Indus Civilization Collapse Due to Heat

Ruins of Harappa in the Indus valley of today's Pakistan.

New research indicates that a cycle of global warming brought an end to the massive Indus civilization.

"Antiquity knew about Egypt and Mesopotamia, but the Indus civilization, which was bigger than these two, was completely forgotten until the 1920s," says researcher Liviu Giosan, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

He and others are using indicators such as river sediment to track the effects of climate on the civilization.

According to LiveScience.com:

"Our research provides one of the clearest examples of climate change leading to the collapse of an entire civilization,” Giosan said. 

The researchers first analyzed satellite data of the landscape influenced by the Indus and neighboring rivers. From 2003 to 2008, the researchers then collected samples of sediment from the coast of the Arabian Sea into the fertile irrigated valleys of Punjab and the northern Thar Desert to determine the origins and ages of those sediments and develop a timeline of landscape changes. 

"It was challenging working in the desert — temperatures were over 110 degrees Fahrenheit all day long (43 degrees C)," Giosan recalled.

These findings are expected to influence where future archaeological explorations will be conducted regarding the development and fate of the Indus civilization.

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Research Points to Harappan Script as Language

A Harappan seal circa 2400 B.C. from the Indus Valley.

The ancient Indus Valley civilization was in many ways highly sophisticated, but its language has proven so impenetrable that some scholars have speculated the entire society was illiterate. But new research on the Harappan script using computer technology seems to be proving otherwise.

The 4,500-year-old urban culture covered 300,000 square miles in modern day Pakistan and northwestern India. Digs at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have revealed a sophisticated society. According to Time magazine:

But the Indus Valley civilization poses an intractable problem, one which a legion of archaeologists and scientists have puzzled over from the first excavations to a new study published last month. Its writing, etched in signs on tiny, intricate seals and tablets, remains undeciphered, shrouding the ancient culture in mystery. A code-busting artifact with bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, has yet to be found.

By some counts, over 100 decipherments of the civilization's often anthropomorphic runes and signs ~ known in the field as the Harappan script ~ have been attempted over the decades, none with great success.

Scientists using computer modeling and probability testing now have “determined the Harappan script had a similar measure of conditional entropy to other writing systems, including English, Sanskrit and Sumerian. If it mathematically looked and acted like writing, they concluded, then surely it is writing.”

Click here for the complete Time magazine article.