change that plugged the Indus River, altered its course, and put successive layers of houses underwater. Others say that earthquakes and massive flooding ended the civilization around 1700 BC.
Avantiputra7 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 3.0
FIGURE 4-1: The Indus Valley Civilization was in what is now India and Pakistan.
Nomadic herding tribes from the Iranian plateau arrived in northwestern India around then as well, and they seem to have displaced the people of the Indus cities. Raiders eventually destroyed Mohenjo-Daro, by then in steep decline. The newcomers brought an Indo-European language (a distant ancestor of modern India’s Hindi, as well as English and many other tongues) and the roots of what became Indian religion and culture.
PULLING PREHISTORY FROM A BRICK PILE
Harappa, perhaps the dominant city of the sophisticated Indus Valley Civilization, was a mess when archaeologists started picking through it in 1920, because 19th-century railroad builders had mined the site for bricks to build a roadbed. The engineers knew that the bricks were old, but they couldn’t have guessed that they were 4,000 years old. They left the hole in the ground, so local villagers helped themselves to the bricks too.
In 1922, two years after the scientists at Harappa began to understand what the site had been, an Indian archaeologist tackled another mound of brick rubble and river silt 400 miles away. He thought he’d found an abandoned Buddhist monastery. Instead, he unearthed the riches of Mohenjo-Daro, a virtually untouched ruin of great villas, public baths, and dazzlingly sophisticated sculpture. Since then, archaeologists have explored more than 150 Indus Valley sites.
Separating history from myth: China’s oldest dynasties
A river also runs through the beginnings of Chinese civilization: the powerful Yellow River. Around 4000 BC, people started farming (first millet and later rice) along this northernmost of China’s major rivers. Chinese legends attribute the nation’s origins to semimystical, demigod monarchs, including a Yellow Emperor of about 2700 BC, three “Sage Kings” or “August Rulers” (from 2350 BC), and a Hsia Dynasty that lasted until 1766 BC. Because historians have no proof that these figures are anything but legend, they credit the later house of Shang (also called Yin) as being the first dynasty to bring together warring Yellow River city-states in the 16th century BC.
Isolated from Asia Minor and Africa, where the Sumerians and Egyptians invented writing, the Chinese developed their own kind of pictograph symbols. Archaeologists have found characters on Shang Dynasty artifacts that are essentially the roots of the same writing system that China uses today. China’s historical writings outshine the records of any other culture in volume, detail, and continuity. For the BC period, China boasts 26 major official written dynastic histories.
Coming of Age in the Americas
By 2000 BC, good-size communities with public buildings existed in South America, specifically in the Andes mountain range of what’s now Peru. Archaeologists have found evidence, for example, that the people near modern Lima irrigated their farmland and built a stone pyramid at nearby El Paraiso around 1800 BC.
In Peru’s northern highlands, the Chavín people started building cities around 1000 BC. Their culture thrived for 500 years, but they didn’t leave many clues for the ages. The Chavín may have traded with the Olmec, who had even earlier urban centers, dating from about 1200 BC, along the southern Gulf of Mexico in today’s Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmec left huge stone heads that may be portraits of their kings (albeit not very flattering ones). They also seem to have passed down their culture and social structure to later, more elaborate civilizations, such as the Maya (more on them in Chapter 5).
Keeping Records on the Way to Writing and Reading
Just as the practice of farming led to the founding of villages, towns, and then cities, it gave rise to record keeping and disciplines including astronomy and math.
In Egypt, for example, practical scientific and engineering methods arose as ways to keep track of planting seasons. The Nile flooded in predictable annual patterns, so farmers could calculate when the water would rise. They studied the sun and the stars, and over centuries, Egyptians developed an accurate calendar with 365 days in a year. In Mesopotamia, too, practical considerations such as keeping track of seasons, trade transactions, lawmaking, and the invention of that most-treasured aspect of modern life — large-scale government bureaucracy — gave rise to record keeping. Record keeping soon led to more general writing and reading, without which you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing right now.
Planning pyramids
Measuring and math came in handy for building Egypt’s pyramids, which are mind-boggling feats of engineering. Herodotus the Greek, a historian of more than 2,400 years ago, wrote that 100,000 men worked for 20 years on Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza. That may be an exaggeration, though, because the Great Pyramid was already more than 2,000 years old when Herodotus wrote about it.
An important way for the Egyptians to impose order on their world, hieroglyphics also became the key for much later people to find out about the Egyptians. I tell you about the Rosetta Stone, the modern world’s key to deciphering hieroglyphics, in Chapter 24.
Laying down laws and love songs
In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians’ pictographs (beginning a bit earlier than the Egyptians’) evolved into symbols that represented words, syllables, and eventually even phonetic sounds. Cuneiform, the Mesopotamian way of writing with the sharpened end of a reed in wet mud, spread all over the Middle East.
Also like Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform writing opened new vistas of early history in the 19th century AD, when European scholars figured out how to read cuneiform documents such as royal edicts, business letters, and even love songs.
Cuneiform writings include early codes of laws. Babylonian King Hammurabi enacted one of the best-known in the 18th century BC. Here’s a sample: “If the robber is not caught, the man who