I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, maybe that's what has compelled me to make this? Or maybe it's that I've been encountering a lot of intriguing new things and don't really have much of an outlet for expressing my thoughts about them? Whatever the reason, here I am. I have a lot of things that I'd like to write about, mostly my weirdo philosophical musings and thoughts about life, society, straight edge, morality, religion, whatever comes to my mind when I'm in front of the keyboard. I'd also like to have a record of interesting things that I learn, and that's what I'll start with.


I'm taking a class on India right now, taught by one of the most brilliant people I've ever encountered. Not surprisingly, it's the first week of the class and I'm already thoroughly fascinated with it. It's one thing to memorize names of cities and demographic information and vocabulary words and all of the other things that don't matter at all in the end, but it's another to get the opportunity to understand the way that someone else perceives reality, and to recognize that our Western way of viewing the world isn't THE way of viewing things, it's just our way. That's what is most compelling to me in learning about these things. I don't want to delve too deeply in that right now, though, as it's something that deserves more focused attention.

So anyway, there is a civilization that existed from around 3000 BCE until roughly 1500 BCE in the Indus Valley area that is known as the Harappan Civilization. This was around the same time as ancient Egypt, but is much less known and celebrated, though in many ways it was far more sophisticated and elaborate. We know about ancient Egypt largely because of the survival of large structures like the pyramids, but the Harappans didn't have that kind of stone and weren't able to build structures that were especially large. Instead, they used a kind of brick that, by design, could only support a structure that was two or three stories high before caving in. As such, this civilization wasn't even rediscovered until the 1920s. Cities are still being discovered in the thousands of miles that the civilization covered. Archaeologists estimate that there were about 50,000 people per city, and the cities were all identical. every brick is exactly the same size and shape. All of the streets run directly north-south or east-west, meaning that the cities all existed on a sort of grid. The alleys are exactly half the width of the streets, and the streets are exactly half the width of the larger avenues. The residences (which are also identical) had indoor plumbing and running water in the houses, tiled bathrooms, things that are ridiculous to imagine that houses thousands of years ago would have had. They have a written language that, according to my professor, we haven't been able to decipher, though things I've looked at online say that we've been able to decipher some of it. The tools, pots, etc. are the same in every city. Societies typically change as time progresses, but everything stayed relatively the same here over its 1,500-year span.

Around 1500 BCE, the culture collapsed. We don't know why, though it's estimated that some sort of natural catastrophe may have caused the cities along the Indus River to be wiped out, and the peripheral cities were abandoned as a result. It's so ridiculous to think about in so many ways. Of course, like I said before, it's hard to imagine such an advanced civilization so long ago, but it's also a trip to think about what would have happened if the civilization wasn't wiped out. Would they have been invaded and conquered? From what is known of them, the Harappans weren't a violent people. Would they have continued in their developments and advanced even further in sophistication, or remained stagnant? What do their records say? It must be so exhilirating to be able to decipher a lost language and uncover the things that these people felt were important enough to record. I'd really like to learn more about this, maybe more developments have occured and we've learned more about them.

Regardless, it's endlessly interesting to me.