Trade between Indus Valley and Mesopotamia appears rather skewed in IVC's favour. IVC exported Gold jewelery, Ivory seals & boxes, Timber, Cotton textiles, Copper & bronze fish-hooks, Carnelian & precious stone beads, Live chicken, Shell & bone inlays, and even Water buffaloes. Mesopotamia exported only Silver, Tin and Copper ingots, Woollen textiles and Bitumen. Could it have been be sex trafficking from Ur, Dilmun and Magan to Sutkagen Dor, Sokhta Koh, Balakot and Allahdino?

Answered by Massimo Vidale, Mayank Vahia, Gwen Robbins Schug, Nisha Yadav, Paolo Biagi and Rita P. Wright

I would like to know something about the nature of the administrative machinery, their irrigation patterns and nature of society...though i am fully aware that the type of sources we have to analyse these things are minimal.

Massimo Vidale
Prof. J. M. Kenoyer, who has recently investigated the Granary at Harappa, is the best person to answer these questions. My impression is that the evidence for the "Granaries" identification is quite flimsy; the type of dig made in the past, simply, was not accurate enough for such an identification, and the various theories so far proposed are pure conjectures. One of these is that the large compartmented building of Harappa was a weaving plant; I like the idea, but at present it is just another guess.

Jane McIntosh
Decipherment of the Indus script would be helpful – if nothing else, it should conclusively settle the non-Aryan/Aryan dispute – but the amount of information this would yield is severely limited.

Jane McIntosh

This case is being made on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Did the people of Indus Valley Civilization interact with people of the Rigveda? What is the relationship between the Indus Valley people and Vedic people? Submitted by Shubha Khandekar and others

We keep reading that agriculture was prevalent in the Indus Valley Civilisation. But when I read about the planning of the settlements, I was confused as to where exactly the fields were located. Were they outside the walled settlements? Or were they located somewhere within the Lower Town? Submitted by Rizowana Hussaini

Or is there any indication of war between these populations?

Rita Wright

There are Mesopotamian texts from the Akkadian period (2350 – 2200 BC) that speak about battles in which the people of Meluhha were involved. This seems kind of far fetched since the battles took place in what today is eastern Iran. There is very little evidence for warfare in the Indus, as you probably know, but still they appear to have thought they were engaged in battles with the Indus or for political reasons they found it useful to say so.

I would like to know if the valley was green and fertile at that time... and if the cultivation of sugar cane, a highly aggressive culture, and the use of timber to construct led to environmental degradation of the area which then became dry and hostile.