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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
But, in historical terms, the most important of the lot is, without question, the seal that shows the cow that looks a bit like a unicorn, for it was this seal that stimulated the discovery of the entire Indus civilisation.
It was discovered in the 1850s, near the town of Harappa in what was then British India, about 150 miles south of Lahore in modern Pakistan. Over the next 50 years, three more seals like it arrived in the British Museum, but no-one had any idea what they were, when or where they'd been made. But in 1906, they caught the attention of the Director of the Archaeology Survey of India, John Marshall. He ordered the excavation of the ruins at Harappa, where the first seal had been found, and what was discovered re-wrote world history.
Marshall's team found the remains of an enormous city and went on to find many others, dating back to between 3000 and 2000 BC. This took Indian civilisation much further back in time than anyone had thought. And it was now clear that this was a land of sophisticated urban centres, trade and industry, and even writing. It ranked as a contemporary and an equal with Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia ... and it had been totally forgotten.
The largest of the Indus Valley cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro had populations of up to 30,000 - 40,000 people. They were built on rigorous grid layouts, with carefully articulated housing plans and advanced sanitation systems which even incorporated home plumbing; they're a modern town-planner's dream. The architect Richard Rogers admires them greatly: