A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [37]
The largest of the Indus Valley cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro, had populations of 30,000 to 40,000 people. They were built on rigorous grid layouts, with carefully articulated housing plans and advanced sanitation systems that even incorporated home plumbing; they’re a modern townplanner’s dream. The architect Richard Rogers admires them greatly:
When you are faced with a piece of ground where there are few limiting constraints, there are not many buildings and it’s a sort of white piece of paper, the first thing you do is start putting a grid on it, because you want to own it and a grid is a way of owning it, a way of getting order. Architecture is really giving order, harmony, beauty, rhythm to space. You can see that in Harappa; that’s exactly what they’re doing. There’s also an aesthetic element with it, which you can see from their sculpture – they have an aesthetic consciousness, and they also have a consciousness of order, and a consciousness of economy, and those things link us straight over the 5,000 years to the things that we are doing today.
As we saw in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the leap from village to city usually required one dominant ruler, able to coerce and deploy resources. But just who ran these highly ordered Indus Valley cities remains unclear. There is no evidence of kings or pharaohs – or indeed of any leader at all. This is largely because, both literally and metaphorically, we don’t know where the bodies are buried. There are none of the rich burials which in Egypt or Mesopotamia tell us so much about the powerful and about the society they controlled. We have to conclude that the Indus Valley people probably cremated their dead, and, while there may be many benefits in cremation, for archaeologists it is, if I may use the phrase, a dead loss.
What’s left of these great Indus cities gives us no indication of a society engaged with, or threatened by, war. Not many weapons have been found, and the cities show no signs of being fortified. There are great communal buildings, but nothing that looks like a royal palace, and there seems to be little difference between the homes of the rich and the poor. It seems to be a quite different model of how to create an urban civilization, without celebration of violence or extreme concentration of individual power. Is it possible that these societies were based not on coercion but on consensus?
We could find out more about the Indus civilization if only we could read the writing on our seal, and others like it. Above the animal images on the seals is a series of symbols: one looks like an oval shield; others look like matchstick human figures; there are some single lines; and there’s a standing spear shape. But whether they are numbers, logos, symbols – or even a language – we simply don’t know. Since the early 1900s people have been trying to decipher them, nowadays of course using computers, but we just do not have enough material – no longer inscriptions, no bilingual texts – to make confident progress.
The seals are often pierced, so they may have been worn by their owners, and they were probably used to stamp goods for trading – they’ve been found in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia. Between 3000 and 2000 BC the Indus civilization was a vast network of complex, organized cities with flourishing trade links to the world beyond, all apparently thriving. And then, around 1900 BC, it came to an end. The cities turned to mounds of earth, and even the memory of this, one of the great early urban cultures of the world, vanished. We can only hazard guesses as to why. The need for timber to fire the brick kilns of the huge building industry may have led to extensive deforestation and an environmental catastrophe. More importantly, climate change seems to have caused tributaries of the Indus to alter their course or to dry up completely.
When the ancient Indus civilization was initially unearthed, the