An Indus Scale
Chapter 5 from Sudeshna Guha's bestselling A History of India Through 75 Objects (2022), includes a little-known object described as a ‘measure of length’ by Ernest Mackay.
The author, who has been working in the larger region for decades exploring the long history of human habitation and industry going back tens of thousands of years, turns his attention to the geographic changes in the Indus delta region through the Bronze Age and what recent work shows us were the curious "islands" that once existed in lower Sindh (Dholavira, in Gujarat, is another example of such a later settlement).
Rao Bahadur Kashinath Narayan Dikshit (1889-1946) was at the helm of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as Director-General during a pivotal time in history, just as tremendous changes taking place across the globe and in his homeland. His tenure as Director-General (1937-1944) corresponded with the years preceding the war, through the war years and just prior to Independence.
A recent VOX Unexplainable podcast featuring Prof. Rajesh Rao (University of Washington, Seattle) offers a broad overview of ancient Indus script research and where we are today.
This nearly 400 page illustrated volume by Dr. Amendra Nath from 2014 covers three seasons of excavations (1997-2000), and is "drawn on the lines of the Wheeler Committee Report-1965." As the start of a record about this extensive, important major ancient Indus site, it is invaluable.
"The reconstruction of Puabi fully adorned provides insights into the fabric that lay beneath the sumptuous ornaments. The queen’s spectacular accessories, though important, have diverted our attention away from the cloth that lay beneath the eye-catching ornaments, which deteriorated (or de-materialized) long ago and so has been mostly invisible to us in the present day."
Omar Khan and Nikhil Gulati in conversation about The People of the Indus, the best-selling graphic novel about the ancient Indus civilisation shortly after its release.
Until Dr. Vermaak's paper (2008), no one had connected the known existence of a Meluhhan village in the Girsu/Lagash area with Guabba; the availability of more texts since the first connections were made by scholars like Asko Parpola allowed him to both locate it more precisely and tease out a number of other references that give us some sense of what these people did and were known for.
A look at some of the other artifacts we have from this extraordinary female ruler of the Mesopotamian city-state of Ur around 2500 BCE.
Archaeologists often assume that metals like bronze replaced the need for stone tools, but is this really the case given the evidence in these two areas not to mention select Mediterranean regions? In the Indus region, what was the use of these tools given their limited presence in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa?

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