Books: Earliest Societies, Early Medieval India

 You didn't think I would stop at just three books, did you? More were delivered few days back.

1) Was the transition from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to agriculture a prerequisite for the formation of complex societies? James C.Scott explores this link between sedentism, domestication and state formation. The Sumerian Ur city state that formed around 3800 B.C is one example of this. New archaeological discoveries are hinting at complex societies of antiquity greater that the agriculture linked complexes that came up in the fertile crescent.  Sites like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey may make us reexamine our assumptions regarding the causes and timing of the formation of early states. Besides this book, I will recommend this essay by Samo Burja - Why Civilization is older than we thought. 

 

2) In the past year, I read four fine books on Indian history covering the time span from the 1000's to about the 1750's. India in the Persianate Age 1000-1765 and A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives, both by Richard M. Eaton. The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate by Sunil Kumar who sadly passed away recently. And the fourth was The Mughal State 1526-1750. This is a collection of essays collated by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam with a long introductory critical essay on Mughal historiography by the two editors. I thought it was time for me to explore the few centuries preceding the arrival of Central Asian Turkic invaders. The Making of Early Medieval India and The Early Medieval in South India look like good introductions to this time period. 

Violence Part Of The Social Experience In Indus Civilization

Researchers Gwen Robbins Schug and Veena Mushrif Tripathy in an interview with Anthropology news have this to say about Harappan society:

It was argued that Harappa was a rare example of a peaceful, heterarchical state. The human skeletal material was never consulted to address this question. Based on our evidence for both exclusion and social differentiation in the mortuary practices at Harappa, we argue that Harappa was not entirely peaceful and social differentiation was part of life. We hope archaeologists working in this area will plan future excavations to include the peripheral areas outside the cities; excavation outside the city walls will tell us more about Indus society.

We are using the human skeletons as artifacts of the social experience. We used the concept of structural violence in our most recent work because it accounts for the clear distinctions we see in the burial practices, ritual aspects, prevalence of trauma and infection. The mortuary and bioarchaeological evidence at Harappa suggests that the social experience in South Asia was not exceptionally different from other early urban civilizations; the kinds of suffering and the patterns of violence present at Harappa suggests structural violence—unequal power, uneven access to resources, and oppression that leads to denial of basic needs and even violence.

Lest some people get too excited about the use of the words Harappa and violence in the same sentence, let it be made clear that this violence refers to interpersonal violence present in any complex society and not violence inflicted by outsiders during war.