The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => History => Topic started by: rangerrebew on July 15, 2018, 07:55:46 pm
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Mohenjo Daro
"Faceless" Indus Valley City Puzzles Archaeologists
Mohenjo Daro 101
By John Roach
A well-planned street grid and an elaborate drainage system hint that the occupants of the ancient Indus civilization city of Mohenjo Daro were skilled urban planners with a reverence for the control of water. But just who occupied the ancient city in modern-day Pakistan during the third millennium B.C. remains a puzzle.
"It's pretty faceless," says Indus expert Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The city lacks ostentatious palaces, temples, or monuments. There's no obvious central seat of government or evidence of a king or queen. Modesty, order, and cleanliness were apparently preferred. Pottery and tools of copper and stone were standardized. Seals and weights suggest a system of tightly controlled trade.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/archaeology/mohenjo-daro/ (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/archaeology/mohenjo-daro/)
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It is difficult to imagine such an ordered culture without some official and standardized medium of exchange. There should be some form of coinage somewhere, you'd think, even if it ian't in the now accepted disk shape. Likely, such would tell more about rulers or the name of the culture, at the very least.