What makes indus valley civilization

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Jaspinder Singh. Sreenath S Kurup. For more information, please visit www. Media Relations Office media whoi. The Indus civilization was the largest—but least known—of the first great urban cultures that also included Egypt and Mesopotamia. Named for one of their largest cities, the Harappans relied on river floods to fuel their agricultural surpluses. Today, numerous remains of the Harappan settlements are located in a vast desert region far from any flowing river.

Syvitski, University of Colorado. Weakened monsoons and reduced run-off from the mountains tamed the wild Indus and its Himalayan tributaries enough to enable agriculture along their valleys.

During the early and mature phases of the Harappan civilization, settlements bloomed along the Indus from the coast to the hills fronting the Himalayas and along the most likely course of the mythical River Sarasvati, in what is now a waterless region, part of the Thar Desert.

With continued aridification, the population moved eastward toward the Ganges basin, where summer monsoon rains remained reliable, and winter monsoon rains increased marking a shift toward small farming communities and the decline of cities during late Harappan times. He uses techniques that span isotope geochemistry, next generation DNA sequencing, and satellite tagging to study the ecology of a wide variety of ocean species.

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He has been a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since Gregory Skomal is an accomplished marine biologist, underwater explorer, photographer, and author. He has been a fisheries scientist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries since and currently heads up the Massachusetts Shark Research Program. For more than 30 years, Greg has been actively involved in the study of life history, ecology, and physiology of sharks.

His shark research has spanned the globe from the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle to coral reefs in the tropical Central Pacific. Much of his current research centers on the use of acoustic telemetry and satellite-based tagging technology to study the ecology and behavior of sharks.

He has written dozens of scientific research papers and has appeared in a number of film and television documentaries, including programs for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, BBC, and numerous television networks.

His most recent book, The Shark Handbook, is a must buy for all shark enthusiasts. Other ancient scripts, such as Linear B, an early precursor to Greek, were eventually deciphered by charting out the signs, figuring out which marked the start of a phrase and which marked the end, how different syllables changed the meaning of a word, and how consonants and vowels were structured within a sentence.

In the past, much of this work was done by hand. Similar approaches have been tried with the Indus script as well. In the s, the scholar G. Hunter worked out sign clusters that enabled him to figure out some of the structure embedded in the script. But Hunter failed to unlock the code. The longest example excavated so far has Archaeologists have yet to find a multilingual text like the Rosetta Stone, which was key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In , Rao published a study that examined the sequential structure of the Indus script, or how likely it is that particular symbols follow or precede other symbols. In most linguistic systems, words or symbols follow each other in a semi-predictable manner. There are certain dictating sentence structures, but also a fair amount of flexibility.

They compared the conditional entropy of the Indus script to known linguistic systems, like Vedic Sanskrit, and known nonlinguistic systems, like human DNA sequences, and found that the Indus script was much more similar to the linguistic systems.

This statistical technique, known as a Markov model, was able to pinpoint specifics like which symbols were most likely to begin a text, which were most likely to end it, which symbols were likely to repeat, which symbols often pair together, and which symbols tend to precede or follow a particular symbol.

The Markov model is also useful when it comes to incomplete inscriptions. Many artifacts are found damaged, with parts of the inscription missing or unreadable, and a Markov model can help fill in those gaps. Yadav performed a similar analysis using a different type of Markov model known as an n -gram analysis.

An example of an n -gram at work is the Google search bar. Yadav and her colleagues looked at both the probability of a particular symbol given the symbol preceding it — a bigram — and the probability of a particular symbol given the two symbols preceding it — a trigram. And like the Markov model, it was also able to fill in probable symbols when inscriptions were missing portions of their text.

These two techniques also uncovered something unexpected: artifacts found in different regions depicted distinctly different symbol sequences.

So seals found in what is now Iraq have symbol sequences that tend to be different from others found in India and Pakistan. Providing anthropological and archaeological context to the artifacts we do have would also help further our understanding of the script. Gabriel Recchia , a research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge at the University of Cambridge, published a method that aimed to do just that.

This was true for US cities based on their co-occurrences in national newspapers, Middle Eastern and Chinese cities based on Arabic and Chinese texts, and even cities in The Lord of the Rings. Recchia applied that idea to the Indus script, taking symbols from artifacts whose origins were known and using them to predict where artifacts of unknown origin with similar symbols came from. Recchia explains that a version of this method that takes into account much more detailed information could be very useful.