of the city sunbathing rooms had small staircases so someone else
could pour water over a bather kind of like a proto shower excavations at Harappa have encouraged eyelets in almost every house there are usually big pots of sunk into the floor although some of mohenjo-daro had seats waste from the toilets was directed into the drains and then out of the city or into large jars sunk into the ground outside the home kind of like an early septic tank the Harappans had multi-story buildings when water had to be drained from upstairs drains are often built inside or alongside the walls this safely brought water and waste from
higher floors down to street level drains without soaking people below which would have been a hazard the citizens of cities like ancient Rome would have had to deal with we found quite a few ceramic toys in her app and drains it seems that her app and children may have been the first to bring toys into the bath with them this could be the earliest prototype of the rubber duckie other toys like puppets and carts along with miniature cooking tools and other toy furniture have also been found amongst all the rooms of the happens though the
great bath Jotaro stands OH nothing like it has been found in any other Harappan site the great bath seems to be the only Harappan building with some sort of religious significance this public bath is an impressive building mostly storied with a 2.4 meter deep bathing pool in the center the pool is made from precisely fitted burnt bricks coated with a layer of tar making this from the earliest examples of waterproofing in history here you can see the well and drain used to fill and empty the pool we have no idea who used a great bath
or why but ritual bathing seems to be our best guess the dedications put towards building such an impressive structure and its symbolic location in the largest Harappan city speaks volumes to the importance of water and bathing in Harappans society other impressive feats of water control include dalla Vera's massive 16 man-made water reservoirs that surround the city and make it appear to float loath I'll also had an impressive dock and canal system to standardization large Harappan cities were usually hundreds of kilometers apart compared to Mesopotamian cities which were just on average 20 kilometers apart the Harappan
state maintained almost complete uniformity across these massive distances uniformly like a standardised bricks at every single Harappan site we found bricks to follow the exact same ratio 1 to 4 this guaranteed good building standards crossed the Harappan world standardization extended to units of weight we found cubical stone weights across bigger up in cities down to small farming villages the smallest weight they had was 0.85 6 grams and then the average weight was about 13.7 grams 3 city-planning the main streets of her happen cities were usually oriented north-south and east-west he's generally divided her up and
settlements into blocks narrow and often crooked lanes ran after Main streets so the cities weren't built on an exact grid pattern access to the houses was from these lanes avoiding the dust and noise of Main streets walls usually surrounded Harappan settlements there was usually a separately walled area built on a man-made mound known as a citadel here you would find most of the important buildings like warehouses granaries and at mohenjo-daro the great bath these citadel's seem to have been built as defense against floods rather than armies though for example mohenjo-daro was built on two massive
mounds that raised the city above the Indus River floodplain the walls supported the mounds and added extra flood defense mohenjo-daro higher western owned was their Citadel and it's about 12 meters above the plain while a lower Eastern mound held the Lower Town this lower townhouse between 40 to 80,000 people building these mounds was a huge investment it is estimated to have taken 10,000 workers about 400 days to complete all that work just to put the foundations of mohenjo-daro in place when the city was founded about 700 brick lined wells were built to provide drinking water
no new wells were built over the many centuries of the city's existence so the city's founders took the growth of the city into account when they built all 700 in some Harappan cities we found the remains of brick platforms and trees planted alongside streets to provide public seating and shade and we even found a large jars half sunk into the ground into which rubbish could be thrown which was then brought to a nearby dump without the rosetta stone or Bengston inscriptions we would never have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform which has given us a
wealth of information on both those civilizations but we have nothing that useful to decipher Harappan writing and so it remains undeciphered to this day all we have to work with is the short inscriptions they left behind on these tiny stone seals every seal has two things an image usually an animal and an inscription the most common image on the seals seems to be this chunky unicorn now those are archaeologists words not mine I think calling this thing a unicorn is a bit of a stretch come on honey make a birthday wish I want a unicorn
isn't that cute we have found thousands of her apon seeds they seem to have had about 450 signs and the script is logo syllabic like Chinese our ancient Maya which means each symbols stood for a word or syllable it seems to have been written from right to left as we can see because some scribes seem to ran out of space on the left side the seals could have been used like stamps but it's that they were more often news like identity cards or passports any Harappan writing on paper or papyrus has been destroyed by the
passage of time this may be why we've only found about 450 mostly repetitive signs there could have been a bias towards the kind of words that are written on the seals like names or jobs and if we found a written document we would find more common words than those more signs imagine if people tried to reconstruct the English language using only the words that appeared on passports the Harappa people were mostly farmers and herders barely in wheat were the main crops and we can see the beginning of South Asia's spice obsession with the Harappans garlic
turmeric ginger cumin and cinnamon were all grown locally we've only found one trace of coriander so that's good cattle and water buffalo were the most important domesticated animals followed by sheep and goats chickens camels and even elephants might also have been domesticated we found tons of Harrap and dog figurines somewhere in colors which suggest that they had dugouts and possibly house cats our prints made by a cat can be seen in a brick jehoon Darrow that was drying as a cat ran across quickly followed by a dog in most parts of the world when people
settle down started farming they to use a historians term super murdered the hunter-gatherer societies around them the Harappans traded with them instead hunter-gatherers could collect exotic products like honey wax ivory silk and wild plants and then exchange they received her app and crops and manufactured goods like bronze tools the Harappans used the constantly moving hunter-gatherers and pastoral herders to move goods between cities like a Harappan fedex but most Harappan internal trade was conducted on the rivers they controlled and foreign trade was mostly conducted across the sea we know it at between 2600 and 1900 BCE
the Harappans traded with the arabian gulf mesopotamia central asia and iran before we invented radiocarbon dating the only way we could date the Harappans civilization was because we found their shields in mesopotamia being able to read Mesopotamian records made it possible to place the Harappans in time around 2600 to 2300 BCE Mesopotamian records begin match traded a far-off land known as Melua this was their name for the Harappans Mesopotamian texts mentioned the following items as imports from Melua lapis lazuli gold silver copper timber evany ivory tortoiseshell chicken buffalo peacock dog cat and monkey apparently Harappa
merchants seemed to have been a common sight in Mesopotamia but Mesopotamia merchants never seemed to have sailed inside the Gulf which suggests that Harappans were the better merchants and sailors this along with the fact that they were shipping bulky goods like timber and wild animals shows us that they must have had some pretty big boats very few Mesopotamian artifacts appear in the Harappan world so we have no idea what the Harappans were trading all their goods for we have discovered a toiletry set with a copper ear scoop and tweezers at Harappa so maybe luxury or
manufactured goods could have been what the Harappans wanted funnily enough Harappan sailors acted a lot like sailors of later times since we discovered every dice for games and gambling at sites they visited more than a thousand kilometers from Harappa is an isolated Harappan town called short ago located in a modern-day Afghanistan we found her up and seals there along with houses built to a rapid design and bricks using the Harappan ratio this was a Harappan colony that her happens you short a guy to control the nearby lapis lazuli mines this allowed the Harappans to monopolize
the ancient world supply of lapis lazuli interestingly the Harappans didn't much care for lapis and use it almost entirely for export this trade made the Harappans incredibly rich but after 700 years of prosperity the Harappan civilization went into a sudden decline around 1900 BCE city staff following strict plans trains were no longer maintained the great bath filled up rubbish and the art of writing was forgotten there is no evidence from massacres battles or sieges at any Harappans sites so the Harappans didn't meet a violent end factors such as reduction in trade climate change disease and
civil strife all probably played a role in their collapse but it seems that the saraswathi River played the biggest role as we saw earlier there was a dense cluster of Harappans cities along the Saraswati River this area was probably their breadbasket but around 1 thousand nine hundred BCE the river began to dry up for reasons still being studied links discussing this are in the description as the crops died out cities were starved of water the Harappans alonga Saraswathi fled their homes in search of greener pastures some seemed to have moved towards the Ganges which will
become the new center of North Indian civilization others simply went back to a simpler style of living in small farming villages by 1300 BCE the entire Harappan system was gone the memory of the Harappan civilization their great cities their beliefs their language and their writing system disappeared under the earth that won't sustain until they are rediscovered 4000 years later the Harappans were one of the greatest Bronze Age civilizations but they weren't the only one the Bronze Age saw the rise of urban societies fast trading empires and military powers from Greece to Egypt to Mesopotamia all
the way to ancient China but how did all this come about and why did it end well this is all explained in the Bronze Age a three-part documentary series that you can go check out over on curiosity stream curiosity stream is a documentary streaming service that gives you access to thousands of documentaries including some featuring top names like David Attenborough and Stephen Hawking along with exclusive originals you'll get unlimited access starting at just $2.99 a month and the first 30 days completely free if you sign up over at curiosity stream com forward slash cogito and
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and earlier than youtube this video was OpenNebula days ago so go to curiosity stream comm slash cookie dome and start enjoying and may educational content over on curiosity Stream and nebula today were helping to support educational creators without sitting through ads so that was a basic overview of the Harappan or Indus civilization it isn't even close to covering everything one video simply can't cover everything but as always further reading and all the sources used are in the description down below if you like this content please subscribe if you're interested in supporting the channel there are
links to my patreon and t-shirt store also in the description if you like this video I think it really enjoyed my videos on ancient China or on the sandpeople which you can see on the screen or link in the description and again thank you so much for watching [Music]
