An excellent video, by a key thinker about the ancient Indus civilization with wide-ranging experience in neighbouring cultures. This talk was given in Chennai as the Iravatham Mahadevan Endowment Lecture on February 25, 2026. Subtitled From Forms of Government to Individual Names it is broken into two parts. The first goes over Dr. Vidale's latest thoughts of how Indus cities were organized into walled compounds, the way they changed over time as new groups entered and tried to emulate former inhabitants. He takes on the question of palaces and large structures, and discusses his idea of a possible second smaller "Great Bath" at Mohenjo-daro. His thoughts are always interesting and he takes on some of the popular myths about the Indus civilization, like that it was a peaceful civilization, and contextualizes the enormous mud-brick platforms at Mohenjo-daro which involved, as he says, the same amount of material as the great pyramid at Giza.
The second part of the talk tries to extract some proper ancient Indus names from cuneiform inscriptions with Indus connections in the Gulf and Mesopotamia. Two of these involve goat-herders, and as Dr. Vidale discusses them, they offer clues to what the language and function of these Indus people living abroad, far from home, might have been.
The talk begins about 22 minutes into the presentation, and offers many interesting threads to explore by one of the most interesting and innovative of Indus archaeologists.