Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.101

c7.101

analogy fails in an important respect if the inferred political unity of the Indus Civilization approximates to fact, as against the basic trend in Mesopotamia towards nucleation in city-states; though even here, in the 24th century B.C., when commercial contacts show that the Indus Civilization was in its prime, an imperialistic régime had emerged in Akkad and may have influenced, or even been influenced by, contemporary political development on the Indus. But if we stick to material evidence the differences are emphatic enough. Neither in its ceramic industry nor in its tools and armoury does the Indus Civilization suggest a remotely foreign origin. Its pottery, though specifically individual, is as generically akin to that of some of the village communities in or below the Baluch hills as to that of Sumer. The thin, rather feeble knives and spears and the flat axes, of copper or bronze poor in tin, run counter to the types prevailing in Iran or Mesopotamia. The unread Indus script is unlike any other in the ancient world. The baked bricks of which the two largest and several of the smaller Indus towns were mostly built (doubtless in response to a relatively rainy climate), though not without precedent in early Mesopotamia, are exceptional there. The normal Mesopotamian building-material was unbaked brick or plain mud.