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Scientists have unveiled a sprawling burial site in India belonging to one of the world's earliest urban civilisations. The BBC's Soutik Biswas delves into the clues the graves might give us about how the early Indians lived and died.In 2019, as scientists embarked on excavating a mound of sandy soil near a remote village in the sparsely populated Kutch region, situated not far from Pakistan in India's western state of Gujarat, they had no inkling of the surprise that lay in store for them. "When we began digging, we thought it was an ancient settlement. Within a week, we realised...

Over the years rock carvings of a previously unknown civilisation have been found in India's western state of Maharashtra. Now, a cave in the same region is promising to shed more light on the creators of these prehistoric artworks and their lives...The cave, located around 10km (six miles) away from Koloshi village in the Konkan region of western Maharashtra, was discovered by a group of researchers last year. Excavations earlier this year revealed several stone tools in the cave that date back tens of thousands of years...The cave, which is situated in a secluded forest in Sindhudurg, was discovered by...

Physical evidence found in caves in Laos helps tell a story about a connection between the end of the Green Sahara, when once heavily vegetated Northern Africa became a hyper-arid landscape, and a previously unknown megadrought that crippled Southeast Asia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, University of Pennsylvania, William Paterson University of New Jersey, and other international institutions explain how this major climate transformation led to a shift in human settlement patterns in Southeast Asia, which is now inhabited by more than 600 million people... To...

A Bronze Age painting on a Greek island shows a monkey from thousands of kilometres away in Asia. The finding suggests that ancient cultures separated by great distances were trading and exchanging ideas. The artwork is one of several wall paintings in a building at Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. Akrotiri was a settlement of the Minoan civilisation in Bronze Age Greece that was buried by ash from a volcanic eruption in around 1600 BC. Many of the paintings show monkeys, yet there were no monkeys in Greece at the time. Most of...

Over 2 billion people are facing a water crisis, and water-related hygiene and sanitation problems. Clean water is the base for economic development of any society. Water treatment produces clean water. Water treatment includes sedimentation, filtration, aeration, solar treatment, chlorination, and sterilization by boiling. A wide range of treatment processes have evolved to suit the different local conditions. Water treatment must produce ‘clean water’, which is having all contaminants safely below the maximum permissible limits (MPL). With oft revised MPL, new materials are explored to address the presence of contaminants such as microbes, heavy metal ions, oils, pesticides, disinfection byproduct...

The Harappan civilization dominated the Indus River valley beginning about five thousand years ago, many of its massive cities sprawling at the edges of rivers that still flow through Pakistan and India today. But its culture remains a mystery. Why did it leave behind no representations of great leaders, nor of warfare? Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence...

Whatever their differences, all Indus researchers agree that there is no consensus on the meaning of the script. There are three main problems. First, no firm information is available about its underlying language. Was this an ancestor of Sanskrit or Dravidian, or of some other Indian language family, such as Munda, or was it a language that has disappeared? Linear B was deciphered because the tablets turned out to be in an archaic form of Greek; Mayan glyphs because Mayan languages are still spoken. Second, no names of Indus rulers or personages are known from myths or historical records: no...

Languages as diverse as English, Russian and Hindi can trace their roots back more than 8,000 years to Anatolia — now in modern-day Turkey. That's the conclusion of a study1 that assessed 103 ancient and contemporary languages using a technique normally used to study the evolution and spread of disease. The researchers hope that their findings can settle a long-running debate about the origins of the Indo-European language group...

Contact: Carrie Golus (773) 702-8359 cgolus@uchicago.edu New discoveries in Syria confirm theory on spread of early civilization Unique artifacts unearthed this season in Syria will force historians and archaeologists to rewrite the history books, because the traditional view of how civilization developed is looking increasingly wrong. A cooperative expedition between the University of Chicago and the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities has uncovered the hallmarks of urban life in Syria a little after 4,000 B.C., a time when civilization was thought to be restricted to Mesopotamia. Already during initial excavations in 1999, discoveries at Hamoukar in northeastern Syria began to suggest...

Of the identified 429 signs, "a man with jar cup", a symbol unique to the Indus civilisation and other compound letters testified to remnants of the Harappan culture, spanning from 2300 BC to 1700 BC, in South India, Varier, who led the excavation at the caves said. The "man-with-the-jar" symbol, an integral remnant commonly traced in parts where the Indus Valley civilisation existed, has even more similarities than those traced in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, he said. The 'man-with-the-jar' has been a distinct motif of the Indus valley symbols. The Edakkal engraving has retained its unique style as the engraver...

The recent International Conference on Harappan Archaeology produced an unexpected announcement from archaeologists BR Mani and KN Dikshit, both of the Archaeological Survey of India, who claim that new dates from excavations show the Harappan culture began around 2000 years earlier than previously thought.The ruins of the Harrapan city of Mohenjo-daro remained undocumented for over 3,700 years, until their discovery in 1922 by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was led to the mound by a Buddhist monk, who reportedly believed it to be a stupa. Image: Wikimedia commons Redating of Harappan culture Based on...

A group of nine Indus Valley copper plates (c. 2600–2000 BC), discovered from private collections in Pakistan, appear to be of an important type not previously described. The plates are significantly larger and more robust than those comprising the corpus of known copper plates or tablets, and most significantly differ in being inscribed with mirrored characters. One of the plates bears 34 characters, which is the longest known single Indus script inscription. Examination of the plates with x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrophotometry indicates metal compositions, including arsenical copper, consistent with Indus Valley technology. Microscopy of the metal surface and internal structure...

[Q:] There are periodic reports of Indus script being deciphered. Are there standard methods to test the validity of claimed decipherments? [A:] The best summary and evaluation of the work done so far is Gregory Possehl’s book, The Indus Age: Its writing. I myself have reviewed five claims to decipherment – two based on Sanskrit, two on Tamil and one claiming that the script is merely a collection of numbers. My conclusion is negative – that none of the decipherments has been successful... There is very little interest in the Indus script in the West – there are very few...

Scientists have used a computer program to decipher a written language that is more than three thousand years old. The program automatically translated the ancient written language of Ugaritic within just a few hours. Scientists hope the breakthrough could help them decipher the few ancient languages that they have been unable to translate so far. Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the program that the language was related to...

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols'...

In what appears to be a new ground-breaking study, Unsealing the Indus Script: Anatomy of Its Decipherment released in November last year, author Malati J. Shendge claims that the riddles of the Harappan graphs which have bedevilled archaeologists, palaeographers and linguistic and other scholars for nearly a century have been largely deciphered. Shendge has decoded many of the seals, and the field is now open for a further understanding of a civilisation that came to an end with the invasion by the Indo-European peoples... Scholars tried to read linguistic elements into it; at times, the script was regarded as...

All those features of the Indus script which have been mentioned as proof for its not being a writing system, characterise also the Egyptian hieroglyphic script during its first 600 years of existence. For detailed counterarguments, see my papers at the website... The script is highly standardised; the signs are as a rule written in regular lines; there are hundreds of sign sequences which recur in the same order, often at many different sites; the preserved texts are mostly seal stones, and seals in other cultures usually have writing recording the name or title of the seal owner; and the...

The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Seato the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of...

A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online April 23 by the journal Science, found the Indus script's pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language... In 2004 a provocative paper titled The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis claimed that the short inscriptions have no linguistic content and are merely brief pictograms depicting religious or political symbols. That paper's lead...

Distributing water DR. T. V. PADMA How did the people of the Indus manage to water their cities? In Indus cities, each house or group of houses had a private well, made with wedge-shaped bricks that slotted together in a cylindrical shape strong enough to withstand the weight of water when the well was full. This is not a simple matter, and required calculation — otherwise a well could collapse once it was full of water. How did the Indus people keep wells and bathing facilities watertight? First, they used bricks that fitted together tightly. Second, they coated the outer...