Madison Rambles #4: The Indus Valley Mystery

Hello everyone!

This time, I'll be doing something a little bit different: I'll answer a question from the book! Because of this, this blog will be shorter than the other blogs.

There were four questions to choose from, but this was the most interesting:

What additional kinds of archeological discoveries would be helpful in furthering our understanding of Indus Valley civilizations?

After some thinking, here are my answers:

A Rosetta Stone: No, not that overpriced program that's supposed to be immersion in a box. I'm talking about Indus Valley stone tablets translated to other languages. If archeologists found even just one of these, it would be the Holy Grail of Indus Valley research. Imagine what we could learn about law and their government from a multilanguage tablet...

Other Civilizations Writing About the Indus Valley: How do we know about ancient Scottish tribes? Because the Romans wrote down their encounters with them. Archeologists would be glad to find Mesopotamia or Egypt talking about the Indus Valley. Sure, we have to take their word with a grain of salt at times, but it's better than nothing.

Blueprints: This is stretching a little, but it would be cool to know how they were so consistent with their building techniques. They had to have wrote it down to get it so perfectly, right? Although that's speculative, it would help to further our understanding of the Indus Valley civilizations.

Bones and Other Body Parts: After some Googling, DNA takes over one million years to be illegible. Considering the Indus Valley civilizations went away only a few thousand years ago, scientists still have time to gather the DNA. Not only that, but as Egypt showed, graves can show a lot about a culture and their values. What I'm saying is that dead bodies and where they're placed can say a lot about a culture.

So in conclusion, archeologists need to find bones and stones if they want to know more about the Indus Valley.

Next time, I'll talk about the beginning of Chapter 3, where it talks about empires. Will I be talking about the famous and intimidating Roman Empire...?

See you next time!