Indus Valley Civilization - an Example of Well-Worked Ancient Society

When civilization comes into play into the world, you think of different societies or cultures that are different in their own ways and finds some way to incorporate what they learn into their everyday lives. So far, the civilizations that we have learned about are those of ancient times, such as India, China, and many more small civilizations that are apart of those bigger societies. The civilizations that have been created shows the different ways on how to be ran throughout different cultures. When someone is discussing civilization, you are asked to be able to understand what that means, civilization is a built up of human societies that made up of different places to live and is made up of many different resources. “A civilization is a complex human society, usually made up of different cities, with certain characteristics of cultural and technological development”..

I have learned that creating your own civilization can be very difficult at certain times, if you are leading the people in this civilization I may be very hard to keep every single citizen that is a part of that civilization. Although, you may have created rules that are put into place to keep everyone in line, there will always be a few people who are feeling rebellious and what to mess everything up. Another thing that must be how you plan on keep everyone satisfied when it comes to food and jobs for the people apart of the civilization because even though you are providing the places for these people to live, they still must be able to stay in their homes and not have to worry about themselves or their children starving. When it comes to being apart of a society, even has leaders and then of course the leader’s people who work right under them taking orders from the leader. After the leader and their people, you have the military to help fight wars and fight to take over new lands to expand, but what comes after the military the people at the bottom, the poor people who can barely afford to keep their houses or even loses their houses and has no source of food. When creating a civilization, you must make sure that you can help provide ever last person in those cities a house and food for them to eat whether it be small or large everyone deserves to live in their own homes without the fear of having to be homeless. In most civilizations that we have read about so far in this course, have discussed how some sort of writing or draw has become present in the way that they are running their societies such as in the Indus Valley, they created the way of poetry, painting and sculpture. “The people of the Indus Valley civilization had shown equal progress in sculpture, art of pottery, painting and carving”.

If I were to create civilization on my own, I would choose to have the people of the Indus Valley while also including a few things from the Yellow River region by added a line of kings or emperors but not in the sense where they all come from the same family and the reason I chose these people is because with the Indus Valley and the Yellow River region, women are not only respected, but they are treated like as the men would be treated due to the high position of the worships of mother goddess. Although there may be some flaws in how that system would work, no matter what any man says, women should be treated equal in the world just because men think that they are good at something does not mean that women may not be matter. With having a line of leaders or rulers not just one person as all the power and the power of the kings or emperors are split into the number of rulers allowing the civilization to run smoothly and calmly making sure that not one person tries to take over and turn it into a dictatorship. Next thing I would include in my civilization would be to add philosophy, philosophy is very important when it comes to civilization because when it comes to philosophy that is how most people learn about the history of where their society and culture and philosophy helps teach that. Philosophy helps change the opinions of the people by not only giving the history but even how it is presented and how others should think through certain problems within that society. The next characteristic that I would include in my civilization is religion, when it comes to religion I am not that religious but the religion that I would choose to be in my civilization would be the religion that is shared by the Indus Valley in India because the Indus believed in worshiping the mother goddess and the father god. With those religions, they also found a way to find peace in the mind by participating in yoga or some form of meditation. There were also trees that they had discovered that relayed meanings as the trees of life. The trees are protected by guardian spirits to keep away the evil forces while the spirits represent strong animals that can defend themselves against their enemies.

In this religion the Indus people believed in things that were all things supernatural like such as spirits and demons and even more mythical things such as spells and charms and even rituals which sounds very interested to be honest. The Indus people also believe in stones that help with their practice of worshiping of Siva and Parvathi which in the form of Shivalinga. With the Indus people death involved cremation with a personal item that they may find useful for them after lives that are to come after death. With this information about their religious beliefs, today we could learn how to value things differently instead of being so materialistic and expect money to fix all our problems or even try and buy someone's happiness instead of working on our own happiness and that is what fascinated me the most that they do not do that they value the meaning of their things. This religion can bring a very big lesson into my civilization because it will help the people realize that they should not push themselves to hard and take a breather and relax a bit before trying to do something that may hurt them in the long run or they will regret later in their lives because they went to fast. I believe that with all of these characteristics that I would add to the civilization I created would not only help to world but also stand out due to all the work I would put into it and even how I would treat the people in my cities by making everyone equal to the each other and by trying to prevent any troublesome problems that might set anyone off and trying to end up starting a war with another city.

I think that if I would create my own civilization, they could be situations that may turn to have problems or have repercussions that may end my civilization. These things that could affect my civilization would be how it would be led, with having more than one leader everyone may not agree with the others and therefore my cause a fight with the leaders and eventually something bad could turn from that. Another thing that may cause problems would have to be the religion, not everyone believes in participating in religious activities or even worshiping any religion to begin with, so when it comes to I feel that no everyone would be very fond of the idea that have to be a part of a religion that they not only know nothing about, but also one that they would prefer not to be a part of due to maybe other religious beliefs that they had prior to my civilization or just not being interested in the religion I chose to represent our civilization. There are some elements in my civilization that do apply to the society around us today, such as the why I chose to rule my civilization even though we have one true leader, there are still others around that one leader to provide guidance to them and allow them to make mistakes and understand them and fix them for the future. While having others surrounding our one leader, they can tell them when something may be off and not turn our society into a big disaster causing our society to burn down into a million pieces. The next thing that I believe that society has that I included in my civilization would be the religion, in our society there are all types of religions that are present in our society and I think that there are certain ones that take place more than others such catholic and Christianity but I think that there are many that take part in participating in the Indian religion provided peace in their culture and life. Philosophy is also a big part of our society today as well, there have been a big improvement when it comes to philosophy in our surrounding societies in today’s cultures. There are big influences that have turned to living a life of teaching philosophy whether it be in the classroom or giving a big speech on stage thousands of people and that is something that we will need in the world today.

Works Cited

• HISTORY OF MUHAMMAD. Accessed March 06, 2019. http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab25.
• 'Indus Valley Civilization: Town Planning, Art, Social Life and Religion.' History Discussion - Discuss Anything About History. August 08, 2015. Accessed March 06, 2019. http://www.historydiscussion.net/indus-valley/indus-valley-civilization-town-planning-art-social-life-and-religion/3015.
• “Civilization of Ancient China.” TimeMaps, www.timemaps.com/civilizations/ancient-china.
• National Geographic Society. 'Civilization.' National Geographic Society. October 09, 2012. Accessed March 06, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/civilization/.