The Indus Civilization Read online

  Three Misconceptions about Indus Architecture

  There are three oft-repeated characteristics of the Indus Civilization that are in fact not true at all. These deal with the use of baked brick, the presence of a common pattern of civic organization, and the importance of grid town planning and design.

  The Baked-Brick Cities of the Indus

  It is often said that the ancient cities of the Indus were built of baked brick. Actually, Mohenjo-daro is the only Mature Harappan settlement where baked bricks were used for most of the buildings. At Harappa there is good evidence for baked brick, even in some houses.1 But there is also a great deal of mud and mud-brick construction, and even evidence for baked and unbaked bricks used in the same building, as in the Granary.2 Baked brick at Harappa, and such places as Chanhu-daro, Kot Diji, and Kalibangan, was used mostly where its durability and other physical properties suggested that it should be used: for drains, the lining of wells, bathing platforms, and the husking floors on Mound F.

  There is no baked brick at Rojdi or the other Sorath Harappan sites, nor was the material used at the Kulli sites. The westernmost Indus site of Sutkagen-dor has no baked brick. There is little if any baked brick at Dholavira and Surkotada; the houses, walls, and drains were constructed of stone. The same is true for Allahdino near Karachi.

  The Layout of Indus Settlements

  It is also often held that the Indus Civilization brought forth planned settlements, with an acropolis to the west, separated from the lower living spaces of the community. 3 Mohenjo-daro is used as evidence for this pattern. But most Mature Harappan settlements are not planned like Mohenjo-daro: for example, Allahdino, Amri, Lothal, Rojdi, Surkotada, Ropar, Hulas. We know that Harappa was an old place by the time the Indus Civilization began, and this would have probably constrained the would-be civic planners there. Thus, a close examination of the plan of Harappa will reveal, I think, that it is only vaguely like Mohenjo-daro. There is an acropolis to the west, but there is also an important part of the city to the north of the acropolis, called Mound F, with the Granary and husking floors. The other mounded parts of the city (Mounds E and ET) were built out from the southern end of the A-B Mound, like the lower extension of the letter L. The pattern is not evident at Chanhu-daro, which is simply a set of three mounds separated from each other. Dholavira has the acropolis near the middle of the enclosed settlement.

  Figure 5.1 Plan of Mohenjo-daro (by Gregory L. Possehl)

  The Indus settlement most like Mohenjo-daro in layout is Kalibangan, but that is the only one with such close similarities. Thus, out of some 1,050 Mature Harappan sites, there are two that are proved to conform to the pattern said to be typical of the civilization as a whole.

  The Grid Town Plan and Streets

  The best example of Mature Harappan grid town planning is found at Mohenjo-daro, although Kalibangan and Nausharo also provide good evidence for this practice. While there is an overall sense of planning at Mohenjodaro, the settlement does not seem to be perfectly organized. Two avenues, First Street (7.6 meters wide) and Second Street (9.1 meters wide) run north-south through the Lower Town. They have both been “proven” through excavation, although Second Street is only documented in DK-B Area. The east-west streets are a bit more problematic. Central Street (5.5 meters wide) is the northern east-west thoroughfare in DK-G Area. It is certainly a wide, straight street, but it terminates at First, where it runs into a building wall. Eleven meters to the south of Central, another wide street joins First. This is Dikshit’s Trench E. It is 3.8 meters wide, on par with Central. The size of these two streets and their propinquity suggests that, if the civic planners of Mohenjo-daro were serious about their grid town plan, they would have aligned these streets, rather than incorporating a dogleg. Mackay thinks “the town planning regulations of Mohenjo-daro were evidently stretched beyond this occasion.”4 Clearly, this dogleg complicates the grid town theory more than a bit (figure 5.2).

  Piggott and Wheeler in their reconstruction of the grid town plan ignore Mackay’s Central Street and place the principal east-west axis in the northern part of the site at the bottom of DK-G.5 This is excavated only on the northern side, so we are not even certain that it is a street. There is a rough alignment between this feature and a street (9.1 meters wide) in DK-C Area, 245 meters to the east. But the street in DK-C is only exposed for 55 meters and seems to dip to the south, not head straight across the mound toward DK-G. In fact, the DK-C street might be a byway internal to the local neighborhood—no one knows.

  The southern east-west street was called East, despite the fact that it cries out to be “South Street.” This has not been exposed let alone proved by excavation. It is placed on the maps only because there is a gully that suggests the presence of a deep, narrow architectural depression.

  In the end, there is very good evidence for First Street, a main north-south thoroughfare in the Lower Town at Mohenjo-daro. The evidence for Second Street is thin, a possibility but not quite proved. The southern east-west street is unexcavated, but a possibility. The northern east-west street, Central and Trench E, or the street at the southern edge of DK-G South, can be debated but not proved.

  Inside the major blocks the streets are not well aligned. There are many doglegs and some deadends. The walls along streets and lanes may pinch in on the avenues that grow narrower and narrower, but curves are rare in the Mohenjo-daro system of roads.

  While there is regularity in the layout of Mohenjo-daro, it is far from perfect. The regularity itself suggests that the founders of this city started with a clean plate, virgin soil, on which they began the construction of their metropolis. This has been very carefully addressed by Jansen, who believes that the foundations of Mohenjo-daro lie in massive platforms that were used to raise the city above the surrounding floodplain.

  Platforms

  Mohenjo-daro was designed in part as a city on the floodplain of a tremendously powerful, violent river. Serious flooding of the Indus River in historical times has been recorded every five to seven years. The solution to this problem at Mohenjo-daro was to build platforms to raise the buildings and streets above the floods. Jansen has developed a general model for this scheme.6 He sees four principal functions for platforms in the Harappan context.

  Foundations, or substructures, for building areas, as in the case of the Mound of the Great Bath.

  Foundations, or substructures, for single buildings.

  Substructures for elevating single buildings, in whole or part, as in House 1 in HR-A Area.

  The often complete infilling of older, abandoned structures to form a new occupational level and surface. This was found in virtually all of the older houses at Mohenjo-daro.

  The story of Mohenjo-daro begins with the original, as yet unlocated settlement. I think that the beginnings of Mohenjo-daro may be another phenomenon of the Transitional stage, admitting the possibility that there could have been a small Early Harappan site there, the plan of which was totally abandoned and submerged by the founders’ settlement. As Jansen says:

  Figure 5.2 Plan of DK-G showing intersection of main streets (after Mackay 9937—38)

  We are dealing with a rather small time gap of not more than 80 years around 2400 B.C. where all these elements must have been developed, most probably not in Mohenjo-daro, but in a place close enough to the alluvial plain to study the river carefully. It seems that the first urban settlement of Mohenjo-daro was constructed as a whole in a very short period of only a few years, equipped from the beginning with vertical water-supply systems such as wells, which could hardly have been constructed later when the city was already flourishing.7

  Platforms of the Lower Town

  Evidence for platforms around the Lower Town is available. In 1964 Dales found “a massive structure of mud brick with a solid, burnt brick wall. It provided a facing and support to the mud brick structure for a length exceeding 183 meters along the western face of HR mound.”8 There is evidence for a clay or mud-brick platform at the very
southern end of Mohenjo-daro, below HR Area, which was gained from a geophysical survey carried out in 1981—1982 by M. Cucarzi, who found a linear anomaly some 400 meters long which “could represent part of a clay or mud brick platform marking part of the southern limit of a constructional phase of Mohenjo-daro.”9 Finally, the deep digging at Mohenjo-daro has consistently encountered masses of mud brick, often recognized as platforms, at the lowest levels of the site.10

  The early platforms were foundation structures that substantially raised the city above the Indus plain, out of the way of the floods. It was a massive amount of work, and a huge investment. One can assume that a laborer can move about a cubic meter of earth a day, so it must have taken approximately 4 million days of labor. This means 10,000 laborers working 400 days, or just over a year. That is a very large labor force. If it were 2,500 laborers, it would have taken 1,600 days, or about 4 years and 4 months, and that was just to put the “foundations” in place.

  Interesting implications flow from the theory of platforms at Mohenjo-daro. They make it a clear that someone, or some group of people, had a plan for the entire city before they built it. This is seen most clearly in the layout of the Lower Town, with the alignment of the main avenues, First and Second Streets running north-south, with East and Central running east-west, if they can be fully confirmed. Planning on this scale, especially planning that was accompanied by the will and means to bring it into reality, is something special for the third millennium B.C. because the Harappan Civilization is nowhere better defined than at this city; we may be justified in thinking that, in some ways, it represents what it meant to be Harappan. This takes us further in the direction of contemporary thought, that ideology was the defining quality of the Harappan Civilization and that it was a definition that developed in the third millennium as a new way for people to organize themselves in terms of their social configuration and their system of beliefs and practices.

  A second implication derived from Jansen’s position is that the platforms would have limited the settled area of the city, which was defined by the elevated ground. This means that ancient Mohenjo-daro would have been about the size of the modern mounds and that the other traces of human habitation around them are either trash deposits or suburban communities vulnerable to flood and therefore not permanent and somehow not part of the urban core.

  Several smaller points need to be made about the platforms. Mohenjo-daro changed over time. As the city rose higher and higher on its own debris, there was a great deal more filling and platform building that went on.11 Rooms were filled in with alluvium and crude brick, even trash deposits, as in rooms 77—80 of House XIII in VS Area12 or the rooms below 15 and 16 in House XIII of HR-A.13 Providing a one-story-high podium for at least one section of a house seems to have been a well-documented part of house construction at Mohenjo-daro. The city grew vertically over time, and there is a remarkable continuity of brick walls, with the tops of old walls forming the foundations for new ones.

  Mound of the Great Bath: Platforms and Retaining Walls

  Marshall excavated a deep trench north of the Buddhist stupa on the Mound of the Great Bath. He found seven strata in this trench. The lowest had a low wall, adjacent pavement, and Mature Harappan pottery.14

  This trench and the exposure of retaining walls around the Mound of the Great Bath allowed Marshall to reconstruct the rough history of the place. It is an artificial hill, probably begun in the Early Harappan—Mature Harappan Transition or the early Mature Harappan. The Mound of the Great Bath functioned as a massive platform to elevate the buildings on its top above the surrounding floodplain and the Lower Town. The Great Bath and Warehouse there were built together as a part of the first set of buildings (figure 11.8).

  These were important civic facilities, and on the Mound of the Great Bath they were segregated from the Lower Town, even hidden from view. Elevating them, especially the Great Bath, above the Lower Town can be presumed to have been an important symbolic act.

  Reasons to Reject Wheeler’s Proposals on Indus Citadels

  A central theme in the Wheeler—Piggott paradigm for the Indus Civilization is that the cities incorporated citadels, from which a ruling elite ruled a vast empire. The Mound of the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is thought to have been one of these citadels. It is reasonable to presume that if the Mound of the Great Bath had been effectively fortified, it would have to have been fortified all the way around. This does not appear to have been the case. For example, the Warehouse, a large storage facility of some importance, was placed on the western side of the mound. It is open to the Indus plains, vulnerable, and not a place that could be observed from the Lower Town. Thus, the notion that the “Great Granary” was on a “Citadel” makes no sense from a defensive, protectionist, point of view.

  Since the Warehouse was built just after the Mound of the Great Bath had been raised, the placement of the facility would have been part of the planning and could have been set anywhere on the Mound. But it was put at the center of the western side, in perhaps the most vulnerable position from a military point of view.

  The Mound of the Great Bath is manmade and built of Indus alluvium. To contain the earthen fill and inhibit erosion, the builders of the Mound of the Great Bath put a retaining wall around their “hill.” This helped to keep everything in place; it also defined the Mound of the Great Bath architecturally and provided defense against floods. The retaining wall would have been a useful feature for the defense of the Mound of the Great Bath, as well. Solidly built walls like this retaining wall generally emerge as multipurpose features. But this one is an imperfect fortification, and the placement of the Warehouse suggests that this acropolis was not a citadel at all, but the place that the peoples of Mohenjo-daro built as a platform to symbolically elevate important public edifices.

  Jansen sees Mohenjo-daro as defined by two Indus innovations: platforms and brick-lined wells. He believes that the location of the wells throughout the city was also planned from the beginning, a contention that can be supported. In any event, they are interesting facilities.

  The Architecture of Water Management: Indus Ideology Expressed in Architecture

  Water and the management of water has been proposed to have been central to the ideology of the Indus peoples. This is most fully expressed at Mohenjo-daro, but is also found at many other Indus sites, most notably Dholavira.

  Well Digging

  A distinguishing feature of Mature Harappan settlements is the brick-lined wells. Jansen has estimated that there were about 700 at Mohenjo-daro.15 Brick-lined wells are also found at Harappa, Chanhu-daro, and Lothal.

  Wells are lined with bricks for two reasons. First, the bricks support the earth and guard against cave-ins and erosion, especially of the well opening. Brick-lined wells also deliver clean, sweet water with a minimum of silt and other large-particle contaminants. Properly dug and maintained, brick-lined wells can deliver perfectly clear water, even on a river floodplain.

  Archaeological observations trace the continuity of well location over the stratigraphic buildup of Mohenjo-daro. Courses of bricks were added to wells as the city mound grew. Also, there is no direct evidence for the construction of wells. Excavations at none of the sites with brick-lined wells have backdirt from digging or wells that cut through older, buried structures. Remarkable as it may seem, the well locations at Mohenjo-daro seem to have been laid out when the original platforms were built and were maintained over the history of the city with almost no changes. Some were abandoned, but we know of no wells newly sited and constructed after the initial platform building.

  Some wells at Mohenjo-daro are as small as 60 centimeters in diameter; one was as large as 2.1 meters. The average is about 1 meter.16 Ardeleanu-Jansen has provided the information for table 5.1 concerning the 75 wells exposed at Mohenjo-daro.17 Some recomputation was done due to the availability of updated excavation data.18 The GFD (or UPM) Area is not included in the study of wells.

  The area served by each
well and the mean distance between wells is remarkably consistent in the Lower Town; another reflection of the planning that went into Mohenjo-daro from the very beginning. A few wells were abandoned during the life of the city. Mackay suggests that this took place because someone jumped into them.19 Dig and discover!

  Table 5.1 Wells at Mohenjo-daro

  Mackay observes that the social context of wells at Mohenjo-daro seems to have changed over time:

  In the early days of the city it is probable that the wells were private, as there seem to be no means of reaching them from the street, but later on, as the population grew, they were thrown open to public use. The rooms in which the wells were situated were, as a rule, carefully paved, and the floor in many cases was worn into deep depressions where countless water-jars had been set down.20

  Many of these wells, especially those thought to be public, have deep grooves in the inside coping, witness to the thousands of times the well was used, ropes raising pottery vessels hand over hand as the inhabitants of the city drew their water.21 Occasionally, low brick platforms provided seats around the well. It is not difficult to imagine knots of people, some sitting, others standing, passing the time, sharing gossip and news while waiting their turn to draw water.

  The rationale for lining wells with bricks and the well-digging technology that the Indus peoples may have employed is discussed in Ardeleanu-Jansen.22 The wells were just one element in the water management system of Mohenjo-daro. The drainage system was another element.