Recommendations for Indus Valley civilization

Are there any good, recent overviews of Harappa, Mohenjo Daro, etc?

You might try either Mark Kenoyer's Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization or Gregory Possehl's The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. I haven't read either, but I would expect both authors to have written something reasonable.

One other author, Dilip K. Chakrabarti. Either India, an archaeological history : palaeolithic beginnings to early historic foundations or more recently (2006) the Oxford companion to Indian archaeology.

I don't have a specific recommendation to make but I would suggest that you search for books on this topic on Indian online bookstores, for example www.vedamsbooks.com . There's a large amount of history books from India which never become available on Amazon or other western outlets, and Vedam's books is a good place for finding them.

Personally, I've read Vedic Harappans by Bhagwan Singh. It's an interesting attempt to establish that the Harappans wrote or created the Vedic literature tradition. However, it's quite a polemical book and doesn't perhaps meet the criteria of objective historical writing, so if your interest is more in the archaeology of Harappa without a lot of speculative conjectures, it might not be what you're looking for.

But in any case I do recommend Vedams Books for finding books on ancient India.

I have been searching without success for a similar book, so I'm going to monitor this thread for other recommendations. The problem may be that in reality we just know so little about them and by some accounts we are no closer to deciphering their language today than we were decades ago.

The Harappans et al are one of those people who are just difficult to find an entire book dedicated to them, and you usually have to get a book about someone else to learn about them. In this case, most of my knowledge comes from books about the Indo Europeans like J.P Mallory's and David Anthony's. The Phoenicians are another people like this. I only have ONE book about them, and it's a reprint of George Rawlinson from like a jillion years ago.

#6

Those books by Mallory and Anthony about the Indo-Europeans, how do they make a connection to Harappa? In the book I cited above, Singh implies that the Indo-European cultures had a Harappan origin, although that's presented mostly just as a corollary of the Harappan origin of the Vedas, which is the main argument. Like I said, it's a speculative book, but I guess all books on Indo-Europeans origins etc. have to be highly speculative.

The debate about the "Aryan Invasion" of India is what usually connects questions about the Indo-European to Harappa, see Bryant's The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture for an overview of the debate. The Indian position, advocated by Singh for example, is that the alleged invasion never took place, that it's just a fiction of colonial prejudices in historiography.

>7 thcson::
I wouldn't call that "the Indian position" per se; I would call it the position of a limited number of ultra-right-wing Hindu nationalists.

Ok E59F, you may be right. But can you also point us towards a more moderate Indian position? How about Romila Thapar? I've been meaning to read Thapar but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

I didn't know about Vedam's--thanks for the tip. Exotic India has a bookstore:
http://www.exoticindiaart.com/book/
but I have never ordered from them. (I either get used or remaindered books, or go to a library. That doesn't mean I don't spend hours drooling over websites.)

Exotic India has a fascinating collection of comics based on the Mahabharata, Upanishads, and other traditional and literary sources.

I am less interested in debates about the origin of the IEs or Vedic culture than I am in learning about the people and cultures themselves.

BTW, did you realize that "Aryan" and "Iran" are linguistic cognates?

Part of the problem of a purported IE invasion is that it may not have been a military-style invasion at all, but just groups of nomadic people settling down in the same place.

Sorry if I'm not making incredible sense; I'm taking Vicodin for a headache.

>9 thcson::
There's kind of a depressing dichotomy between fundamentalist ideologues vs. unthinking adherence to the conventional thought of the 1940s, but there are some individuals who are both sane and modern. Romila Thapar would be one; Shereen Ratnagar would be another.

thcson - Thapar goes through the debate, but is definitely not on the Hindutva side of the issue. Thapar's Early India is really a stellar history, but, of course, it still reads like a text book, so I'd recommend reading it intermitantly while doing other reading.

Thcson, my point was that you just get a little mention here or there, such as in the books I mentioned.

Genetic support for traditional view of Indian history--

I picked this up on 3 Quarks Daily, my favorite bloggish site, then read the full story on the Nature site:

"Now, a team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, has probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India. The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal."

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090922/full/news.2009.935.html