Bricks, Beads and Bones — the Harappan Civilisation

Mohenjodaro, in Sindh, is the best-known Harappan city. It was divided into two sections: a smaller but higher Citadel to the west and a much larger Lower Town to the east. The Citadel owed its height to buildings constructed on mud-brick platforms, and it was walled. On it stood structures that were probably used for special public purposes, among them the so-called warehouse and the Great Bath — a large rectangular tank in a courtyard, made watertight with bricks set in mortar and a layer of bitumen, with steps on two sides and rooms around it. Scholars suggest it was meant for some kind of special ritual bath.

• Planning first, building second: the settlement was planned and then built — platforms were laid before houses, and roads and streets were laid out along an approximate grid pattern, intersecting at right angles.
• Standardised bricks: sun-dried or baked bricks had a standard ratio — length four times the height and breadth twice the height (1:2:4) — across Harappan settlements.
• Drains: among the most distinctive features — every house was connected to street drains, which had covers and were laid along streets; it appears streets with drains were laid out first and houses built along them.
• Domestic architecture: houses were centred on a courtyard; there were no windows in walls along the ground level, and the main entrance gave no direct view of the interior — a concern with privacy. Many houses had a bathroom paved with bricks and a well.

Chanhudaro, a tiny settlement in Sindh, was almost exclusively devoted to craft production — bead-making, shell-cutting, metal-working, seal-making and weight-making. Beads were made of carnelian, jasper, crystal, quartz and steatite, of copper, bronze and gold, and of shell, faience and terracotta. Nageshwar and Balakot, near the coast, were specialised centres for shell objects such as bangles, ladles and inlay.

Long-distance contact reached Oman, whose copper carries traces of nickel that match Harappan artefacts, and Mesopotamia, whose texts of the third millennium BCE mention contact with regions called Dilmun (probably Bahrain), Magan (probably Oman) and Meluhha — possibly the Harappan region — and list its products, such as carnelian, lapis lazuli, copper, gold and varieties of wood. Seals of stone, usually steatite, carry an animal motif and signs from the script; they were used to stamp clay on bags of goods, certifying the sender. The script remains undeciphered. It was not alphabetic — it has between about 375 and 400 signs — most inscriptions are short, and it was written from right to left, since some seals show wider spacing on the right and cramped signs on the left. Exchanges were regulated by weights of chert, usually cubical, with no markings; the lower denominations were binary (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …) and the higher ones followed the decimal system.

Archaeologists look for social difference in burials and in artefacts. Burials were in pits, some lined with bricks; some contained pottery and ornaments, a few copper mirrors — but on the whole Harappans did not bury precious things with the dead. Artefacts are classed as utilitarian (querns, ordinary pottery, needles) and luxuries — rare objects or ones made of costly, non-local materials or by complicated techniques, such as little pots of faience. Faience vessels are found mostly in large settlements like Mohenjodaro and Harappa and rarely in small ones.

Was there a ruler? The planning, the standard bricks and the organised craft suggest complex decisions were being taken and carried out. A large building at Mohenjodaro was labelled a palace by archaeologists, but no spectacular finds were associated with it, and a stone statue was labelled the "priest-king" because archaeologists were familiar with Mesopotamian history and its priest-kings — the name is an analogy, not a reading of evidence. Scholars hold three views: that there were no rulers and everyone enjoyed equal status; that there was no single ruler but several, Mohenjodaro having one, Harappa another, and so on; and that there was a single state, given the similarity of artefacts, the planned settlements, the standard brick ratio and the settlements near sources of raw material. The book notes that the last seems the most plausible as things stand, while it is unlikely that entire communities could take and carry out such complex decisions together.

Marshall dug along regular horizontal units measured uniformly across the mound, ignoring its stratigraphy, so artefacts from different layers were grouped together and their context lost; Wheeler, an army brigadier, brought precision by following the layers instead. After 1947 most major sites lay in Pakistan, and Indian archaeologists located sites in India — among them Kalibangan, Lothal, Rakhigarhi and Dholavira.

By c. 1800 BCE most Mature Harappan sites in regions such as Cholistan had been abandoned, while population expanded into new settlements in Gujarat, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. In the Late Harappan settlements the distinctive artefacts — weights, seals, special beads — disappear, writing, long-distance trade and craft specialisation decline, and building techniques deteriorate. The explanations offered include climatic change, deforestation, excessive floods, the shifting or drying up of rivers, and overuse of the landscape; some apply to particular settlements but none accounts for the whole collapse, and many scholars see the end of a unifying element — perhaps the Harappan state — as the deeper change. Wheeler once read skeletons at Mohenjodaro as victims of a massacre by invaders; the archaeologist George Dales later showed that the bones did not belong to one period and that there was no destruction level, so the "massacre" was not borne out by the evidence.