Prelude :In the “Geography of History” series we have learned the evolution of mankind from hunting gathering societies to agricultural societies.The invention of agriculture led to far-reaching changes in human societies. One important result was the emergence of cities and civilizations. This series covers one of the most important civilization – Harappan Civilization – be it in prelims or GS mains or History optional . There are certain themes that UPSC has been asking for many years and will keep on asking years to come.Few of such themes are – Buddhism, Harappan civilization, Gupta age , Akbar’s policy etc.Hence from exam point of view this series is quite important.
Discovery of an Old City :-
- In 1826 an English man Charles Masson visited a village named Harappa in Western Punjab (now in Pakistan). He noted the remarkably high walls, and towers of a very old settlement. He believed that this city belonged to the times of Alexander the Great.
- In 1872, a famous archaeologist Sir Alexander Cunningham came to this place.The people of the surrounding areas told him that the high mounds of Harappa were parts of a thousand-year old city.His views concurred with the local folk tale and believed that the city was 1000 yrs old.
- But in 1924 , another archaeologist John Marshall reported about Harappa, and opined that Harappa is as old as the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia (5000 yrs old)
Harappan Civilization:-
- The finds from Harappa had similarity with finds of another place known as – Mohenjo-Daro in Sind.
- In Mohenjo-Daro the settlement lay underneath a Buddhist monastery belonging to the Kushan period. It has been found that in ancient times if a house was destroyed for some reason people would generally use the brick or mud of the house to prepare a plinth and make another house on top of it.
- The cities were part of an age when iron was unknown.
- When Marshall published his discoveries some other writers found objects similar to those of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in Mesopotamia.
The Chronology of Pre-Hareppan and Harappan Cultures :-
- 5500-3500 BC – Neolithic – In Baluchistan and the Indus plains settlements like Mehrgarh and Kili Ghul Muhammad came up. Beginning with 3500 B.C. pastoralism with limited cultivation and seasonal occupation of the villages, permanent villages emerged. Knowledge of wheat, barley, dates, cotton and sheep, goat and cattle. Evidences of mud houses , pottery, craft-production found.
- 3500-2600 BC -Early Harappan Period –
- Many more settlements established in the hills and the plains.
- Harappan Largest numbers of villages occur in this period.
- Use of copper, wheel and plough.
- Emergence of uniformity in the pottery tradition throughout the Indus Valley.
- Also, the origins of such motifs as Pipal, humped bulls, Cobras, horned deity etc . Evidence of granary, defensive walls, and long distance trade.
- 2600 – 1800 BC – Mature Harappan Period –
- Emergence of large cities, uniform types of bricks, weights,Harappan seals, beads and pottery.
- Planned township and long distance trade.
- 1800 BC Onwards – Late Harappan Period –
- Many Harappan sites abandoned.
- Interregional exchange Harappan declines. Writing and city life abandoned.
- Continuation of Harappan Crafts and pottery tradition.
- The village cultures of Punjab, Sutlej-Jamuna divide and Gujarat imbibe the Harappan crafts and pottery traditions.
Why is it Call Harappan ? :-
- Beginning with the discovery of Harappa, nearly thousand settlements having similar traits, have been discovered.
- Scholars named it the ‘Indus Valley Civilization‘ because initially most of the settlements were discovered in the plains of the river Indus and
its tributaries. - Archaeologists prefer,to call it the ‘Harappan Civilization‘. This is because in archaeology there is a convention that when an ancient culture is described, it is named after the modem name of the site which first revealed the existence of this culture.
Early Harappan Sites :-
- This geographical space would roughly cover the areas of modern-day Rajasthan, Punjab, Gujarat, Pakistan and some of the surrounding areas.
- The Harappan civilization represents the culmination of a long period of evolution of agricultural and semi-nomadic communities.
Geographical Feature of Harappan Sites :-
- The areas of present day Pakistan and North-Westem India formed the core region of the Harappan civilization
- Dry weather and scanty rainfall
- Regional Variation:-
- Punjab and Sind are dominated by the alluvial plains of the Indus river system
- Baluchistan are characterized by steep craggy hills , inhabited by Pastoral Nomads.These pastoral nomads with their herds of sheep, goat and cattle kept shifting from uplands to low lands in search of pastures for their herd.
- These hilly regions are fractured by many passes, like those of Khyber, Gomal and Bolan.These have acted as highways of traffic for nomads,merchants, warriors and various groups of people.
- The interaction among the population of the uplands of Baluchistan and plains of the Indus on the one hand and
the communities of Iran on the other seems to be related to this geographical feature.
Origin Of Agriculture and Settled Villages :-
- The earliest evidence for the emergence of agricultural communities comes from a place called Mehrgarh, near the Bolan pass in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan (See the Map above)
- Beginning as a seasonal camp the place turned into a settled village in the 5th millennium B.C.
- Mehrgarh is located at the place where the alluvial plains of the Indus join the uneven hilly plateau , of the Indo-lranian border-land.
- People of Mehrgarh lived in mud houses which could sometimes have five to six rooms.
- By the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. many small and large villages had sprung up around the Indus, Baluchistan and Afghanistan area
- The better known settlements among them are Kili Ghul Muhammad in Baluchistan and Mundigak in Afghanistan.
- In the Indus flood plains villages like Jalilpur near Harappa had come into existence.
- These agriculturists gradually learnt to exploit the Indus plains and to control the flooding of the Indus
- All this led to the development of small towns. The period of this new development is called ‘the Early Harappan‘ because of certain uniformity found all over the Indus.
P.S. – In the next series we will cover the findings and importance of particular Indus Valley Civilization Sites.
Receive Daily Updates
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.