The millennium or so that followed the dimming of the Harappan Civilization would have been the most tumultuous and turbulent period in the history o… - Tony Joseph
" "The millennium or so that followed the dimming of the Harappan Civilization would have been the most tumultuous and turbulent period in the history of the modern human in south Asia. But we have very little record of this and hence very little understanding of it. Look at all that happened: a long-standing civilization, the largest of its kind at the time, fell apart due to the ravages of a long drought, and its most visible symbols of power and prestige slowly disappeared even as urbanism itself did; people migrated to the east and the south in search of a new life; a new set of migrants came in from the north-west, bringing new languages and a different culture that put emphasis on sacrificial rituals and prioritized pastoralism and cattle breeding over urban settlements; another set of migrants came in from the north-east, bringing new languages, new domesticated plants and perhaps wetland farming techniques and a new variety of rice... and thus the pot of Indian culture was put on the boil. Four thousand years later, it is still simmering, with new ingredients getting added once in a while, from the Jews to the Syrians to the Parsis.
English
Collect this quote
About Tony Joseph
Tony Joseph (born 12 March 1963) is an Indian journalist and former editor of Businessworld magazine. He is also the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From (2018).
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Tony Joseph
So here is a question: if you were to identify a single person who embodies us Indians the best, who do you think it should be? Ideally, it should be a tribal woman because she is most likely to be carrying the deepest-rooted and widest-spread mtDNA lineage in India today, M2. In a genetic sense, she would represent all of our history, with very little left out. She shares the most with the largest number of Indians, no matter where in the social ladder they stand, what language they speak and which region they inhabit because we all migrants and we are all mixed. And she was here from the beginning. And she was most likely also at Mohenjo-daro as the 'dancing girl' (the image on the cover) about 4500 years ago, during the period that most shaped us as we are today.
So in hindsight, it looks like the British archaeologist and director general of the Archaeological Survey of India between 1944 and 1948, Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, blamed the wrong person for the disappearance of the Harappan Civilization when he wrote, ‘On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused!’ He was suggesting, of course, that ‘invading Aryans’ had destroyed the Harappan Civilization – something for which there is no archaeological evidence.
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
The most exhaustive, multi-year geological study on the the possible reasons for the decline of the Harappan Civilization was published in a 2012 paper titled 'Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization' which identified a clear cause: a prolonged drought that ultimately made monsoonal rivers go dry or become seasonal, affecting habitability along their courses. To quote: 'Hydroclimatic stress increased the vulnerability of agricultural production supporting Harappan urbanism, leading to settlement downsizing, diversification of crops and a drastic increase in settlements in the moister monsoon regions of the upper Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.'
Loading...