Indus Seal

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The ancient city of Harappa lies around 150 miles north of Lahore in Pakistan. It was once one of the great centres of a civilisation that has largely disappeared, one with vast trade connections and boasting several of the world's first cities. At a time when another great civilisation was being forged along the banks of the river Nile in Egypt, Neil MacGregor investigates this much less well-known civilisation on the banks of the Indus Valley. He introduces us to a series of little stone seals that are four-and-a-half thousand years old, covered in carved images of animals and probably used in trade. The civilisation built over 100 cities, some with sophisticated sanitation systems, big scale architecture and even designed around a modern grid layout. The great modern architect Sir Richard Rogers considers the urban planning of the Indus Valley, while the historian Nayanjot Lahiri looks at how this lost civilisation is remembered - by both modern India and Pakistan.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.
0:07.0	Imagine the great cities of the world gone forever.
0:12.0	London has slowly disappeared, submerged under the swollen Thames.
0:16.6	Cairo, Los Angeles and Sydney have all been abandoned to drought and desert.
0:21.8	Climate change has swallowed up our cities and they've vanished without trace.
0:28.0	Whether this apocalyptic scenario is our future or just another Hollywood disaster movie, we or our successors will find out.
0:36.9	But what's certain is that it has happened before. more. I want to take you not just to a city that was lost, but an entire civilisation that
0:59.6	collapsed and then vanished from human memory for over 3,500 years, largely due to climate change.
1:09.0	Its rediscovery in Pakistan and North West India was one of the great archaeological stories of the
1:14.8	20th century and in the 21st we're still piecing the evidence together.
1:21.0	What can we now know about this lost world, the civilization of the Indus Valley?
1:29.0	The story begins with a small carved stone used as a seal to stamp wet clay.
1:37.0	You could really say that's where all the things that I'm interested, the civil society starts.
1:44.0	It speaks to me in so many different ways.
1:48.0	And it doesn't appear to be something that is alien just because it belongs to the third millennium BC.
1:54.7	A history of the world in a hundred objects. The Indus Seal, a stone stamp from the Indus Valley in Pakistan.
2:20.0	Four to four and a half thousand years old.
2:30.0	This week I'm looking at how the first cities and states grew up along the great rivers of the world,
2:36.2	and how these new concentrations of people and of wealth were controlled.
2:41.5	Around 5,000 years ago, the Indus River flowed, as it still does today, down from the Tibetan
2:47.6	Plateau into the Arabian Sea. The Indus civilization, which at its height covered nearly 200,000 square miles, grew up in the rich, fertile floodplains.
2:59.0	Excavations have revealed plans of entire cities, as well as vigorous patterns of international trade.
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