TecC 19 - Footprints in Dust
How hidden hands once worked unlikely wonders to fight the waves of change
In the last 3 episodes we have been tracing the development of more complex institutions than what developed before the advent of writing, institutions which were in good part made possible because of writing. Furthermore, in the last one I hinted, with regards to the major early civilizations we’ve covered, at not yet having spoken about ‘one of the most outstanding ones yet’. Let’s do that now!
Let’s go back to the first two to start with, where we traced how the technology of writing, a big leap from the long-existing human genetic trait of the ability to use (spoken) language, enabled the emergence of what we call civilization, without yet having clearly defined what that meant or what it entails (which omission is not acceptable since forms of that word has taken on certain other connotations, some less desirable). So before I get to ‘the outstanding one’ promised, let me cover a few more related concepts to consolidate my treatment of the overall broader phenomenon. As before, let's go back to a fictionalized take to start with.
Weighting Worth, Building Worlds
Our Bronze-Age friends Bryan and Brenda have made great strides thanks to bringing about writing and enabling the growth of the State and the Market, as we saw them convincingly do in the last couple of episodes. Their business - Bruno Enterprises Ltd, has been going from strength to strength, thanks perhaps to the branding power of their tailwaggy mascot. So much so that they are confronted with a new problem, there is inconsistency in how the goods being traded under their supervision are being weighed, a problem getting all the more acute as the scope and scale of their undertaking expands.
And while talking about it one fine evening over a brew, Brenda gets a brilliant idea: why not do some work to ensure that the weights used by us and our counterparties in all the trading parts are exactly the same? Bryan is like, come on Brenda, we cannot carry those same weights to each of these places each time something needs weighed! But Brenda is made of better stuff - the weights would be the same functionally, not physically. In other words, you could use one physical weight (of a certain denomination) for another physical weight (of the same denomination) and the results would be identical.1
I am of course referring to standardization. While they might have started initially making those weights themselves, that might not have been scaleable. So later, thanks again to writing, they might have produced a document describing how exactly to make them to be identical. And this is what we would call a specification.
Specification and standardization are fundamental to the scaling of almost any productive activity, and I posit that we underestimate the importance of this in day-to-day life. I say this despite efforts in recent decades to institute Standards bodies, whose promulgations we rely on every day, taking it for granted, until you’re at the cafe with your phone battery going low, you’ve forgotten your charger at home, and the one your friend offers is, erm, not compatible!
And over and above the pertinence of standardization to modern life, I propose that this, alongside things like writing, was at the heart of the emergence of the earliest civilizations, and consequently all civilizations: the phenomenon of concentrated centers of population engaged in productive activity with advanced systems of trade, and political, social and cultural organization. In other words, urbanization.
So then let’s now look at that concrete historical example I promised.
Urban Precision or Urbane Perfection?
Imagine walking through a city on the pavement of a street that is about 30 feet (~10 metres) wide, bifurcated for two-way traffic flow, with walled citadels forming an ‘upper town’ and residential/commercial areas making up the ‘lower town’. The streets are all laid out in a perfect grid going north-south and east-west - by ‘perfect’ I mean they were precisely at 90° angles, every one of them!
Each house or dwelling is built to more or less the same standards of size and composition, they’re spacious, with every one of them having a private bathing area and latrine with waste disposal happening via covered, underground drainage systems. In fact every single brick that makes up every single building is of the exact proportion of 4:2:1. Again, perfectly so. And there are public wells within 50 metres of any residence.
The larger cities house up to 50,000 people while those and several smaller ones, all in accordance with these characteristic features, are dotted around an area of 1.3 million square kilometers (500,000 square miles) which is more than the area of Britain, France and Germany combined!2 Or, almost twice the size of Texas!
How far back in time do you think you would go back and still expect to find such an urban conglomeration?
Here’s an answer: at least 4,500 years ago!
Yes, I said that! At least four thousand five hundred years before the present time.
This, is the Indus Valley Civilization. Or sadly, was, for a lot of their achievements were not replicated until millennia later.
Rediscovered in the early 1900s across the Indus river (which along with the Himalayas defines the Indian Subcontinent, but furthermore also gives the land its name) and its tributaries both extant and extinct from areas close to the spring of these rivers in those snow-capped mountains, to the shores of the Arabian Sea, were ruins of this forgotten civilization,3 now covered in dust but still retained enough for archeologists to piece together a remote reality conforming to the picture I painted above.
While its origins have been traced back at least a millennium before, the mature (or Integrated) phase of the Indus Valley Civilization is said to have begun around 2600 BCE, and flourished for about 7 centuries until about 1900 BCE when it suddenly, i.e. within a handful of generations, essentially collapsed. Just like that. Archeologists and other researchers are still puzzled about what exactly happened, especially with the sudden inexplicable decline.4 The main reasons are known to be drastic changes in the environment, including a massive course change of one of the major rivers,5 which later went extinct as desertification set in - most of these ruins, cities of a civilization built on the system of river flow are now found in arid desert areas.6
This coincides with the sudden abandonment of those magnificent cities - beyond signs of social unrest and disease seen in some of the late burials, archeologists speak of no large scale conflict or invasion. The Indo-Aryans, a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranians,7 migrated to these lands from their home in Central Asia8 at least around two hundred years later.
The IVC people had writing, and hundreds of clay tablets have been discovered in the ruins, but unfortunately their writing, owing to both the paucity of the content (not more than 6-8-10 symbols per tablet) and to the lack of a bilingual text such as the Rosetta Stone, has not been deciphered. There’s still some hope though, because these people have been mentioned in a cuneiform tablet by none other than Sargon of Akkad.
Innovators Indi-genius
The Indus Valley Civilization, contemporary archeologists are now reasonably convinced, developed indigenously. It was not, as previously conjectured, brought to the area by, say, one of the other Bronze-Age peoples from further west.9 But at the same time, the IVC people had extensive contact with many of the other bronze-age civilizations, such as the Sumerians already mentioned, but also the people of the BMAC and others.
So there was exchange of ideas but there was also a home-grown flowering of concepts and concrete10 implementations. I don’t know about you but to me, the sheer scale and achievement of this civilization as the above depiction represents, is rather astonishingly extraordinary.
In our study of progress in this, we have already touched upon a great number of technological - artefactual and institutional, achievements spanning of the Bronze Age, and while many of them we know to have been huge and impressive, there are aspects of this particular civilization that seem rather uniquely outstanding, and their sudden disappearance relinquishing that great urban achievement, leaving no lasting legacy visible to us, similarly uniquely disappointing.
Take these couple of cases:
They had a standardized system of measurement that was used in the entire stretch of area we call the Indus Valley Civilization. These measurements were accurate down to 0.13mm (0.005 inches). Such precision was arrived at again only in the 1900s of our era, more than FOUR millennia later!
Despite such standardization implemented across a territory spanning more than a million km², which to us necessarily implies a centralized standardizing authority of some sorts, there are no large palaces or artefacts suggesting the presence of a dominating, extractive elite, which is what we see in every of their contemporary civilizations of any scale, as much as in later eras.
And as I’ve said, and I haven’t emphasized it enough, water was a central element to their existence, both in the large scheme of things but also quotidianly. Unlike a common square or plaza of our modern expectation, the heart of their cities seems to have been these grand communal baths, which given the scale of population mentioned, raises questions of sanitation to be sustainable. And it was: they had an elaborate, fully hygienic drainage system, neatly covered, leading waste away to the outskirts, neatly separated from areas of living and eating. When did the modern industrialized West achieve a comparable degree of hygiene?
Let’s take a look at gardyloo for example. ‘Gardyloo’, a corrupted version of the French phrase "gardez l'eau" (watch out for the water), is what residents of Edinburgh (Scotland, Britain, Europe) would shout before emptying chamber pots from their windows onto the streets below.
This practice was particularly prevalent in Edinburgh's Old Town, where extremely tall tenement buildings housed large numbers of people in a densely packed area with no indoor plumbing or sanitation systems. There were ‘improvements’ such as The Nastiness Act of 1749 which imposed time limits during the day for this, but the practice is said to have persisted till the 1930s!!11
As I said, more than four millennia later!
And thus I hope you can see my lament. Why is it that we have lost such great developments of human progress and innovation, sometimes gone without leaving a visible trace?
That’s what I’ll explore next.
Further Reading & Reference
Giesche, Alena et al. (2023). North Indian stalagmite reconstructs ancient droughts.
A technical term for such swappability is ‘fungible’ which is from the same root as ‘functional’ - in essence, serving the same function
When restricted to their Europe-only territories, adding up to about 1,145,000 sq km (420,000 sq miles)
Also called the Harappan Civilization
Technically the period of decline is said to have lasted from 1900 to 1300BCE but this is largely isolated pockets of dwelling and in any case without any of the productive capacity as seen prior to this period
Known variously as Ghaggar-Hakra or likely the same as what texts in Sanskrit, a language that developed later, refer to as the Sarasvati
Mainly in modern-day Pakistan, and parts of western India such as Rajasthan and Gujarat
Who, as we’ve met previously in TecC 09 - the story of fire, called themselves ārya, with the name ‘Iran’ meaning ‘[land] of the Aryans’
The Indo-Iranian sub-branch of the Indo-Europeans is said to have taken form in the Sintashta culture in present-day Russia just east of the Urals, then spread to the Andronovo horizon in the wider region. The Indo-Aryan group in particular are said to have interacted and intermingled with the BMAC (Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex) people in modern-day Tajikistan/Afghanistan/Turkmenistan before heading south across the Hindukush into the Indian Subcontinent. See the story of their ancestors the Proto-Indo-Europeans in TecC 15 for sources and the broader context
In contrast with a great many propositions of early archeologists whose theories have now been debunked as not sufficiently scientifically based and extremely unlikely
I’m loath to repeatedly use the term ‘concrete’ because their buildings were made of mud-brick, but hey they did better than many concrete structures that come later?
The said act has still not been repealed but I think it’s better not to test it, however law-abiding you might wish to be!
This was a brilliant piece! Quietly staggering in how much it made me reflect on what we’ve lost, not just what we’ve built. That last comparison to Edinburgh really landed.