Unveiling the Mysteries Pakistan s Hidden Ancient Civilization Early Humans Documentary

In the arid deserts of the Lakharna district in the Sindh region of northern Pakistan, lay incredibly special ruins. Stone blocks and walls hinted the presence of a vast city that once stood here around 2500 BCE, standing proud and bustling with ancient people until around 1700 BCE. 40,000 souls from the Indus Valley civilization called this city, now known as Mohenjo-Daro, home, where they lived, worked and survived, just as modern humans do. Rediscovered by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1919, almost 4,000 years after it was abandoned by its original inhabitants, it was revealed to be the largest city of the Indus Valley civilization and the artifacts that have been uncovered here are amongst the most culturally significant of all finds from ancient history. Today we will be exploring what this ancient city was like when it stood tall thousands of years ago. We will look at the people who lived there, what they built in Mohenjo-Daro and the objects they left behind that have made this ancient settlement such an important site for archaeologists. Sit back and relax as we take you back to the 26th century BCE to explore Mohenjo-Daro, one of the most spectacular lost cities of all of human history. Mohenjo-Daro first came to be in around 2500 BCE, in the 26th century BCE. One of the oldest examples of efficient and near modern city planning, Mohenjo-Daro is structured around a grid system where distinct blocks of buildings are separated by roads and walls. This is the earliest known example of an efficient system that can be seen in cities across the entire world today. The city was built by people from the Indus Valley civilization who we will discuss in greater detail later in this video. Their culture developed in around 3000 BCE and Mohenjo-Daro was the biggest of all the cities they would go on to build. Not only was the city the largest on earth at the time it was built, but it was also the most advanced. The site was thoroughly planned and well managed with evidence of advanced civil engineering across the ruins. Mohenjo-Daro was abandoned somewhere around 1900 BCE as the Indus Valley civilization started to decline and thin out across their South Asian range. Historians have provided a series of different explanations as to why the city was abandoned, with theories ranging from a huge flood destroying blocks of the city to issues with trading which starved the city into failure. Around the time Mohenjo-Daro fell, political unrest was rife in Western and Southern Asia and it is thought that the Indus Valley civilization's key trading partners refused to make any further deals. As a result, there was no incentive for its citizens to live in a city with waning resources, so they decided to look elsewhere. Mohenjo-Daro was subsequently rediscovered in 1919 when Rakul Das Banerjee, an Indian archaeologist under the Archaeological Survey of India, found the ruins in the arid landscape of northern Pakistan. One of the first objects he discovered at the site was a flint scraper, similar to ones used by ancient humans in the Pleistocene. This was enough to show him just how old this site was, and he organized larger excavations to be led by Kashinath Narayan Dixit across 1924 and 1925. Excavations continued up until the mid-1960s, where it was determined that weathering damage over the years had become too severe to prevent damage to the city if the ruins were persistently excavated. Today, the only work that persists at the site are conservation efforts to preserve the city as best as possible. The Indus Valley civilization arose around the Bronze Age, around the northwestern regions of South Asia, spanning the modern-day countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and northeast India. The civilization is thought to have arisen in around 3300 BCE, lasting until roughly 1300 BCE. It was one of the most widespread of the Bronze Age civilizations, along with those of Mesopotamia and North Africa, as well as being one of the most technologically advanced. Named posthumously after the Indus Valley locations in which its sites have been excavated, it is thought that 10% of the entire world's population lived within the realms of the civilization at its peak. There is also much we don't know about the people who called these home. While over 1,000 Indus Valley villages and sites have been recognized by archaeologists, only 96 of them have been excavated. Along with Mohenjo-Daro, the largest Indus Valley civilization cities are thought to have been Harappa, Gonwariwala, Rakigari, and Dholavira. Many of the people who called the Indus Valley civilization their home lived in sparsely populated villages, with just a few cities, such as Mohenjo-Daro, forming the main strongholds and technological centers. Many of the people who lived in these villages were traders or craftspeople, who lived in basic dwellings. In fact, the reason there is little evidence of the Indus Valley civilization out there, in comparison to, say, ancient Egypt, is due to the fact that many of their buildings were built from easily destructible materials. Mud huts supported with wooden beams made the basis of many of the buildings in these villages, materials that don't typically stand the test of time when a civilization falls. This had little impact on the Indus Valley civilization's technological capabilities, however, and via the excavations of sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, we have come to understand that the people who lived here were well-versed in forming their own culture, planning their cities, and using basic versions of modern technologies. Their cities were built using blocks and grids, and some of the later buildings discovered in cities show advanced planning and structures, having been built on raised platforms to ensure their safety in times of flooding. People from the Indus Valley civilization wrote in their own form of writing, known as the Indus Valley Script. This is something of a locked treasure chest. Countless troves of information on the Indus Valley civilization would be available to us if we were able to decipher what the texts read. Thousands of examples of their texts have been unearthed from archaeological sites, but at the time of this video being published, scholars have not been able to decode anything. It is a language built on symbols inscribed into tablets and walls, and most of the sequences of symbols are very short, containing only a few characters. It is thought to have been read from right to left and from bottom to top, and was likely developed around 3500 BCE. Many historians debate that the writing methods used by the Indus Valley people was a prehistoric form of a language group known as Dravidian. A now nearly extinct group that is sparsely spoken across India and Pakistan. Some also debate that it could be the earliest known form of Sanskrit, but we can't be certain. Some scholars such as Steve Farmer boldly state the opposite, claiming that the Indus Valley people were entirely illiterate. He has even gone so far as to have pledged 10,000 US dollars to anybody who was able to find an Indus script text longer than 50 characters. Around 1900 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization began to decline and disappear. Some scholars argue that this was a direct consequence of climate change. As the climate warmed, the Saraswati River, which ran along many key Indus Valley settlements, dried up, meaning that key water sources had become unreachable. Conversely, some scholars go the opposite way, stating that a catastrophic flood destroyed so many structures in the Indus Valley that the civilization was unable to recover. Whatever the reason, all we have left is a series of mysterious ruins and the artifacts within. Mohenjo-daro's grid-based city blocks allow for individual buildings and their functions to be established rather easily, as long as enough of them have been left behind for archaeologists to study. Many of the buildings in the city contrast greatly from the village settlements. They are built from fired brick, some of which have been cemented together by mud. The city can be split up into two main segments, the citadel and the lower city. The citadel was constructed on top of an intentionally built mound of brick and dried mud, and sits around 12 meters higher than the buildings of the lower city. Amid the citadel are a variety of interesting buildings, perhaps the most peculiar of which is a huge hall built to house around 5,000 residents of the city. Two large community halls and an area that is thought to have once housed public baths can be seen either side of this building. In the lower city, the centerpiece is thought to have been a square which held a public marketplace, and a well which supplied clean river water to the citizens. Smaller wells were present across the residential blocks of the lower city, where households could get their own water. It is thought that the water wells were some of the first structures built by the people who arrived in the area, with 700 wells present across the city. That's the equivalent of one well for every three residential buildings in the settlement, a number that completely eclipses those found in other ancient civilizations. Dirty or waste water was transported through drains, which were present on many streets, and functional toilet systems were present in certain areas. Some houses even had their own bathrooms, one of which is known to have had an underground heater to warm up the bath water. Some residential buildings had two floors with multiple bedrooms, and most of them had inner courtyards. One of the most famous buildings of Mohenjo-Daro is the Great Granary, discovered by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1950. This was a major food storage area for the people living in the city, divided internally to keep different types of food fresh and dry. Air ducts helped to achieve this, and farms that surrounded the city are thought to have supplied the food directly into the various rooms of the granary. The Great Granary is one of the key buildings of the citadel, situated close by to the public baths. There is also a building not too far from this site known as the College Hall, a huge complex of over 70 rooms, which may have been a residential site for priests. Surprisingly, no walls lined the city, but guard towers and a series of fortifications ensured safety from raiders or attackers. The same could not be said for other Indus River civilization cities, which were typically equipped with tougher fortifications. The city was, however, well equipped to deal with one ever-present threat, flooding. Some buildings were built on top of large platforms in order to mitigate the damage inflicted by the rivers of the Indus Valley bursting their banks. As global warming increased, these floods are thought to have become more commonplace, with frequent natural disasters wrecking the site time and time again as the years progressed. Within the wrecked buildings of Mohenjo Daro, archaeologists have managed to find a series of amazing artifacts that can give us a brief insight into the lives of the people that called this settlement home. Within residential buildings, many different pots and vases have been discovered, some of which bearing the presence of ash. These may have actually been urns holding the cremated remains of people, or they may have been used as heaters in order to burn wood and plant matter to heat the home. Elsewhere at the site, archaeologists have uncovered jewelry, some of which was made of gold, as well as weights, bowls, ornaments, and children's toys. Certain finds in certain areas have led us to understand that some parts of the city acted as industrial districts, with one section of the city dedicated to shell working and another to copper working, the latter of which also helping to produce the copper tablets that were engraved with the mysterious Indus script. Some artifacts salvaged from the site can also give us an insight into the religion of the citizens of Mohenjo Daro. One such object, discovered by John Marshall in 1931, appears to show a mother goddess figure, a small statue of a woman adorned in jewelry and elaborate clothing. Some historians interpret them as religious idols, perhaps a visual representation of a deity, whereas some have suggested them to be figures of regular citizens of Mohenjo Daro. If the latter is true, these figures might have been used in healing rituals or religious ceremonies, despite the fact they did not depict an actual goddess. This is not the only statue uncovered from the site, and archaeologists have also uncovered the remains of a figure depicting a young girl dancing, a bearded man thought to have represented a priest, as well as figures carved on seals thought to represent deities. Along with these artifacts have been found jewelry thought to be over 4,500 years old, some of which contain over 1,500 bronze segments. Today Mohenjo Daro is open to tourists who would like to visit the area. Although very little excavation work takes place at the site to preserve what is left of the ruins, it can be explored as part of a tour group, surely a fantastic experience for those interested. Conservation work continues to take place on the remains of the ancient city, with millions of dollars being pledged by UNESCO to protect the area from further flooding and damage caused by the elements. This doesn't mean that the site is without its threats though. Groundwater salinity threatens to reduce the ruins to crumbled rubble by 2030, and improved conservation measures are required to tackle this. The site has been damaged further by the presence of the Sindh Festival's inauguration ceremony in 2014. The setup and hosting of the festival exposed the site to greater damage, including drilling and digging work. The site is protected under the Antiquity Act, and thankfully no similar events have been held since. This is a remarkable and culturally invaluable piece of human history, and to lose it would be to lock ourselves out of so much knowledge surrounding the ancient people of the Indus Valley civilization. Let us hope that conservative measures protect the site from any further danger going forward, so we can appreciate this awesome part of history for years to come.