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In this episode we a going to complete our brief tour of early civilizations in the Neolithic era.  We will begin with a quick discussion of the Indus River Valley civilizations, then travel to Ancient China, and finally take a look at Meso-American systems.

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Transcript: 

It is argued that the civilizations that developed in the Indus River Valley were even more advanced than those in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.  At its height, the Indus-Sarasvati, or Harappan civilization extended for more than 1 million square kilometers from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges. We know that around 7000 BCE there were permanent agricultural settlements there, and by 2500 BCE the area was populated by an estimated 5 million people.

On the banks of the Indus, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro grew. Streets were planned in a grid system with wide roads. Houses were built from mud bricks and were often raised. These cities also had a sewer system, and a water supply. It is often assumed that even the poorest citizens had a better standard of living than in Mesopotamia, but we cannot know for sure.

What we do know is that throughout the second millennium BCE, the area was populated by Aryan groups who settled from the steppes (an area that stretched from modern day Eastern Europe – the Ukraine, through to the south of Russia in to today’s Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan). Don’t get these Aryans mistaken for the cos-play supremacists who claim that white folks are Aryans. That is something completely different, and dangerous, whose connections are rooted in 19th century Colonial and Fascist ideologies).

These Aryans are important, though, as they wrote down a collection of stories from the area, known as the Vedas. These are the oldest known stories told, from as long ago as 7000 BCE.  Their writing formed the basis for the literate society that traded with the other civilization to it’s East and West. With this literacy, and no doubt it’s advanced societal needs, came a need for learning. While we don’t have any evidence of formal places of education, as we do in Egypt or Mesopotamia, we can assume that there were complex institutions that served as places of learning. We know that as a culture, they mastered astronomy, time, elementary mathematics, and medicine, plus their religious lore and writes needed to be learned and shared, and as always in a complex society, there needed to me an administration, so we can assume that there was some formal education based around learning the Indus script. However, we have little evidence of an education process.

Climate change caused the monsoons and floods to lessen and change in predictability, and the way of life in this region began to change over a period around 600BCE. Larger cities were abandoned for smaller villages, and so we