More recent studies have proven that these classical models are inappropriate. Thus they wrote of kings, urban capitals, slaves, citadels, and alien invasions in the Indus Valley. When they sought to reconstruct the Harappan world they saw a rather poor but still representative example of aspects of more familiar civilizations.
The early excavators were trained in the study of the history of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, Greece, and Rome. Only recently have we begun to understand something of their contents.Ī second and more basic problem lies in the the way in which scholars have looked at the mute remains of Harappan culture-the assumptions that they have made in their interpretations of buildings, art, artifacts, and trash. In contrast to early Chinese, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures which are relatively well known as a result of the decipherment of their scripts and the translation of substantial texts, the brief inscriptions left by the Harappans on seal-tablets remain a basic scholarly problem. In part this is due to the paucity of written documents. In spite of decades of archaeological field work in both India and Pakistan, much is still unknown about the Harappan world. Map of the Indus River system showing the location of Harappan settlements, ca. It was unknown until the early part of the 20th century, when the great settlements at Harappa and Mohenjo daro were excavated and their antiquity recognized. The Harappan or Indus Valley culture is one of the world’s earliest civilizations.