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In 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter stunned the world by discovering King Tut's tomb in Egypt. Two years later, his contemporary John Marshall published the results of his excavations in the Indus Valley. Although it lacked golden artifacts, the discovery demonstrated that ancient South Asia was just as advanced and complex as ancient Egypt. Learn more about the rise and fall of the Indus Valley civilization on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Everybody knows someone who insists on doing things the hard way. There's a friend who keeps paying for a subscription they forgot they had, or the one refusing to update their phone just because it still works. Min Mobile exists purely to fix that problem. You get the same coverage, same speed, just without the inflated price tag. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. For a limited time, get 50% off 3, 6 or 12 month plans of unlimited Premium Wireless. 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Eight thousand years ago, however, the region looked much different. It was a lush, green landscape teeming with abundance. Between approximately 9,500 and 5,500 years ago, the region experienced a period known as the Holocene climatic optimum. The weather during this period indicated robust monsoons that filled lakes and rivers, creating a lush green landscape rich in plant and animal diversity. This is a stark contrast to the region's current weather patterns, which average only 14 inches of annual rainfall, most of which falls during the summer monsoon season. The height of this climate pattern marked the beginning of civilization in India. Archaeological evidence indicates the roots of urban life in India date back to about 7000 BC. The Indus river once had a companion called the Saraswati river, described in the Rig Veda as a mighty river. During this period, the Indus Valley may have resembled Mesopotamia, with a fertile valley between two major rivers that supported a civilization. Shockingly, the river dried up well before the communities that wrote about it actually arrived in the region. Historians speculate that the river and its stories are far older than Vedic culture, which described the river as being as wide as the sea. Around 1500 BC urban areas such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro thrived in the region. Beginning around 3000 BC the valley between the two rivers produced a remarkable set of similar and connected sites. Archaeologists have identified approximately 1,000 sites spanning approximately 400,000 square miles, or 1 million square kilometers, in this network of cities. Studying the connections between the sites has proven difficult. The region appears to have had a unified written language, yet it is limited in volume and remains undeciphered. Historian Michael Wood calls the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley the greatest mystery in archaeology. It's a mystery so profound that the government of Tamil Nadu in India has offered a $1 million reward to anyone who deciphers it. It's this mystery that has made the study of the Indus Valley history so difficult, as it's almost entirely reliant on excavated artifacts. The geography of Mohenjo Daro has also made this a great challenge. The site's excavation is very close to the water table in the region, and continuing to dig into the city's foundation will result in the remains being flooded and destroyed. Historical developments have also made this difficult. The British built the railroads linking Lahore, Pakistan to the region in 1856. As they laid the track in the Indus Valley, they found hundreds of hundreds of thousands of uniform sun baked bricks. Archaeologists assume that the buildings were from a much newer community and were not of grave historical importance. However, they were wrong. The British used these bricks to lay the foundation of the railroad bed. Amongst the ruins, they found small seal stones engraved with intricate drawings and inscriptions. The seal stones depicted animals, often a bull, an elephant or a crocodile, and even mythical creatures like unicorns. One of the most famous seals, the Pashupati seal, is believed to depict the earliest images of Siva, a primary deity in Hinduism. The nature of the seal is one of the great mysteries of archaeology and could unlock the chronology of Hinduism, the world's oldest known religion. An archaeological study was commissioned at the site, but excavation didn't begin until the year 1920. The archaeologists did not find the remnants of monumental public construction projects because, as it turned out, the region didn't engage in such projects. The Indus Valley civilizations differ from those in Egypt and Mesopotamia in that they didn't prioritize the construction of wonders on an incredible scale. The civilization, like its ruins, was hidden behind a veil of practicality. The excavations of the 1920s revolutionized historical thinking and transformed our global timeline. Before the discoveries in the Indus Valley, the conventional wisdom held that the oldest cities in India were in the Ganges Valley and dated only to 1250 BC. The core of the Indus Valley civilization was in its two great previously mentioned urban centers, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. Harappa was discovered in 1922 when John Marshall dispatched Indian archaeologists under the leadership of Daya Ramsani, to excavate the site where railroad crews had previously found the seal stones. In 1924, a second team was dispatched to examine Mohenjo Daro, the Hill of the dead, a site 200 miles from Harappa. The two excavations revealed a pair of large urban centers with populations estimated at up to 50,000 people. The sites revealed symmetry between them, as the city shared many common features. The two cities were each built with standard mud bricks for its walls. The city's defenses both featured a citadel at the north end. Both sites were laid out in the same rectangular grid pattern of right angles. Ceremonial bathing sites were central to each location, highlighting the importance of ritual bathing in India and early Hinduism. Archaeologists were quick to conclude that the cities belonged to the same culture and perhaps even shared the same governmental structure. The most outstanding achievement of each city was a remarkably sophisticated sanitation system. Historians were stunned to Learn that in addition to the sewer system, houses also had gravity fed water and private baths. Harappa and Mohenjo Daro had a street sewer system to remove waste from the city, and this was a feature thousands of years ahead of major urban centers in Europe or the Americas. These innovations made Indus Valley cities the cleanest in the ancient world. While there was no golden monuments or soaring public buildings, historians were nonetheless impressed. Historian Jonathan Mark Knoyer of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a veteran of the excavation of Harappa, offered this There is more to a society than big temples and golden burials. Those are the worst things that ancient societies did because they led to their collapse. As an expert on ancient urbanization, Knoyer argues that the cities of the Indus Valley civilization exhibit a distinct form of urbanization compared with those of its contemporary civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Reflecting an impressive legacy of long distance trade, Indus Valley seal stones have been identified in the ruins of Mesopotamian city states. The trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley is one of the first known examples of long distance trade in world history. Merchants from the Indus Valley used the Indus river to reach the Arabian Sea. From there, they traveled roughly 2,000 miles along the coast in small watercraft until they reached the Persian Gulf. Successfully navigating thousands of miles across the open sea long before the compass or the modern sail was invented was a staggering achievement for a Bronze Age society. The most prized item and one found in Mesopotamia alongside the seal stones were beautiful jewelry items made from lapis lazui and carnivorous carnelian beads. These beads had to be drilled using a special drilling technique developed in the Indus Valley. Carnelian is a type of quartz that has a hardness of 7 on the Mohs hardness scale. While establishing long distance trade networks is an impressive feat, drilling into carnelian quartz with precision is an incredible achievement for a Bronze Age society. The inability to read the Indus Valley script has limited our understanding of the region's political systems. Historians interpret the absence of monumental public building as a key indicator of the region's political process. In traditional river valley civilizations, the political legitimacy of the ruler rested on their ability to harness resources to build massive structures. Leaders of Mesopotamian city states were expected to construct ziggernauts for the region's deities. Egyptian pharaohs were the most prolific builders of antiquity, producing a wide array of projects to bolster their political standing. The absence of monumental public buildings in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro suggests that the region's leaders may have been local economic or social elites whose legitimacy was tied to local affairs and trade rather than to monument building. The Indus Valley civilization did not come to an abrupt end. The state slowly eroded beginning around 1900 BC in a complete departure from traditional ancient civilizations. There is no record of military activity. There is no art depicting violence or conquest. The weapons found at the site are hunting weapons in such quantities as to eliminate the possibility of organized military activity. Funerary sites show no record of violent death at Harappa, and only several from Mohenjo Daro. The evidence points to a slow decline driven by the region's climate transition. The population in the region did not die in a mass death event. Instead, they migrated to other regions of India. As they migrated, they brought their oral stories with them. Many of these stories appear in the sacred chronicles of the rig Veda. Around 6,000 to 3,000 years ago, a mass migration of people into India occurred during the Indo European migrations from Central Asia. The arrival of the Aryan people led to the creation of new linguistic and cultural traditions in India. Their arrival also coincides with the beginning of the Vedic literary traditions. The Vedas introduced Hindu deities that would become fundamental to the faith. The Rig Veda tells the story of Indra, a heroic God who defeats a demon named Vitra. Vitra had stolen the reins, causing drought and suffering amongst the people. Indra, using a magic lightning bolt, comes to the aid of the people and restores the rains. The story of Indra provides further insight into Vedic India. The story is an accurate appraisal of the climate changes occurring in India at that time. The Indus Valley became increasingly arid during the transition from city states such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro to communities of Aryan populations. The Vedas recount their interactions. The story isn't one of an invading foe replacing a community. Rather, it's like a parallel migration. The early Indus Valley people had been leaving due to a changing climate, with the new Aryan population replacing them before migrating east themselves. The Vedas chronicle this cultural collision. The Aryans didn't arrive in India and immediately write the Vedas. This is not possible, as the Vedas contain historic information about the region that predates their migration. The Vedas are most likely a compilation of oral stories from the Indus Valley civilizations, transcribed by the Aryans over nearly a millennium later into a language that we can read. Any other explanation is highly unlikely. And to understand this, we turn to the river Saraswati. It's mentioned more than 50 times in the Vedas and is referred to as a great river, characterized as one that flows from the mountains to the sea. The Aryan Indo Europeans could not have known about the river as it had disappeared before they arrived, suggesting cultural exchange of oral traditions. Because we have been unable to unlock the writing system of the Indus Valley people, there is much that we don't know about their world. However, much can be inferred from the archaeological evidence. The Indus Valley civilization appears to have been a place of peace, artistic refinement and long distance commerce, and their cities were exceptionally well designed. Their demise wasn't the story of an invading army, it was the story of agricultural failure driven by diminishing water resources and a changing climate. While there's still much that we don't know, what we do know shows that the Indus Valley remains one of the few places where civilization arose on Planet Earth and became a foundation of the world that we live in today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it running the show.