Decades-long droughts doomed one of the world’s oldest civilizations
A series of severe, decades-long droughts ushered the end of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world’s oldest civilizations, a new study finds.
This Indus Valley Civilization (also known as the “Harappan” civilization) flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in a region that stretched across the modern-day India-Pakistan border. Its people created cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, which had sophisticated water-management systems. They also created a written script, which remains undeciphered by modern scholars, and they traveled to Mesopotamia, where they conducted trade.
Why their civilization declined has long been a matter of debate. Now, in a new study, published Thursday (Nov. 27) in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists say that lengthy droughts played a sizable role.
“Successive major droughts, each lasting longer than 85 years, were likely a key factor in the eventual fall of the Indus Valley Civilization,” the scientific team wrote in a statement. As these droughts got worse, populations within the society shifted to areas where substantial water sources still existed, the researchers found.
Eventually, cities across the region collapsed. A century-long drought that started about 3,500 years ago “coincides with widespread deurbanization and cultural abandonment of major [cities],” the team wrote in the paper. [Continue reading…]