Maisels, Charles Keith;
Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia
Routledge 2001, 480 pages [gbook]
ISBN 0415109752
topics: | india | history | ancient
By about the middle of the 3d millenium BC Indus VC : 1.1 K x 1.1K = 1.2 m kmĀ² Babylonian : Tigris / Euphrates valley : 65K sqkm Egyptian: 34.5K Nearly twenty time area of Egypt, and over a dozen times the settled area of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. cultivated valley of the Nile: 34,440 km2 (Kees:1961:17) alluvium between Tigris and Euphrates: 65km2 By contrast, the Indus civilization extended roughly 1,100 km north to south and east to west, covering an area of around 1,210,000 square km. This is nearly twenty times the area of Egypt, and over a dozen times the settled area of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. To get some feel for the distances involved, Harappa, located by the south bank of the River Ravi, an Indus tributary, is some 625 km from the other major centre, Mohenjo-daro on the lower Indus (and it is some 500 km from Delhi, around 859 km from Karachi). Harappa to Ganweriwala is 280 km, Ganweriwala to Mohenjo-daro 308 km. By comparison, virtually the whole length of the settled Mesopatamian alluvium is spanned by a straight line of 440 km, drawn from Eridu northward through Uruk, Isin and Kish to Samarra. At Baghdad the Tigris and Euphrates are only 35 km apart, while the longest transect between the rivers... amounts to only 240km, much of which in the east is or was marsh. p. 186 [Goes on to compare the Harappan civilization with the Mesopotamian, in some detail. The difference lies in the sheer number of Mespotamian cities, which on the southern alluvium could even be in sight of one another, in turn reflecting fundamental differences in the relationships between centres and hinterland. The consequence is a different level and type of urbanization, as between Sumer and Harappa, with nearly double the percentage (78%) of the Sumerian population living in settlements above 40 hectares as the Harappan (44%). ... The contrasts have been well made by Ratnagar's comparison of fifty Mature Harappan sites with fifty-six Early Dynastic II-III site areas surveyed by Adams (1981). [Table 4.1: Number and size of Harappan cities compared with those of broadly contemporary Sumer] p. 188 Sumer was a society of city-states whose populations had a strong civic consciousness. Harappan society consisted of an extensive oecumene or commonwealth, with a largely village-based population which the cities helped to integrate economically and culturally.
Of the 1,399 sites presently known (917 in India, 481 in Pakistan, 1 in Afghanistan: Misra 1994:512), only 44 sites are actually on or near the river Indus. However, around 1,000 lie along the course(s) of the Ghaggar-Hakra river|Ghaggar-Hakra / Saraswati river in Cholistan and, most importantly, those include the Hakra-ware sites, the earliest of the pre-Early Harappan wares. Hakra wares are the core ceramics on the core sites of Harappan origin, "marking the oldest or earliest human habitation in Cholistan, which could hav begun sometime during the first half of the fourth millennium BC (Mughal 1992a:106).
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