Word: indus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ancient cities of the Indus Valley belonged to the greatest civilization the world may never know. Since the 1920s, dozens of archaeological expeditions have unearthed traces of a 4,500-year-old urban culture that covered some 300,000 square miles in modern-day Pakistan and northwestern India. Digs at major sites such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa revealed a sophisticated society whose towns had advanced sanitation, bathhouses and gridlike city-planning. Evidence of trade with Egypt and Sumer in Mesopotamia, as well as the presence of mining interests as far as Central Asia, suggests that the fertile Indus River...
...Indus Valley civilization poses an intractable problem, one that legions of archaeologists and scientists have puzzled over from the first excavations to a new study published last month. Its writing, etched in signs on tiny, intricate seals and tablets, remains undeciphered, shrouding the ancient culture in mystery. A code-busting artifact with bilingual text, like the Rosetta stone, has yet to be found. By some counts, more than 100 decipherments of the civilization's often anthropomorphic runes and signs - known in the field as the Harappan script - have been attempted over the decades, none with great success. Some archaeologists spied...
...perhaps out of befuddlement and frustration, a group of scholars declared that the script marked only rudimentary pictograms and that the Indus Valley people were functionally illiterate. That hypothesis, which caused a minor uproar in the world of Indus Valley researchers, was recently rejected by a team of mathematicians and computer scientists assembled from institutions in the U.S. and India. That team's study, published initially in April in Science and more extensively in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, employed computer modeling to prove that the Harappan script communicated language, and has reinvigorated attempts...
...leads to the loss of the Himalayan glaciers whose seasonal melt provides water for billions in Asia. In fact, the history of cross-border water disputes has been surprisingly conciliatory so far. India and Pakistan have fought three wars and currently point nuclear weapons at each other, yet the Indus Waters Treaty - which divvies up the two countries' trans-boundary waterways, overseen by a joint commission - has survived for decades. And even though nations can be quite possessive over water (India and Bangladesh have skirmished repeatedly over the shared Mahananda River), they trade it all the time in other forms...
...Traveling in India and China, I cannot help but feel that some life is cheap there. The agrarian poor do not benefit from investment, and the backward castes are left behind. It is nauseating to think how much genius lies fallow between the Indus and Yellow Rivers. It is even more revolting to consider how many simply charitable and industrious citizens and workers are outside the system...