The Indus Civilization
Page 34
The original entrance to the Mound of the Great Bath is obscure. There is a grand staircase almost 7 meters wide from the plain to the top of the Mound of the Great Bath (figure 11.3).6 This is one of the entrances, but it is on the back, or western side, of the mound, possibly used in connection with the Warehouse (Wheeler’s “Granary”). It is not likely to have been the entrance for those coming from the city side. There is also a small postern gate at the southeastern corner of the Mound of the Great Bath.
Today one ascends the Mound of the Great Bath by a series of comfortable footpaths. The best way to reach the Great Bath, avoiding the steep northern slope, is through the saddle separating SD from L Area. Climbing a gentle rise moving west, one passes a set of rather unsorted walls of baked brick. Then there is an opening on a wide unnamed street that draws the visitor north toward the center of the area, to the Great Bath.
The Great Bath
It is a few steps on a dogleg course to Main Street, which separates the Great Bath on the west from the College of Priests, as Mackay called the building to the east. Main Street itself is wide (4 to 5 meters) and straight, excavated for a length of just over 100 meters. There is a series of drains here, one of them large and covered with rough-hewn white limestone blocks brought in antiquity from the Rohri Hills. This was an area of heavy-duty drainage given the presence of the Bath to one side and a large building, the College of Priests that can be reconstructed plausibly as a residence, at least in part, on the other. There was a concentration of people here, and they appear to have been deeply involved in ablutions (figure 11.4).
Figure 11.2 Structures at Spur Number 3, east of Mohenjo-daro (after Hussein 1989)
The ancient visitor to the southern end of Main Street would have looked up an unpaved, shadowed road, with imposing buildings on both sides. There was probably little relief on these walls: a door into the College, but probably no windows; and a slit to enter the well room of the Bath was all that relieved that facade. Unless we are missing something major (festive, multicolored murals, brightly dressed young men and women)—always a possibility in Indus archaeology—it was all pretty dark and plain.
The Bath itself is set just off center of the Mound of the Great Bath, slightly to the north and west. The Warehouse abuts the southwestern corner of the Bath structure, and this suggests that they may have functioned in tandem, at least in some contexts. Marshall’s description of the Bath seems to capture it very well:
The Great Bath . . . was part of what appears to have been a vast hydropathic establishment and the most imposing of all the remains unearthed at Mohenjo-daro. Its plan is simple: an open quadrangle with verandahs on its four sides, and at the back of three of the verandahs various galleries and rooms; on the south a long gallery with a small chamber in each corner, on the east a single range of small chambers, including one with a well; on the north a group of several halls and fair-sized rooms. In the centre of the open quadrangle is a large swimming-bath some 39 feet long by 23 feet broad and sunk 8 feet below the paving of the court, with a flight of steps at either end, and a the foot of each a low platform for the convenience of bathers who might otherwise have found the water too deep. . . . That the Great Bath had at least one upper storey is evident from the stairway ascending to the latter . . . as well as from drains descending from it. . . . We know too from quantities of charcoal and ashes found in the course of my excavations that a great deal of timber must have gone to the building of the upper storey.7
Figure 11.3 Mound of the Great Bath (after Wheeler 1968)
Figure 11.4 Plan of the Great Bath (after Marshall 1931i)
The bathing pool was fashioned of very precisely fitted baked bricks. The finish was said by Mackay to be “so good that the writer has not seen its equal in any ancient work.”8 The four walls of the bathing pool were uniformly 1.36 meters thick. This had been covered and made waterproof by a regular lining of bitumen (tar) 2.4 centimeters thick that was kept in place by a course of brick. The bottom of the pool was not probed in sufficient depth to know if the bitumen sealed the bottom as well, but this is a more than a fair presumption (figure 11.5).
There is a well on the eastern side of the bath, within the enclosing structure itself. Marshall proposed that it was used to fill the bath and provide water for its operations; Mackay doubts this.9
Figure 11.5 Reconstruction of the Great Bath (after Wheeler 1966)
A drain was found in the southwestern corner inside the bath. This was a hole in the brick facing 38 by 20 centimeters that goes through two baked-brick walls and an intervening packing of clay, all 3.12 meters thick. The water exiting the pool would have flowed into a burnt-brick channel, which enters a culvert with a beautiful corbelled arch, 0.71 meters wide by 2.3 meters high, large enough for a fair-sized man to walk in. There is a manhole at the bath end of the culvert, which would have allowed for the inspection and cleaning of the drain, a feature also found with the sumps in the drainage system of Mohenjo-daro. The end of the drain has been removed by erosion of the western edge of the mound and cannot be traced. Thus, we do not know how the effluent was handled, but it presumably was routed, ceremoniously or not, down onto the plain.
Marshall proposes that the impressive corbelled arch of the bath drain was provided for cleaning and “may have served as a secret exit in times of need.”10 If it was only a drain, there was certainly no need for it to be 2 meters high. It simply enlarges an area of flow to no particularly good end. But Mackay has the answer, I think, by proposing that the culvert was where the bathwater was blocked and the water to fill it put down the manhole, causing the drain in the bottom of the pool to flow backward.11
The sunken bath could be entered at either end by two flights of steps, which were baked brick covered with wood held in place by bitumen. The stairs at either end terminate on a platform 1 meter wide and 40.6 centimeters high. If filled to the brim, the bath would have been about 2 meters deep; given the stature of most Harappans at about 1.5 meters, even this extra 40.6 centimeters of depth would not have allowed them to stand on the platform without treading water. Thus, assuming that the platform was for comfortable standing, with the water at about shoulder level for the bathers, the level of the water in the bath would have been kept at least 40 or 50 centimeters below the top, making Mackay’s use of hydrostatic pressure for filling it even more plausible.
The Bath was surrounded by a colonnade, seven across the width, and ten along each side. These would have supported a roof, but given the span, most reconstructions leave the bath open to the sky as an interior courtyard. On the eastern side of the Great Bath is a series of seven, possibly eight, bathing chambers of typical Mohenjo-daro design, with doors offset to one side to ensure privacy and a drain to carry away the dirty water to the large drain in Main Street.
A Chronology for the Great Bath
The Great Bath was built just following the raising of the mound on which it is sited. The modified building that one sees has been assigned to the Intermediate Period at Mohenjo-daro but it was probably built much earlier.12 It is apparent that the Great Bath was no longer in use during the last phases of the Late Period at the site, when most of the architecture that we see today at Mohenjo-daro was inhabited.
In a formal analysis of the Great Bath, the German research team that worked at Mohenjo-daro notes that the original architectural concept for the building should be considered a representative piece of Harappan architecture: It is rectangular, proportions of about two by three, with robust enclosing walls, concentric layout, strong central axis, and the like. This team has noted the following additional points concerning this building:
Functional alteration . . . indicated by the blocking up of all entrances but one in the south, raising of floor level in many compartments, bricking up of parts of inner fenestrated wall intersecting inner circumambulatory, blocking up of northern staircase necessitating the sealing of room 20, building activity in the north and west resulting in the obliteration of these portions o
f the outer surrounding streets (outer circumambulatory).
Complete abandonment of primary function probably coincidental with the destruction of the complex. Filling of the central tank with debris, removal (destruction?) of eastern and western rows of pillars, partial reuse as production area.
Construction of a drain close to the surface traversing the southeast entrance and ignoring the structure underneath which was already completely buried.
The change in function is further documented by the fact that “prestige and ideology” artifacts, seals, luxury goods and the like diminish in frequency as one moves from lower levels to upper strata; but “production” artifacts show the reverse trend, with more of them in the upper levels.13
The Great Bath was abandoned and filled in. The area was then used as a craft production site. Wheeler, who excavated the adjacent Warehouse, noted that “to a height of 30 feet or more, the tall podium of the Great Warehouse on the western side of the citadel, was engulfed by rising structures of poorer and poorer quality.”14 We do not know how deep the fill covering the Great Bath was; however, a photograph suggests that about 3 meters separated the local ground surface from the floor level of the bathing rooms around the pool.15
The sequence that can be pieced together then is something like this. At an early time in the history of Mohenjodaro, but within the Mature Harappan, or the Early Harappan—Mature Harappan Transition, there were settlers near plain level under the Mound of the Great Bath. The inhabitants raised a platform and equipped it with proper buttresses and reinforcing. Two of the buildings they constructed at this time were the Great Bath and the Warehouse. Both of these structures were abandoned at about the beginning of the Late Period of Mohenjo-daro. During the Late Period, there is much evidence for craft activity in this area. This relative sequence of events is reasonably well documented and there is some archaeological evidence for all of it.
Departing through the southern doors of the Great Bath, a turn to the right takes one down a well-trodden street leading to a small stairway up into the Warehouse.
The Warehouse
The Warehouse would have been an imposing building, mostly of wood, with a heavy, thick, flat roof (figures 11.6 and 11.7). This was probably repaired many times, with added layers of Indus rushes and mud crisscrossed and piled on. Not terribly sophisticated, and weighing many tons, it took a substantial set of supports to keep it up. The Warehouse is one story, lower than the Bath, and the light on this side of the mound is not nearly as dark and shadowy as Main Street. The building walls and supports are wooden planks and timbers. The pattern of the outside wooden planks is up and down. These may have been taken from huge deodar trees of the mountains and were floated down to Mohenjo-daro from Kashmir.
We do not know precisely what function the goods stored in the Warehouse played in the life of the inhabitants of Mohenjo-daro or the Mound of the Great Bath (figure 11.8). But propinquity and the similarity of history suggest that the people in charge of the Great Bath had these goods at their disposal. They probably stored things for their own use (food, cloth, leather, wood, fuel, etc. in raw and finished form) as well as for patronage, or “giveaways.” That all of this fits into an institutionalized state economy based on redistribution cannot be demonstrated. The fact that the Great Bath and Warehouse seem unique to Mohenjo-daro, with a possible parallel at Lothal, suggests that whatever the function of these two interrelated buildings, it was confined to this city (and possibly Lothal) and may not apply to the civilization as a whole.
Figure 11.6 Plan of the Warehouse at Mohenjo-daro (after Wheeler 1968)
A broad staircase of baked bricks took visitors from the Warehouse down to the floodplain of the Indus. Once there, one can turn around for a broad, unobstructed view of the land. The mountains of Baluchistan are visible in the winter, but the haze of the monsoon heat obscures them other times of year. There is no wall around Mohenjo-daro, not even on this side of the city with the major storage depot on the very edge of inhabited space.
The College of Priests
The College of Priests is now a stabilized set of walls that are difficult to understand without the help of a technical drawing and a trowel. The possible institutional function of the College “was probably the residence of a very high official, possibly the high priest himself, or perhaps a college of priests” (figure 11.9).16 The overall size of the building is approximately 70.3 meters long and 23.9 meters wide. There were many internal changes to this structure over its lifetime. It was probably conceived with large rooms to the north and south, and smaller ones in the middle. One of the more interesting spaces seems to have been patterned after the northern end of the Great Bath, with interior fenestrations. The western wall of the College appears to have had the principal entrance.
Figure 11.7 Elevation of the Warehouse at Mohenjo-daro (after Wheeler 1968)
Who Came to the Bath, Warehouse, and College of Priests?
Who among the citizens of Mohenjo-daro would have found themselves at the southern end of Main Street? We do not know for sure, but some of them would have been the men and women who were allowed by their society to use the Great Bath. I think of them as a group of individuals who were dedicated to acting out the rituals for which the Great Bath had been constructed. They may well have been “career specialists,” possibly by birth, but it may have been something that individuals advanced to over the course of their lives. They may have lived in or around the College of Priests. There were probably other visitors at this intersection: high officials from the city, responsible citizens, respected elders, senior families, and all sorts of special people defined by Indus society as privileged. They, too, may have come here to partake of bathing, ritual, study, and socializing with the “permanent” residents. I do not take this area to be the playground of the Indus hoi polloi, folks at the lower end of the social pyramid.
The foregoing could be read as very “Wheelerian,” with the Mound of the Great Bath as the headquarters of a priestly administration wielding autocratic, absolute power from their citadels.17 This is not what I want to convey. First, we do not know what role the religious specialists, who are proposed to have been primary users of the Great Bath, played in the government of Mohenjo-daro or some larger part of the Indus Civilization. There is no compelling reason to think of them as priest-kings. That they had some form of political influence, perhaps even power, is a reasonable proposition, but we do not know how this worked itself out within the contexts of the Indus political institution. Moreover, there is nothing quite like the Mound of the Great Bath at any other site of the Indus Civilization. Kalibangan might come the closest, with the separate High Mound to the west, but there is no Great Bath there. Such a facility is not a part of Harappa itself, where there is a high mound, but, again, no Great Bath. Lothal’s “tank” comes to mind, but the scale of this feature is so much larger than the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro.
The Area North of the Great Bath: Blocks 6 and 10
Remounting the Mound of the Great Bath via the western stairway, one can return to Main Street and walk north between the Great Bath and College. Today this is another jumble of walls, mostly of the Late Period, and not at all well understood. The Buddhists were also in this area and seem to have used it as living space. More bathing rooms were found by Mackay in 1927—1928 in Block 6, to the north of the Great Bath.18 He dates these to the Late Period and makes the quite reasonable suggestion that they may have taken over the function of the Great Bath at this time. Wheeler has an excellent description of the new bathing rooms.19
Just across Main Street from Block 6 is what seems to have been a large open courtyard, Mackay’s Block 10. This feature probably originated at or about the same time as the Warehouse and was one of the original features of the Mound of the Great Bath. The surrounding wall is thick (approximately 2 meters) and is preserved in only the southwestern corner and extensions there from. There are later structures inside, but I feel that it was probably conceived as an open
space, possibly also connected to the ritual/religious establishment.
Figure 11.8 Reconstructions of the Warehouse and Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro (after Wheeler 1966)
L Area: The Southern End of the Mound of the Great Bath
It is less than a 200-meter walk from the neighborhood of Block 6 to the complex of buildings on the southern end of the Mound of the Great Bath. Getting there takes a matter of minutes, walking across the saddle of open, eroded turf. Today the ground is sufficiently salty so that a crust forms on the surface. After rain and a period of time for drying, one “crunches” across the skin of lightly consolidated earth and salt.
The southern end of the Mound of the Great Bath was designated “L Area.” It was excavated by Mackay in 1926—1927, his first year at Mohenjo-daro (figure 11.20).20
L Area is clearly an important place, but what went on here during the heyday of the city is still obscure. The principal feature of L Area has been construed by Marshall as a place of assembly for monks or priests and has been compared to Buddhist caves,21 although Mackay thought of it as a marketplace.22 Siding with Marshall for once, Wheeler believes it to have been an assembly hall: “The general scheme of the building is a little reminiscent of an Achaemenian apadana or audience chamber.”23 We call it the “Pillared Hall” here.