RIVER VALLEY CULTURE
Our written history begins in the Indus, Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile river valleys. These young civilizations were contemporary and apparently in touch with each other. Many identical items, such as cylinder seals, are found at all of these sites. The newly discovered techniques of one city were carried to the others by trade. It is not possible to point to any one city as the "inventor" of civilization. In fact the city culture could well have been perfected by a people as yet unknown to us, whose ruined cities have not yet been disturbed by the shovels of archeologists.
The relatively recent discovery of the Indus valley culture in 1924 by Sir John Marshall on the western bank of the lower Indus is a case in point. Here were found solidly built brick houses and shops with bathrooms and sewer systems that their discoverer thought were eminently superior to those of the coexistent city of Ur . Here were found pottery thrown on a wheel, the first known coinage, and jewelry of those earliest of the metals-gold and silver. Mohenjo- daro , like most archeological sites, is several ruined cities piled one above the other. In the lowest levels we find the polished stone of the New Stone Age . As we rise in the ruins to later times we find a transition from stone to copper and then to bronze. The art of the smelter, the foundryman, the metalsmith, was born in the river valleys. They had a high level of well-ordered life, a blossoming technology, and a linear script which we cannot as yet read. Mohenjo-daro and the other Indus valley cities belong to prehistory where tentative conclusions about the llife of the people are reached by sifting over the village dumps. We cannot read in their own words of their deeds or of their hopes and fears.
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