The Indus: Lost Civilizations Hardcover – December 15, 2015

It's a great book for those who know little to nothing about Indus civilization. It is concise - it provides the overview of the accumulated knowledge about the civilization from different perspectives (discovery, historiography, religion, script etc) without turning into the endless musings. Typically several schools of thoughts are mentioned considering each of the aspect of the Indus civilization and its studies, without dogmatic preference to any paradigm. The book is cohesive - the overlapping of material is minimal, but the chapters add to each other to form one multifaceted idea of what the ancient civilization. The author's personal remarks are rare and always seem appropriate The book is rigorously scientific in its approach to the topic, but doesn't leave the impression of a detached examination, which would be really strange given the sense of wonder the Indus civilization implants into anyone studying it. The text touches upon the lost culture's mysteries, but without being overly sensational and keeping it rather mundane - again, staying true to the book's scientific approach. It also provides nice bibliography, not expansive, but essential, so that anyone interested in further deeper studies of the subject could choose what to read next. Overall, I'd highly recommended the book provided that you new to the field.

A well done review of the very little that is known of the long-lost civilization of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus River valley.

The Indus valley civilization has always been a source of fascination for me, having lived almost my entire life in the area. It has enabled me to understand who were the people of Indus valley and whey they disappeared so mysteriously from an area of Sindh, Punjab and in to modern day India. This was a civilization far ahead of its time, in terms of urban planning and city dwelling. Andrew deals in each of the chapters about religion, art, culture trade and their culture that flourished along the Indus and its global outreach. Felt a proud of an advanced civilization that existed in our country thousands of years ago.A must read for those who feel passionately about Indus and its civilization.

Reads easily and the illustrations supplement the text very well. Encouraged me to look for other books by this author.

One of what is probably a large series of "mass-produced" reviews. Really not all that well-written. It contains lots of information readily available elsewhere. I suspect the author(s) consulted Google and/or Wikipedia.

Very informative deals with facts not speculation

The Indus culture is one the oldest and least understood of civilizations in human history. It covered a huge area in present Pakistan and India from about 2600 to 1900 BC. Although archaeologist have discovered thousands of Indus sites we know almost nothing about its origins, how the Indus culture developed, its social structure, its religion or its language, nor when and how it ended. These circumstances make it necessary to describe the Indus civilization with caution and to distinguish facts from fiction. In his book Andrew Robinson has met this challenge in a splendid manner despite the difficulties he faced.After a short introduction, Robinson describes the discovery of the Indus civilization in much detail. This give sufficient background to understand both progress and problems of Indus archaeology. The excavations of the two largest Indus sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, have unearthed a complex of architecture, pottery, and thousands of small artefacts such as beads, figurines, weights, tablets, seals, metal tools, etc. Despite the wealth of artefacts we have little chronological control due to the destruction of the upper (Late) levels at Harappa, the nonextant Early periods at Mohenjo-daro and the small temporal overlap between both sites. Chronological divisions at Harappa are based on the presence or absence of inscribed tablets. This is because, from start to finish, the "Mature Harappan" ceramics cannot be differentiated.This book covers all aspects of the Indus culture and discuss architecture, arts, crafts, agriculture, trade, social structure, religion, and its decline and disappearance. One of the most controversial topics is discussed in Chapter 10 which deals with the Indus script. Robinson gives an overview of the corpus of Indus inscriptions, argues for the direction of writing, and discusses four unsuccessful approaches to decipher Indus signs by Petrie, Wilson, Rao, and Fairservis. In the discussion of the sign list he cites Parpola's and Mahadevan's count of 425+-25 signs, but both estimates based on a limited, outdated corpus not updated after the publication of the HARP data recently excavated from Harappa. More problematic is the question of how many signs are allographs. Are similar graphemes distinct signs or not? Parpola's and Mahadevan's sign list merges graphically similar signs together into one sign despite their different positional distribution within sign sequences. As demonstrated by Wells (2011, 2015) the fusion of similar signs into one sign graph results in sign sequences in which sign varieties that never occur together replace the actual sign sequences. Mirrored and doubled signs behave differently (Fuls 2013), and we know with some confidence that stroke signs are used as numerical signs as well as in other, non-numerical context. Because of these difficulties it is more logical to keep signs separated as long as structural analysis has not shown that they behave identical in all contexts. At the present this approch results in a sign list with 694 signs (Wells 2015). Robinson cites Parpola who regards the increase in the number of signs greater than in his own sign list as a backward step. But the estimate of about 700 Indus signs is comparable to other logo-syllabic writing systems such as 599 signs in Akkadian cuneiform, 713 Luwian hieroglyphs, and the core of about 830 Maya glyphs (in addition to hundreds of rare Maya glyphs).It is also known from other ancient writing systems such as Egypt hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing, and Maya glyphs that one sign may have more than one function and more than one logographic or phonetic value. Ancient writing systems are complex and represent sophisticated tools to communicate meaning and sound, but because of the little cultural knowledge about the Indus civilization it is difficult to decipher the Indus script. Robinson discusses the guess of sign meanings by their shape but do not mention the linguistic-structural approach by Wells (2015). In future research it is therefore necessary to focus on internal structure of Indus writing and to compare it to the structure of known languages such as Indo-European, Dravidian and Munda languages.In the next chapter the Indus origins of Hinduism are questioned. Is it possible to trace Vedic tradition and features of Hinduism from the beginnings of the Vedic age 1000 years back to the Indus culture? Both contrary viewpoints, in favour and against cultural continuity, are given and the answer remains unresolved for the reader.There are no grandious monuments or buildings such as pyramids or large temple complexes as found elsewhere in the Old World. Consequently, the Indus Civilization has not captured the imagination of the public or academia in the same way that Egypt, Mesopotania, or China has. After 100 years of research we are still facing many problems and questions in Indus archaeology and epigraphy, but the book summarizes the results in a fascinating manner. Robinson presents the world of the Indus people in a concise and detailed way, which makes the book a useful contribution for readers interested in this ancient civilization.References:Fuls, A., 2013. Positional Analysis of Indus Signs. Voprosy Epigrafiki, 7 (1), 253-275.Wells, B. K., 2011. Epigraphic Approaches to Indus Writing. Oxbow books: Oxford and Oakville.Wells, B. K., 2015. The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Indus Writing. Archaeopress: Oxford.

Good book.