Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 64

Harappa, perhaps the dominant city of the sophisticated Indus Valley Civilization, was a mess when archaeologists started picking through it in 1920, because 19th-century railroad builders had mined the site for bricks to build a roadbed. The engineers knew that the bricks were old, but they couldn’t have guessed that they were 4,000 years old. They left the hole in the ground, so local villagers helped themselves to the bricks too.

In 1922, two years after the scientists at Harappa began to understand what the site had been, an Indian archaeologist tackled another mound of brick rubble and river silt 400 miles away. He thought he’d found an abandoned Buddhist monastery. Instead, he unearthed the riches of Mohenjo-Daro, a virtually untouched ruin of great villas, public baths, and dazzlingly sophisticated sculpture. Since then, archaeologists have explored more than 150 Indus Valley sites.