The Indus Valley civilization truly came into its own in about 2500 b. c., when its people established two great cities at Harappa (huh-RAH-puh) and Mohenjo-Daro (moh-HIN-joh DAHR-oh), which lay about 400 miles south of Harappa along the Indus. These two cities, discovered by British archaeologists in the 1920s, represented a triumph of urban planning. The cities established by the Egyptians and the Sumerians at around the same time seem to have sprung up without any clear plan. In Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, by contrast, the wide, straight streets formed a grid, intersecting one another at right angles as though they had been carefully laid out—as they obviously were.
The center of Harappa was a great citadel, or fortress. Outside the citadel were neatly arranged areas where workers lived. Each city also included enormous public buildings not unlike the city hall or the post office in a great urban center of today. There were temples and granaries, warehouses for storing grain. Little booths on each street may have provided a station for a night watchman or a policeman. Mohenjo-Daro had an enormous public bath and another great building for public meetings.
Equally impressive were the private dwellings. Houses had two or three stories and were built around an inner courtyard. Windows, and possibly also wooden balconies, opened onto this courtyard, whereas the walls of the house facing the street were windowless to keep out noise and heat. This design continues to be used in many parts of the Indian subcontinent and neighboring countries today. But the most remarkable aspect of homes in the Indus Valley—indeed, one of the greatest triumphs of their civilization—could be found in the humblest part of the home: the bathroom.
Whenever large numbers of people come together in cities, there is always a great potential for health hazards.
Modern-day New York City is an example of a metropolis. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
Human beings create waste: not only the garbage from their homes, which must be disposed of properly so that people do not get sick from the bacteria in rotting food, but also the waste from their bodies. In Europe during the Middle Ages (a. d. 500-1500), when toilets were crude at best, people simply dumped their waste into the streets. Germs spread, and with them diseases that killed millions and millions of people. But in India thousands of years earlier, brilliant engineers developed indoor toilets and a system of clay pipes to carry the waste into public sewers.
By ancient standards, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were huge: each was about three miles around. Based on the size of the granaries at Harappa, it appears that as many as
40,000 people lived in the city. Though a medium-sized town by modern standards, in ancient times, such a great number qualified Harappa as a metropolis (meh-TRAHP-uh-lis)—that is, a major urban center on the order of modern-day New York City, New York, or Los Angeles, California.
There were many other such sites throughout an area of about half a million square miles in the Indus Valley, making the Harappan culture (as it is sometimes called) the most widespread of all civilizations at the time. Between the cities were enormous agricultural areas, where farmers grew wheat, barley, rice, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. They also raised sheep, cattle, and pigs, and evidence suggests that they domesticated animals ranging from the horse to the house cat to the elephant.
But the Harappan economy was not solely based on agriculture. Craftsmen produced pottery, cloth, jewelry of silver and gold, and items made of bronze. It also appears that the peoples of the Indus Valley imported goods from the Sumerians to the west. Not only did they possess carts drawn by bulls but they also used boats to transport items such as gold, silver, and copper. Imported items included gold and silver, as well as various minerals used in making beads. Beads have been an important part of fashion in India—where people wear them all over their bodies, including on nose rings—ever since. As a further mark of the Harappans' advanced system, evidence uncovered by archaeologists suggests that some of the pottery from the Indus Valley may even have been mass-produced (produced in quantity rather than one at a time), which would indicate an extremely high level of development.
Given the impressive achievements of their culture, it is not surprising to learn that the Harappans also possessed a highly developed form of writing. The written and spoken language of the Harappans is often described as Dravidian (drah-VID-ee-uhn), which is actually the name for a family of languages. They used a form of writing that involved about 400 different symbols. Though archaeologists have found a number of examples, most of these are seals and therefore do not use many words. Partly for this reason, no one has ever been able to translate the writings of the Harappans.
World History
