Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.21

c12.21

The combination of elaborate social and economic organization over a huge empire with an isolation which rendered many of its technological processes astonishingly primitive makes one think not so much of contemporary Sumer or Egypt, but rather of the Central American pre-Columban civilizations. Here similarly one finds great architectural achievement (far surpassing that of the Harappā civilization indeed); the rigorously authoritarian rule and elaborate religious conceptions that we may be permitted to infer from the Harappā evidence; a primitive hieratic script, and a technological backwardness which in America was so extreme that the use of metals for tools was still unknown. But America in the twelfth century A.D. had more excuse for isolation than Western India in the twentieth century B.C.