tralized, which on its own is very impressive but again creates an apples to oranges comparison.
[–]Swole_Prole 7 points 13 hours ago
They were by far the most expansive and populous civilization for most of ancient history. How could that be achieved with no political organization? What would evidence look like, considering we have not deciphered the Indus Script, and are not even sure it is a script? Why would they all have such similar city organization? Obviously there is a lot we don’t know, but it simply makes no sense to imply they were just villages doing their own thing. Where else on Earth have poorly organized societies ever produced such an advanced civilization?
[–]sachinabilliondreams 0 points 17 hours ago
India for a long part of history had city state like the Greeks but on a very large scale. The Mauryas brought it under the control of an Empire. I am seeing that people are calling Mauryas as just titular heads who were content to let local kings rule in there stead. This is incorrect as the Mauryas had a unified army, administration which was centralised. They had a common currency and regional governors. Why India didn't develop into a homogeneous society is mainly because non was powerful enough to overthrow the other and each region maintained its uniqueness simply because everyone had huge numbers which couldn't be completely suppressed. Also China had a lot of diversity and the totalitarian state destroyed it .
[–]Demiansky 5 points 12 hours ago*
I would say that the main reason is the same reason Latin isn't the dominant culture in Europe (but nearly was). Maintaining imperial hegemony over India or the Mediterranean for an extended period of time was harder than it was for China due to geography and the relative locations of high population carrying capacity. India's Ganges and and Ganges delta has huge carrying capacity, but is wedged up in the corner of the subcontinent. In other words, dominating all of India long enough to enforce one culture over all of India meant projecting power from a much more distant power base across many more mountains, deserts. Also, a large population base south and West of the plateaus meant powerful, "civilized" rivals to any Northern entity (not to mention over in modern day Pakistan, separated by even more natural barriers.)
Given enough time consistently United under one political entity, one dominant culture evolved. The same thing started happening in the Roman Empire with Latin culture, but the process was interrupted.
EDIT: I worked on a pretty complex historical demography program which gave me a lot of insight into the subject.