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Ancient Civ - Indus Valley with Stefan Milo - Ep 70
1.4k Plays4 years ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins, we continue our series on ancient civilization and discuss Indus Valley Civilizations and their precursors. We have Stefan Milo join us to discuss this region. Stefan Milo is a popular Youtuber who has appeared on episodes 20 and 43. He made a video on an Indus Valley Civilization where he discusses the interesting lack of social hierarchy found in this civilization (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxP1zornb-w). We struggle with geography, time periods, and basically everything in this episode but also discuss social hierarchy/structure.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Announcement
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Discussion on Early Indian States
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 70 of the Life and Ruins Podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living in life and ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I'm joined by my co-host, Connor Johnen and David Howe. Today, we are joined by one of the Life and Ruins Podcast's biggest fans, Stefan Milow, to talk about the origins of early states in the Indian subcontinent. Stefan, thank you so much for deciding to come on to the podcast. Very much last minute, I think we notified you.
00:00:42
Speaker
Five hours ago, we were doing this. How are you doing today, bud? I feel like I'm, I don't know if I'm your biggest fan or arch nemesis after listening to the last one.
00:00:55
Speaker
But yeah, I'm good. I'm ready. I'm ready to go toe to toe. Good, man. Yeah, you're definitely, I just realized this as we were talking, I think our first like three timer veteran on the podcast. I think we've had Chris twice.
Geography and Early Civilizations of India
00:01:10
Speaker
What a terrible indictment of a life in ruins podcast.
00:01:18
Speaker
We're scraping the barrel. We texted Stefan and out. What was it like at noon today? Hey, can you, can you come on to talk about ancient India civilizations? And he was like, I guess. Yeah, here we are solely based on the fact we watched his YouTube video on there being an ancient communist society, possibly in India, possibly that's the debate.
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, good stuff. Connor, where is India? It's on the Indian subcontinent, I'm guessing. So I guess in previous episodes we talked about we did South America and kind of origins in the intro to what civilization is, state societies, things like that. We're taking a little trip towards the Indus Valley and kind of India in general to kind of
00:02:11
Speaker
There's like this another another flourish meant of state societies that kind of emerged there. It takes a little while. It's kind of a later development. Any of you guys even visited India up in there? I have not. No, no. Not me or anyone in my family. I've seen the Jungle Book, both the cartoon and the live action by John Favreau. Both are, you know, cool with me. And that's the connection I have with India.
00:02:37
Speaker
Oh, I also recently tried non bread with you guys in Colorado. So
00:02:45
Speaker
India is bound on the north end by the Himalayas. All the water and all that stuff flows down into the Indian Ocean, ultimately. The important kind of river for this area is the Indus River, which is the place where you see all these civilizations pop up. But you don't really see that in the archaeological record until about 7000 or so BCE. Like, I feel like that's like a similar time period to
00:03:14
Speaker
see like the Neolithic revolution in South America at that same sort of time, right?
Agricultural Developments and Mehrgarh Site
00:03:20
Speaker
What about like 3000 BC? Yeah. Well, I think if we're talking in terms of Neolithic, we might be jumping the gun a little bit. I think the Neolithic starts in the Indian subcontinent, more sort of 6500 BCE, as far as I'm
00:03:39
Speaker
long before we get to the emergence of a full civilization. I know we need to use that in a very nuanced way, but India is at a really interesting geographical place because on its eastern side, northeastern side,
00:03:57
Speaker
borders China where like Neolithic society is developed around the domestication of rice and on its western side borders Iran which is of course heavily connected to the fertile crescent and the domestication of wheat and and goats and all these things so it is a super interesting geographical location for this whole development in our history. That's a really interesting point actually because yeah those are two really big you know different cultural things like combining together into the
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess like Indian cuisine kind of reflects that too. Yeah. And along with other domestic it's Zebu cattle, which we mentioned in the domestic it's in order to find them episode there.
00:04:38
Speaker
domesticated here along with, as Stefan said, wheat and barley. Although barley wasn't completely domesticated yet. I'm not sure what that means. I guess it was really close to being so horticulture or something at that point. Yeah. It might mean that it wasn't like an imported crop because I think if you, when you find like a region
00:04:57
Speaker
that is next to the area where it was domesticated, that culture just has domesticated versions of the crop. And when you see like the slow progression from wild to domesticated, I think it might indicate that India is like a key region in the domestication of that crop, if you see what I mean. Like one of the earliest like Neolithic sites we have is I'm going to butcher all these Indian words
00:05:27
Speaker
Merigar? Magar? M-E-H-R-G-A-R-H. Which is 125 miles west of the Indus River, and it was predominantly occupied by village farmers for 6,000 BC.
00:05:45
Speaker
It contains graves which have copper artifacts and imported turquoise from Iran and shells from the coast of the Arabian Sea. It's thought that maybe they were obtained through exchange of sending cotton that way and getting these goods from the West in return. I also think that domestication came from the Near East as well. The knowledge of that comes from there too.
00:06:10
Speaker
So there's a lot of interchange and movement of at least the people and ideas between the Near East and India, which is cool and you can kind of see the influence of it a little bit. One of the cooler things I did find at Mergar is at least some evidence for early dentistry.
00:06:27
Speaker
So there's at least 11 teeth from nine individuals that show evidence of drilling, and it's not for any sort of ceremonial or decorative purposes, but they're used to stop something or save
Nature of the Indus Valley Civilization
00:06:40
Speaker
the teeth rather than religious or decorative purposes. So that's a cool little...
00:06:46
Speaker
He used to come out of that. Sounds like they're enjoying a nutritious and delicious Neolithic diet. All these early civilizations get themselves into, like these people are messing with teeth. The Inca are them over there. We're doing trepanation. You just, you get bored and you got to drill holes into yourself.
00:07:05
Speaker
Well, it's like if you have sandstone that you're like grinding stuff on and then all that little grains get into the food you eat, the weed, the corn, you know, and it just destroys your teeth. I think Egyptian teeth, like from the earlier periods, are like completely worn down from grit from sand, if I remember correctly.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah. Like you see like a lot of skeletons out that way. The teeth, like the caps of the teeth, like the crowns are just like completely gone. All from all that stone in the bread. And on top of that, like getting the cavities from all the starches.
00:07:39
Speaker
It sounds miserable. Isn't that great? And also just have like beer all the time. I was going to say beer like gut. Anyway, so I think we talked a lot about last time about how early like Moshe and early South American civilizations over in the Western hemisphere were kind of either in mountains or in between mountains and those like planes between the coast.
00:08:05
Speaker
I know Indus Valley Civilization was like because the Indus River is like up by Pakistan and not down towards like the south. So it's not like a jungle environment. But are we looking at like a same kind of like an Egypt looking situation or Mesopotamian or is it kind of like a lush green area like China?
00:08:22
Speaker
I think it's lush and green because it's being fed by a bunch of tributaries from the Himalayas. So you have, and so this is like Northwestern India on the border of Pakistan. So you have the Hakra river, Gagar river, and others that all feed into the Indus, which then leads out into the Arabian sea.
00:08:44
Speaker
This is a pretty green and lush area. I believe this is also like if you've seen the great documentary Alexander, the great, this is where the elephant battle takes place. Oh, the high despots. Yeah. Okay. So that's like in near this area. Yeah. It's very jungly. Okay. Really? I thought it would have been more arid. I'm pretty sure they just gave the Muslims the desert and said, enjoy Pakistan.
00:09:07
Speaker
I think the area that we're describing is deceptively large. I don't think, you know, across the course of the Indus River, I think there's going to be a lot of different climates. Like coastal India is for sure going to be much more different to areas further upstream. Like India is basically like half the size of the USA. This Indus River is huge. This is one of the world's biggest rivers, I believe.
00:09:35
Speaker
So yeah, I guess like the Mississippi River is like long and all those civilizations are all up and down it, not just in Mississippi. Does that make sense? This map I'm looking at has two deserts described on it too, so that's a thing.
00:09:48
Speaker
It's very lush. The Cholistan desert and the Thar desert. We should mention that we're looking at like the southwest or the northwest corner of India. We're not looking at like the, the lower subcontinent. Right. Yeah. Nothing, nothing down there. We're really, there's like a smaller area close to kind of the near east more than, more than any things where these things kind of emerge. David, you know, Pakistan is in between India,
00:10:17
Speaker
and Afghanistan and then it's Iran, right? Yeah. I'm pretty sure Pakistan borders Iran directly. Okay. I thought they were in Afghanistan though, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I thought India touched a little bit in the bottom. I guess not. I think it, I think it does. But really I think we need, you know, when we say we're talking here about the Indian subcontinent, you know, this civilization wasn't
00:10:41
Speaker
following modern boundaries. You can find these sites in India, in Pakistan. This is using India in like the geographical sense, I feel like rather than a political nation state. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So according to the illustrations I'm looking at here, it does look pretty much arid like Mesopotamia with the river. Carlton says it's green and lush. So I don't know which source to trust here, but either way, it could be green and lush and surrounded by desert.
00:11:11
Speaker
It's true. It's fertile. We're getting hung up on, or I am on the, you know, the, uh, the geographic area here. So what should we dive into next? Is this neolithic or is this bronze age? Did we say that? This is neolithic moving into bronze, but part of the geography deal though, Southern India has been much less intensively studied archeologically. So very much, this could be a byproduct of, because this is a major river drainage.
00:11:40
Speaker
they're finding more archaeology there. Whereas like the deserts that flank it, you might have, you know, just like the great pyramids, they might be under a couple. I imagine they don't have giant sand dunes, but you know, you catch the drift, the sand drift. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the start, when you said the Neolithic started a little later here, I think that could entirely be just a bias in our archaeological record for sure. And even going back into the Paleolithic,
00:12:09
Speaker
India is becoming like a huge area of study because, you know, we have early humans in Africa, in the Middle East, and we have a lot of evidence for humans in East Asia. Of course, they had to travel through this region. And so like Indian archaeology is an area where there's going to be a lot of discoveries for sure.
00:12:30
Speaker
Well, especially the more we study China, too, and get an understanding of that as well. I think that's going to even add more credence to the idea that we need to study these kind of in-between areas. According to the official national Chinese archaeological interpretations, humans evolved out of China. The first civilizations were out of China, and they were all communist. That's not made up.
00:12:54
Speaker
Communist Party fact. Interesting. So yeah, maybe we do have much earlier neolithicization happening in India because they're right next door since China is the home of all things human. Hashtag free Winnie the Pooh. Oh my God. And I guess to second Stefan's point there, like if you're looking at a map of the world, all the humans that went down towards Southeast Asia and Australia probably would have
00:13:18
Speaker
hugged closer to India than gone up through Asia and back down. So that makes sense too. There'd probably be tons. And I assume India in the places seem was still kind of similar to how it is today. Probably a little more cold, but maybe it was a pine forest instead of jungle. I don't know. I'd have to check.
00:13:35
Speaker
Anyway, getting, I'm just really trying to get the image in my head of what this looks like for some reason. Listen, our life in ruins listeners. If you don't know where India is, Google, we can't describe it any better than we just did. Exactly. Oh, we didn't mention though, that India was, you know, its own place and then converged up into the continents there. And that's what made the Himalayas. We got, we throw that in there. You got real smashy.
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah. That's why they're the tallest mountains in the world too. Cause it's the most recent to smash. Super smash. Um, and at, yes. And at the end, so this important Neolithic site that goes into the bronze and copper age.
00:14:13
Speaker
even during this time where you do have this large settlement of farmers coming together and living in these structured settlements, you still have surrounding populations practicing hunting and gathering. It's still part of that same neolithic transition where you do have those growing corn, their teeth are falling out, and then you have the buff hunting and gathering populations coming into trade back and forth with nice teeth and no arthritis.
00:14:40
Speaker
Did you say structured settlement? Do you need cash now? There you go. On that, JJ Wentworth. I think we're going to insert that right here. Free advertising. All right. So we'll be right back with segment two of episode 70 with Stefan Milow.
00:15:01
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 70. Stefan is still with us and we're going to be moving on from talking about the site of Mergar into the early Indus period, which is the late fourth and early third millennia BCE. And part of this, like, unlike going back to the geography, unlike the Nile, which is one
00:15:22
Speaker
long stretch of river. This Indus River Valley area is multiple rivers with multiple tributaries, so you do have this dense river system within the desert that's creating these massive flood plains. In this early Indus period, settlements are spread out throughout this region of tributaries.
00:15:43
Speaker
So it's not just like the Nile where you can dot it up and down. And, you know, there's an interesting little tidbit where some have hypothesized that the construction of these early cities, which have walls, which is a key feature of early States, rather than for defense, some have postulated that these walls have been intended as protection against floods.
00:16:07
Speaker
rather than their neighbors because of how many tributaries and waterways feed into the Nile, not the Nile, the Indus. That's cool. Yeah, it's possible. It's possible. I think a lot of these ideas about these walls not being used for defense date back to quite early in the 20th century.
00:16:33
Speaker
1920s, 1930s, and I think it's fair to say there are a few archaeologists that are questioning that now. Several of them have features like bastions and complicated gateways and things like that that aren't really what you would put in a wall for flood defense, but you would include them in a wall if you were going to shoot someone, perhaps. Here's a question.
00:16:59
Speaker
If it was an ancient communist utopia, were the walls to keep people in? Is anyone asking that question?
00:17:06
Speaker
Probably not. Probably not. They're probably not asking that question. Yeah, I would say. But I mean, the walls, I don't think from what I see look like they do keep people in. They could probably just leave. I mean, eventually they abandoned them anyway. So it's not like, not cages. And these occur at multiple sites across this area. So it's not just one site that has some sort of defensive structure, right?
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I know there are several sites we've mentioned. Dolavira is more towards the coast. You know, the walls at this site, I think, if I remember rightly, are about 18 metres thick. So this is real like megalithic. Oh, megalithic is probably the wrong side of that, because they're made out of bricks. This is construction on a huge scale.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah. And Mohan Jadara, which is another major Indus city with a population estimated at like perhaps 35,000, there's kind of like this high rise podium of a Citadel. And it's, do you find this at other sites and this, these perimeter walls around parts of the lower cities across all of these, which I think is part of that whole early 20th century hypothesis that Stefan has mentioned. Now, Stefan, you did a,
00:18:22
Speaker
You released a video on YouTube, on your channel, Stefan Milow. I think we talked about it last time you were on, that you're about to release it when we had, I think we recorded you back in like December, January, because our member being in West Virginia when we recorded you to come back. Maybe, yeah, it would have been around that time. It came out in January, yeah. January 30th. Wow, this year's flown by. Yeah. Yeah. Better than 2020. Titled, an ancient comet is utopia, question mark, the Indus Valley Civilization. So we're kind of getting into like early Indus,
00:18:52
Speaker
Are we even in the right ballpark and timeframe and what you investigated in this video? Or is this a hypothesis of early communism or this utopia a little bit later?
00:19:05
Speaker
I think the early Harappan is a period that is not super well understood. I think it's rough timeframe starts at like 3300 BCE. Again, in researching that video, you know, it is possible that this early Harappan stage has its roots in about 5000 BCE. So it really is a contemporary of all the sort of more well-known
00:19:32
Speaker
early civilizations of the old world in Mesopotamia and China and Egypt and there seems to have been like a big cultural shift for whatever reason
00:19:43
Speaker
around 2600 BCE and that is what archaeologists who study that period call the mature harappan and that is when these cities increase in size and they develop writing systems that we can't read and like standardized systems of measurements over this huge area and and all of these things and
00:20:12
Speaker
and allegedly they were a peaceful society and were allegedly an egalitarian society. Both ideas are possible, but a lot of archaeologists are questioning whether that assessment was correct because both these ideas really, as I said, stem back to the early 20th century and
00:20:39
Speaker
We've had 100 years more excavations and research and all of this stuff going on in the region. And those ideas are perhaps not so well supported by the evidence anymore.
00:20:52
Speaker
But as as American archaeologists, am I right in thinking that people had similar ideas about the classical Maya at one point, that they were a peaceful society and then their writing system was deciphered and, you know, they did some blood residue. I never heard that, actually, but I could see that. I could be way off on that. I could be way. That's just what I had.
00:21:17
Speaker
Well, you bring up two really good points. So the reason the Harappan civilization is roughly the culture area that it flourished over is over 1,295,000 square kilometers, which is just over 500,000 square miles, which is larger than modern-day Pakistan.
00:21:35
Speaker
And so you have the Indus and the Sarawati valleys are the cultural focus of this of the civilization. The largest sites here, we're talking about Harappa and I think it's the region of Punjab Punjab. Yeah. Yes. Harappa and Punjab and Mohan Jadaro and Sindh.
00:21:59
Speaker
Then you have these other sites like Ganwer, Ganwerawala on the Saroswati and Dolavira in Gujarat. And it's like, as Stefan said, we don't know much about the civilization. Primarily, we don't know anything about the elites. There's not much iconography. There's one pedestal or statue of a dude with a beard that they're not quite sure.
00:22:26
Speaker
But the big thing is that we don't know much about it. That Stefan hinted at is
Governance and Trade in the Indus Valley
00:22:30
Speaker
we haven't deciphered their writing. So like with the Maya, we figured everything about them real quick. Once the Maya code was cracked by that Russian archeologist back in the eighties, we have not cracked the Harappan code. Even if we did, though, just to interject super briefly, I think the longest inscription we found is only 26 characters.
00:22:51
Speaker
So even if we do decipher it, there is presumably only so much information that you can convey in such short texts.
00:23:01
Speaker
But is it a safe assumption to assume that there was sort of an elite? I mean, these places don't create themselves. You can't assume they're all... I mean, I guess the assumption is that they were this communist society that everyone worked together to build these large structures and whatnot. But that's not really shown anywhere else.
00:23:23
Speaker
in the world in these kind of early states, there's always some sort of hierarchy of folks who are the leaders who are organizing and motivating the workers around there. So I feel like it's a safe assumption to say there was some sort of elite and we might be missing pieces of that. That's definitely a fair assumption for sure. I think there are some interesting
00:23:49
Speaker
tidbits, uh, some quirks in the archaeological record, which do support, I'm not saying that there was absolutely no hierarchy whatsoever. Um, but these sites are interesting in the, you know, at Mahindra Dara and Harappa, the two biggest cities. There is not seemingly any like variation in the sizes of houses, really, even houses of
00:24:18
Speaker
you know, what you could call like common people have their bathrooms connected into like sewer systems that run through the city. And to compare that to like the common person in Mesopotamia or Egypt, that really is the height of luxury to be able to have like not indoor plumbing, probably
00:24:44
Speaker
had to get water from a well, but they have wells adjacent to their houses and they have bathrooms that flush their waste into connected urban sewer systems. That really is incredible for the common man to have those features. And also if we compare it to the neighboring civilizations like China, Mesopotamia, Iran, Egypt, their contemporaries,
00:25:09
Speaker
Like the social hierarchy in those regions is extremely obvious. You can't really miss the pyramids. Do you know what I mean? Society was obviously very hierarchical. And we just don't have, as far as I'm aware, anything like that for the Indus Valley civilization. So if whoever was given the orders, they seemingly did not enrich their lives in the same way that Kings did in other regions.
00:25:38
Speaker
I have this little tidbit from Scar and Fagan, if you guys wouldn't mind if I'd read that real quick. We know little of the Indus social organization religious beliefs, those who ruled Harappa and Mahanjadara remain anonymous for they never commemorated their deeds on grandiose palace walls or enriched homes and left almost no portraits.
00:25:56
Speaker
One exception is a small limestone figure from Maja Hendaro that depicts a thick-lipped bearded man staring at the world through slitted eyes. He seems to be withdrawn in meditation, perhaps detached from worldly affairs. That's a reach. The man wears an embroidered robe that was once inlaid with metal. The only clue to his statue is that one shoulder is uncovered, a sign of reverence during Buddha's lifetime more than 1,500 years later.
00:26:22
Speaker
So far, archaeology reveals leadership by rulers, perhaps merchants, ritual specialists, or people who control key resources or large areas of land. They seem to have led unastatious lives marked by a complete lack of priestly pomp or lavish public display. So, whereas with all these other contemporaneous people where you basically have a bunch of elitely marketing,
00:26:45
Speaker
We just don't see that here because clearly you have this large, we don't know if we're dealing with city states, theater states, or one large region controlled by one polity because there's just none of the flash of elites that we'd usually expect to see. Is there a chance that it's like a merchant republic? Have we covered that? It could be. That's one of the theories that it's just basically a bunch of rich guys.
00:27:08
Speaker
That is one of the ideas behind the writing, too, is that these are badges of office, perhaps, because many of the seals that we call them, we call them seals, but they weren't necessarily all used as seals, but they're sort of carved on soft stone and they have loops on the back. So it seems like they were designed to be hung from something.
00:27:31
Speaker
And they typically have a picture of an animal and then a short undecipherable text that goes along with it. And one idea is that these represent, you know, merchant guilds, social groups, priestly groups, tribal groups, you know, with, we're not sure.
00:27:52
Speaker
We're ultimately just missing the scale of everywhere else. There's smaller hints that maybe some sort of class structure, but it's just not as monumental as we're seeing everywhere else. Okay. And their social stratigraphy could have been?
00:28:10
Speaker
you know, not necessarily in, let's say like the, you know, the concrete walls and stuff or the stone walls, but it could have been like based on the clothes you were wearing or just like items you had and that we just can't see. Like if you had the finest silks from China, you were the leader, but like most people wore tunics or something, but they all lived in the same houses. I don't know.
00:28:31
Speaker
I'm going to speculate. I can't imagine that they were ruled by a king and that that king did not attempt to display their power in some overt way. You know what I mean? You really see that if there's like some sort of system where there's a monarchy
00:28:47
Speaker
you really see a palace, a monument to their glory. Someone's got a bowling alley in their basement. In Bronze Age Europe. Bronze Age Europe didn't really have urban centers like this, but you still see individual burials, burials that are seemingly given much more significance, burials with a lot of
Collapse and Mysteries of the Indus Civilization
00:29:11
Speaker
material goods. You can still see hierarchy even in these non-urban societies. And it seems like we just don't see evidence of that in the Indus Valley.
00:29:27
Speaker
That's fascinating. I didn't really know anything about this. And this isn't like an enclosed world. I mean, they're trading with East Africa, like all along the East African coast, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even to Southeast Asia. Like this is a major, along a major trading hub. So that would make sense that it's like a transient place where you like you came to, you know, chill while you sold stuff and then went back.
00:29:52
Speaker
Yeah, and they had colonies in Afghanistan. So you have this complex urban civilization that just doesn't seem to have this monumental elite architecture that's pretty ubiquitous across the globe. And a script that seems to be a mix of
00:30:15
Speaker
Kind of like the Maya script, it's phonetic and also pictographic. So some, whatever that means, you know what I mean? Like it's a mix of, yeah. It looks like hieroglyphs, but also like Mesopotamian. What is that stuff? Yeah. So like certain symbols are phonetic and other ones just represent the word itself. So it's a mix, which makes it harder, but there's only like 400 different demographic symbols. Well, I think one of the challenges is because we can't read the writing.
00:30:43
Speaker
And we know so little about it. One of the big debates is how many characters did they have? Or are we seeing like, you know, one character transform over time? Yeah. All of these things. So we were like, basically, we don't know. We don't know a lot about them. Yeah. I'm looking at the writing now. I didn't really see this before. Yeah. It's interesting. And as Stefan said, they're on these seals or other short inscriptions. So.
00:31:12
Speaker
there's not much of it to go off of. So you have possibly 400 different pictographs. Some might just be the same one, but illustrated differently. But we don't have a Rosetta Stone or we don't have these huge Maya stele, right? So. And we don't even know the language family because India is an incredibly diverse place. We don't even know the language family that this alphabet even applies to.
00:31:39
Speaker
Because theoretically it would be Indo-European, but that's like not till later. Yeah. It could be an Indo-European, like modern Indian languages in the North are Indo-European languages. And then in the South they're not. But this is so long ago that we can't really say that, oh, they're speaking some variation of Indo-European. You know, we can't really say that, I think. Yeah. But we can say that this Indus civilization reaches peak around 2300 BCE.
00:32:09
Speaker
And people just dipped out. And definitely looks like these urban populations just dispersed into smaller settlements over an enormous area. We're also going to abandon this segment and go to segment three of a life members podcast, episode 70 with Stefan Milos. I will catch you in the third segment.
00:32:30
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 70 of A Life for Nerds podcast. I got the number right this time. We're here with Connor John and Carlton Gover and Stephanie Lowe. We are talking about India and the Indus Valley Civilization. Guys, where is India?
00:32:44
Speaker
I just wanted to do that. No, Carlton, take it away. Another interesting case that we've already talked about in these past two segments where this Harappan civilization breaks the norms of what we expect from early states. Well, after the collapse or dispersal of these urban populations into the surrounding areas,
00:33:05
Speaker
We have what archaeologists refer to as this rural interlude from about 2000 B.C. to 600 B.C. The dates, it just depends on what book you're reading, what article. They vary like, you know, 2000 B.C. plus or minus 100. Right. That northeastern India, which had this
00:33:24
Speaker
long history of these mercantile states, the civilization, people just go back to farming and they're building on top of these sites. And there seems to be no centralized polities that it's just the dispersed populations just hanging out. Whereas usually when you see early states arise, when they collapse, something else takes over.
00:33:48
Speaker
So you see that in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere, and that this idea of statehood and centralized government spreads from these areas. But in the Indus, after they do this Harappan thing, people just don't do it for 1,400 years.
00:34:04
Speaker
Well, have you heard any ideas as to why that happened? I have heard one. Go for it. So there is a river in Indian sort of tradition, you could say the Sarasvati River, which is mentioned in some of the earliest Indian texts that exist, the Vedas. And that river is basically unknown. It doesn't exist anymore. It's dried up.
00:34:31
Speaker
And if you look at the location of Indus Valley sites, a lot of them are not grouped along a river anymore. There seems to be some sign that there was a missing river in that region.
00:34:52
Speaker
Let me see if I can find you guys a picture, which will be impossible to share with the listeners. But if you take a look at this massive Google images link that I've just sent you.
00:35:06
Speaker
There is like a real cluster of Harappan sites, Indus Valley sites in the center. And this is actually the highest concentration of sites, I think, that exist. And it's not along a river anymore. And so there is one idea that, you know, perhaps climate change causing this core region of Indus Valley civilization to be abandoned. That would do it if their river disappears.
00:35:36
Speaker
Yeah. The other idea is this might coincide with the Aryan invasion from up north. And this is kind of the same period. People hypothesize this is when Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan comes into the Indian subcontinent. I mean, this has been the trying to figure out the Aryans and this language group, you know, that's just going to a whole other, you know, buffet of canned worms. Right.
00:36:04
Speaker
It was probably a very complex process to cause that level of change, regardless of what it was. It was no doubt pretty complex. 100%. And rice gets introduced in this area, so it becomes even more profitable just to be a farmer. Yeah, it's just, this is just a very interesting time in this region. And there's just so many mysteries in Indian archaeology. And I imagine a lot of it, because the further south you get in India, the more jungle you get, right? Jungle-like.
00:36:34
Speaker
and the soil becomes more acidic and it's similar to central Mexico, where biological remains will not last in the record. As we mentioned in the first segment, northeastern India is far more archaeologically investigated than southern and southeastern India.
00:36:55
Speaker
what the Indus Valley people did with their dead. We don't really get many burials. We don't really get signs of cremation. But again, the current populations in India do dispose of their dead, at least some people in the river. So it's not wild. I was about to say there's Tarsum in the river.
00:37:18
Speaker
I mean, Tulsa men might be doing it a disservice, but they dispose of their dead in the river. And considering the Indus Valley's civilizations are keen, water management and hygiene, you know, it's not impossible to think that water played some important role in their society too.
00:37:43
Speaker
And, uh, I don't know if you guys ever saw river monsters with Jeremy Wade. The practice of dumping their dead into the rivers has led to like ginormous man eating catfish called the goonch. Really a name. The goonch. The goonch.
00:37:59
Speaker
If you haven't watched it, go watch it. It's worth it. It's like the first episode. I think his last episode, he goes to recatch it like years later after that whole area has been built up by cities and they think it's just too polluted for him. He can't, he couldn't reel it in. So the goonsch might be gone. I can't
Post-Indus Political Entities and Influences
00:38:21
Speaker
remember the sound. Goonsch is a lifestyle.
00:38:28
Speaker
The Gooch life chose me, dude. So what takes over after, because like in the break we were talking about Macedonians, that's far later, but what takes over directly after like Mahindra and after that? So you get, and particularly around the Ganges Valley, you do see the, particularly in Northern Pakistan, mark the beginning of the classic period of South Asian civilization, you see the return of urban areas.
00:38:54
Speaker
with definitive class structures so we can see the elites. But, you know, around in, not around, at 516 BCE, King Darius of Persia invaded Northwest. Northwest India becomes part of the Persian Empire. You see Persian influence entering the Indian subcontinent. And then
00:39:19
Speaker
you know, two centuries later, Alexander the Great comes in to the same area, takes it over, introduces Hellenistic culture.
00:39:27
Speaker
And then he bounces back and dies in, he dies in Egypt, right? Babylon. Babylon. And it creates this power vacuum. So you had two major superpowers and like basically get to Northeast India, modern day India, introduce Mediterranean cultures and science and basically introduce them to the Mediterranean world. And then there's kind of this power vacuum and there are these polities
00:39:57
Speaker
in southern India that kind of take advantage of this power vacuum. It's the kingdom of Magadha led by Chandragupta Mara of Magadha. Yeah. So this is what he shows up at some point. I think that's a person. Yes, that's his grandson, Ahsoka. And so this is the Mauryan empire and it dominates pretty much encompasses into Pakistan all of the early Indus civilization
00:40:27
Speaker
to the Bay of Bengal, basically just south of the Himalayas, but doesn't manage to extend to the tip of India, but is a much broader geographic region. This is a Buddhist society through and through, and so these are really the early historic cities that we see, that we know much about in the Indian subcontinent, and this is kind of it, and from there we go
00:40:49
Speaker
into the common era times. But India provides this case study where you have this early pretty much unknown empire of what's going on, who's leading it, 1400 years of we're farming again, and then two major powers coming into the area followed by really that's when states as level societies become fully adopted into Indian culture. And that continues into today.
00:41:19
Speaker
It's fundamentally interesting. There's a lot of cool stuff going on, and it's pretty pivotal when we talk about Western civilization, specifically the topics of the Aryans, the Indo-European languages.
00:41:33
Speaker
India is always kind of this periphery area, but it's central to early statehood societies developing across the world. And they're part of a large interconnection between the Mediterranean, Eastern African coast, and then Southeast Asia and China. Like they are today a major nexus of trade between two parts of the globe. And that's what they were that early in this civilization.
00:42:01
Speaker
The Rome didn't extend towards India, right? I don't think so. They kind of left to Levant. Yeah. They couldn't get past Nubia. Yeah. They were Babylon for like a 10 year period and then had to bounce. Crassus and his son, they were killed by Babylonians or someone in the Middle East. Like I'm pretty sure they killed him with molten gold down his throat.
00:42:29
Speaker
But this region was traded with the Roman Empire. They had Bengal tigers and gladiator. Well, there you go. But they had to have done.
00:42:45
Speaker
No, but I think, you know, with, you know, sad to say, we're very used to viewing history from a European centered perspective. And, you know, you couldn't even help just then Carlton using the word periphery. And that, you know, that's often how we view it. But really, it's not the periphery if you take like a
00:43:07
Speaker
Like a worldwide view, this is a real central region in the Bronze Age, Iron Age into the ancient world. This is where a lot of the action is going on. Yeah. I think even in my world history class or world civilizations in freshman year, sophomore year of college, we just glanced over India. Like we learned a lot about China, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, Africa, the Americas. But like, I don't really remember much about India or else I would be talking about it today.
00:43:36
Speaker
And is that because maybe that it's like, especially in this Valley civilization is hard to understand, or is it just because we're Europeans and we don't want to, you know, we just focus more on Greece? I don't know. A bit of both. Probably. I imagine. Yeah. I mean, I learned a decent amount growing up because the community I grew up in was like marketed to Indian tech professionals.
00:44:01
Speaker
So like a lot of my friends growing up are from India and I learned a lot about Indian culture and traditional Indian food because they were straight from there, some of those brilliant people. And Suresh, God bless that man, was the only one that could stand my father in doubles tennis. Suresh the beast. I'm glad Suresh can do that.
00:44:19
Speaker
I've got one more thing to add. We can't skip over this. We can't skip over this thing about Neolithic and the development of society in India. We've got to give a big shout out to Neolithic, Bronze Age, Caleb Welch. I'm sure Caleb Welch is fully down for this nugget of information.
00:44:44
Speaker
It may be the region that domesticated cannabis.
00:44:50
Speaker
The wild precursor to cannabis is a Central Asian plant. There are a ton of
Conclusion and Future Content
00:45:00
Speaker
varieties of cannabis that grow naturally in the Himalayas. At least according to this book, I have here entitled Cannabis Evolution and Ethnobotany by Robert C. Clark and Mark Merlin.
00:45:16
Speaker
No doubt those guys are absolute legends. But at least according to this book, cannabis, again, in those mentioning those earlier Indian texts, the Vedas is regarded as one of the five kingdoms of herbs which release us from anxiety. End quote. And they apparently used it to produce a drink called bang.
00:45:44
Speaker
And cannabis extends really far into prehistory, but this is definitely a contender for one of the first places that used it for its mind-altering abilities. In the Indus River Valley. In the Indus River Valley. That explains it. We don't need a centralized governor, man. We just hang out.
00:46:13
Speaker
1400 period without States is everyone was just like, you know what? Let's just smoke some of this. Yeah, exactly. So massive shout out to Neolithic India. Yeah. I'm going to say score one for the Neolithic today. Cause yeah.
00:46:34
Speaker
Wow. I didn't know that. That's cool. So like some guys got wheat. It's a contender. We're not sure, but it definitely is. Uh, you know, it's in the mix when it comes to early cannabis production. They're in the mix. Maybe that's what they were selling there. Like it was just a giant trading hub of, there was just a giant dispensary. You want some sour diesel? All right. You gotta go east.
00:46:57
Speaker
Not that I know strain names, but I'm taking a whole. You know, actually, it would be slight tension. It would be kind of cool to have a, you know, archaeologically conscious cannabis company. And you could name the strains like. Mahenjo Dara's finest. Hey, you two live out on the coast there. Join forces. Archaeological beer archaeologist has blown up. Maybe we should all get in on this.
00:47:27
Speaker
Yeah. Archaeological weed stuff and get the purest strains from across the globe. No, we've got to get, we've got to find it like a seed that's still alive. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then breed it from there. Yeah. Get high like the harappans. You get a slight headache, but man, you're going to chill out. This is actually becoming too good of an idea. We might need to cut this out.
00:47:53
Speaker
Let's see, what are the names of these cities here? Okay, so yeah, Harappan High, Mega Remind Mesh, and there we go. I keep going, what do we got here? Aryan, you know, Aryan Attack. Don't get a diesel. Yeah, we're not calling it Aryan anything. It's a marketing nightmare. That end is Kush. Yeah, Kush, there you go.
00:48:21
Speaker
There's already stuff you have him. You do have like afghan kush mohenjo diesel. There we go. All right. Excellent. So
00:48:32
Speaker
Stefan, thank you so much for coming back on the show, especially so last minute. We do appreciate your presence. It's been a lot of fun. As always, where can our listeners find all your Neolithic brilliance? Yeah. Go to youtube.com forward slash Stefan Millo. That's S-T-E-F-A-N-M-I-L-O. And that is on the internet. And watch my videos. When is this coming out?
00:49:02
Speaker
like two weeks. So August 23rd, two weeks. So you guys.
00:49:09
Speaker
we'll be able to watch Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, the same species. Let's get the popcorn out for that. I'm very excited for that one. Saddle a life throne's dispute. Still my favorite one is the fundamental objections to Graham Hancock, where he clearly used Microsoft paint to put an Illuminati eye on the top of his forehead.
00:49:36
Speaker
Microsoft pain. I'll have you know, that's a premium Photoshop job. Okay. Hey man, whatever works works. It is what it is. Uh, someone commented on, how do I go to my community page? Oh, I know where this is. Um, community. Yeah. I thought this was neat, dude. Uh, I asked people.
00:49:56
Speaker
You know, they thought about the last video or whatever. And somebody said, he said, I found you through step in me though, but your style is very different from his, which is good. It means I get similar and some dissimilar information that you have two different lenses. Stefan's work feels poetic and contemplative, contemplative. I love his frequent use of the phrase, we just don't know. And others like it. I thought that was kind of cool. And then he talks about mine, but I'm not going to toot my own horn on you. Uh, my favorite comment was, damn, Stefan, you really let yourself go.
00:50:27
Speaker
there's so many there's also one i went and checked i occasionally go back and check the new comments on my video on your channel just to see what's there
00:50:45
Speaker
I sent them a screenshot of it and sent it to these guys. And I'll say, get you an actor who has this range. And it was like, I love this. Thanks for introducing me to David. So what's that damn step? And you really let yourself go. And the last one said, I hate this guy. And I commented me too. Yeah, it's good stuff.
00:51:05
Speaker
It's funny. The world of YouTube is funny. Podcastors, you get off lightly with your lack of comments, lack of public comments. I've never sifted through the comments on your videos really, except for that one. But I imagine there's some very weird... I got a lot of your subs come to my channel and I get some weird messages and comments and I assume they came from you. It's actually just me and my 25 different accounts.
00:51:36
Speaker
somebody asking me about, was there mammoth domestication in the steps of Canada and stuff like that? I was like, I don't know, man. Well, on that note, you got your, you know, we found where, we know where to get you now. Sorry. The, my up in Maui is getting me. So here we go.
00:51:57
Speaker
What am I supposed to say now? Right. Please rate and review the podcast. If you guys have any qualms with this, if you are, you know, maybe a member of the, the, uh, you know, FDA count, not the FDA. Yeah. Yeah. FDA. There you go. Come tell us, you know, comment that if you liked the podcast, let us know. But if not, you know,
00:52:17
Speaker
Buy our merch, get a t-shirt, get some stickers. And of course you can find Stephen Miele on YouTube and on Instagram. All of his links are down below in the description. So thank you for joining us today, Stephen. Really appreciate your time, man. Take it easy, buddy. And with that, we are out.
00:52:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So gents, what do you call a tree growing in the Indus River? When an industry
00:53:12
Speaker
Oh, I literally was thinking that, but it's like, no, that's like factory industry. But that one was bad. Thank you, Connor. Yeah.
00:53:33
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.