The cities of the Indus Valley

The story

Ancient bricks used for railway tracks

Around 1856, the English engineers who were building the railway between Lahore and Multan, in the Punjab, had a problem: they needed ballast for the tracks and the area had none. They then noticed that near the village of Harappa there were hills full of fired bricks, very ancient and well made. They took them and used them. It is calculated that kilometres of track bed were prepared with those bricks. They did not know they were destroying part of a city 4,500 years old, the capital of a civilisation the world had forgotten.

The real rediscovery began only in the 1920s. In 1921 Harappa was excavated, and in 1922 the archaeologist Rakhaldas Banerji began to dig another great ruin in Sindh, Mohenjo-daro, whose name in the local language means “the mound of the dead”. In 1924 John Marshall, director of the Archaeological Survey of India, announced to the world the discovery of “a forgotten civilisation”. Today we call it the Indus Valley Civilisation, or Harappan civilisation.

Bigger than Egypt and Mesopotamia

By the standards of the time it was immense. At its peak, between about 2600 and 1900 BC (the phase called “mature”), it covered an area of more than a million square kilometres: the Indus valley, in Pakistan, but also Gujarat and Rajasthan in India and parts of Afghanistan. More than a thousand sites have been identified, almost all small villages. The main cities were few: Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Ganweriwala. Scholars estimate that the civilisation numbered between one and five million inhabitants, but the figures are very uncertain.

Its origins are older: at Mehrgarh, in the hills of Balochistan, farming villages already existed from 7000 BC, growing barley and wheat and raising cattle. In the following millennia the villages grew along the rivers, and around 2600 BC the cities were born.

Cities planned on paper

The most surprising feature is order. The main streets ran straight from north to south and from east to west and crossed at right angles, like a chessboard. Houses were built with fired bricks (at Mohenjo-daro) or mud bricks (elsewhere) of always the same proportions: the length was double the width and four times the height. This 4:2:1 ratio is found in all the cities, even hundreds of kilometres apart. It seemed that someone had decided the measure for everyone.

Weights were standard too: small stone cubes, each double the one before (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...), used for trade. The cities had a high district, the citadel, built on a platform, with public buildings and cisterns, and a lower district with the dwellings. Almost all houses had wells and bathrooms, connected to drains (we will talk about them in another card).

Trade, crafts and seals

The people of the Indus made beautiful cotton, carnelian beads worked with great skill, painted pottery, terracotta figurines and jewellery. They traded with their neighbours and with Mesopotamia (see the card on trade). They used small square stone seals with carved animals, such as bulls, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses and a one-horned creature, often called the “unicorn”, with a line of small signs above. The most famous object from Mohenjo-daro is a bronze statuette 10 centimetres tall, the “Dancing Girl”: a young woman with her arm covered in bangles, in a pose full of life.

A script nobody can read

The signs on the seals, about four hundred different ones, form short inscriptions, usually of five or six signs; the longest has twenty-six, spread over several faces of one object. Nobody has managed to read them. There is no bilingual inscription, like the Rosetta Stone, and the texts are too short. Some scholars even doubt that it is true writing. That is why, of the people of the Indus, we know neither their language, nor the names of their kings, nor their stories. It is like listening to music without words.

Without kings and without wars?

Another riddle: unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, here no great royal palaces have been found, nor kings' tombs, nor clearly recognisable temples, nor many weapons. Some think of less unequal societies; others remind us that perhaps we have not yet understood how to read the remains. We do not know.

The end

Around 1900 BC the cities were slowly abandoned. An old theory spoke of an invasion of warriors on horseback, but today hardly anyone believes it: the remains found at Mohenjo-daro are not the victims of a massacre. Scholars think rather of a change in climate, with weaker monsoons, and of rivers changing course or drying up. With less water and fewer harvests, people moved east and south, into smaller villages.