The Indus Civilization

by Gregory L. Possehl

  HR-B Area

  Lane 1 is a good opening into the northern part of HR-B. Taking a left at the end of this lane heads one south on Street 2 and into the back side of an interesting neighborhood, designated Block 2 of HR-B by Marshall. House VIII, room 17, has the remains of one of the few kilns at Mohenjo-daro. This is a very late and very noxious facility. In this same house, room 8 yielded one of the magnificent jewelry hoards found during the first phase of excavation at Mohenjo-daro. The hoard was called “the most important find of the (1925—1926) season” by Sahni, who described It.39 This large body of material was found just beneath a floor, and it consists of the following:

  Two silver vases, originally wrapped in a cotton bag

  A copper vase that contained a copper axe and chisels

  Four, large hollow, earrings (?)

  Two circular ear ornaments of gold

  Three fillets or diadems of gold

  Thirteen addition fillets, rolled up

  Two more broad fillets with hanging beads attached

  Three forehead fillets of a pointed shape

  Seven hemispheric terminals

  One silver bangle broken in two halves

  Six silver finger rings

  One shell finger ring

  A large collection of beads of gold, silver, faience, semiprecious stones, along with pendants, terminals, and spacers that were made up into nine necklaces40

  The oxidation salts of the two silver vases had preserved the cotton fabric and led to the positive identification of this fiber at Mohenjo-daro.

  Block 2 is dominated by House V, which is about 1,000 square meters. This is the place where the HR Area tragedy was found. To give one a sense of just how large this building is, a good-sized American home is about 200 square meters. Getting to House V from Street 2 is either through House IX or across an area that today is a jumble of walls. House V, a structure said to be of the Intermediate Period, is dominated by a large (14 by 19 meters) open courtyard (room 70), which was nicely paved. This is a splendid space, which must have been open to the sky when the building was occupied. To the north of the courtyard is a mass of rooms including an intramural, private well, an elevated house “core” on which the next floor up would have rested, and other spaces. One of these sets House V apart. This is long, narrow room 49, approximately 13.5 by 3.3 meters, immediately distinguished by the fact that the blocked-up doorway in the south wall has a corbelled arch, the only such doorway in Mohenjo-daro as we know it; although there are many smaller corbelled arches.41 This room is well preserved, with the walls standing over 5 meters high. There are also beam holes for very substantial rafters. The ceiling of room 49 was built to take a very heavy load. When room 49 was cleared, Sahni found a collection of eighteen large ring stones, of the kind that Mackay found in L Area (figure 11.16). These were lying along the north wall of room 49. Sahni has the following to say of the other finds:

  Not far from these rings were found two round stone caps with rounded tops (HR 5935, Plate CXXX, 23 and HR 5939, Plate CXXX, 21), which resemble the tops of the so-called “gamesmen” (probably cult-objects) of varying sizes found both at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. The precise purpose of these stone rings and “gamesmen” is not yet definitely known. Other objects of the same class are the cones of stone, terra-cotta, etc., but without the projecting rim at the top. One cone of this type (height 11 inches) was unearthed by me at Harappa in 1924—25, and I then drew attention to its similarity to the Siva-linga and suggested that it might have been fixed in a pedestal (its base was rough dressed) and worshipped in a tiny brick structure found close by it.42

  Figure 11.16 Ring stones from Mohenjo-daro (after Marshall 1931i)

  A lingum was also found in House V, and it figured in the preliminary report in the same photograph as the objects noted in Sahni’s quote.43 Two limestone capitals were also found in room 49. Others turned up in adjacent rooms; one in 47, the other in 50.44 These capitals are unique in Mohenjo-daro and tend to strengthen the position documented at Dholavira that the ring stones are column drums.

  There are more interesting structures in this neighborhood, including a group of modular structures at the end of Street 3. The direction to head is north, up to Lane 9, then west for 20 meters, up an original flight of stairs with a shortcut through House LV. Room 40 in this house is well paved and the place where the so-called bronze dancing girl of HR Area was found on January 26, 1927, by Daya Ram Sahni.

  This shortcut brings us to the southern wall of House L, the building with massive walls discussed previously as one of the structures proposed (wrongly) to have been a temple. It does have well-preserved walls on the order of 1 to 2 meters in thickness. Sahni was of the opinion that this was the basement plinth of a building of the Intermediate Period, the upper portions of which had completely disappeared. 45 The rooms (8, 9, 10) on the western side of this building had been filled with well-laid mud bricks. Sahni makes no mention of rooms 24, 25, and 26. It is the massiveness of this building that sets it apart and makes it comparable to House XXX across Street 3.

  House XXX is larger than House L, with a footprint of approximately 24 by 11 meters (figure 8.9). The massive walls are quite apparent and comparable to House L’s in thickness. When they were excavated, they stood well over 3 meters in height. There are nine rooms in this building, none with doorways; and at some point in time they were all filled with “sun-dried brick or pure clay.”46 An inner court (room 55) 7 by 5.8 meters is a distinguishing feature of the structure. The southern rooms (56, 57, 58) were paved, and 57 has a well, so at some point they were something other than foundation cells, built to be filled with brick and/or pure clay. The same may have been true for the court; but what we see today appears to be, once again, the basement plinth of a large building of the Intermediate Period, the upper portion of which is no longer extant.

  What of the function of House XXX, and its partner L? Sahni says of XXX: “That the building, which stood on such massive foundations, had an exceptional character—probably sacred—can hardly be doubted.”47 There is nothing in the list of finds associated with Houses L and XXX that suggests a function, but more systematic work with the collections might prove interesting.

  Between Houses XXX and L is a double row of small quarters that also caught the attention of Wheeler and Piggott (see figure 11.12). There is a total of fifteen spaces here. House XXXII to the north is a single unit. The rest are divided by a central axial space without doors, so the eastern chambers could not communicate directly with those on the west. One of the spaces is a well room. The southernmost pair of rooms has more complicated subdivisions, and they are a bit larger than the others; the one to the west has a second well. The ten modular spaces, those divided by the central axis, and the one opposite the well room, vary in size, but they are similar: 4 by 6 meters, plus or minus about a meter and a half. There is a small room to the rear (approximately 2 by 4 meters) and a larger one in the front (approximately 4 by 4 meters), just twice the size of the back room. The front room has a bathing floor and a drain to the street, which was usually connected to a sump of some kind. The thinness of the walls and the absence of stairs suggest that these were single-story units.

  Sahni dealt with this group of buildings as an isolated set, not as an integral part of the neighborhood in association with Houses L and XXX, his sacred building. He refers to them as shops, the front rooms being used as display areas, the back as storage. He even went so far as to suggest that the well room of LXIII was a place where drinking water can be obtained by the glass.

  One corner of this room is occupied by a finely built well with a neat brick paving laid across the rest of the floor. The shallow round pits in the floor near the well were meant to hold pottery jars which were kept filled with water, and by them the attendant to dole out draughts to thirsty persons. The floor was littered with broken pottery goblets with pointed bases. Similar goblets and other jars were also found in the brick-lined pit in the front of the room into wh
ich the waste water flowed out.48

  Sahni has created a wonderful living image here. The association of the scene with the well, standing water jars, and the discarded containers makes a strong case, not necessarily for a public facility, but in a more general way.

  Piggott has also described these rooms. He builds on the idea that this part of HR-B was for workers’ quarters: “The whole lay-out is so strongly suggestive of [”coolie-lines” of colonial India] that one feels that this is a likely explanation, and this receives confirmation from the more explicit Harappa evidence.”49 The structures at Harappa are on Mound F, to the north. They are associated with a series of husking floors and are discussed in detail as a part of the description of Harappa.

  Wheeler sides with Piggott on this, noting that the “coolie-line” analogy and the links to the “workers’ quarters” at Harappa would be a fruitful line of inquiry. But there is no small amount of waffling in his position:

  Servile or semi-servile labor is a familiar element in any ancient polity; it is only necessary to recall once more the slave-attendants and craftsmen employed in the Sumerian temples, or the labor cantonments of Egypt, to create an appropriate context for these Mohenjo-daro tenements. If the building in front of them was in fact a temple, their proximity may well have been significant. Alternatively they may have been police-barracks, or even the quarters of a priest-hood. Whatever their precise function, they fit into and enhance our general picture of a disciplined and even regimented civilization.50

  Wheeler’s suggestion is, then, that these modular structures were the abodes of slaves, laborers, police, or priests. This certainly covers a lot of social and institutional ground!

  I am not drawn to Piggott’s notion that these were workers’ quarters, or that they were the places of residence for any category of servile labor. The bathing floors run counter to this, in my mind at least. This leads me to think of them as places where those citizens of the Indus Civilization who were given to use bathing facilities would stay. It just does not make sense to think that these would have been slaves or servile labor, recognizing the fact that slave covers a great deal of social space as well. The look of the place, with the relatively thin walls, I take to indicate both a single story and a place of temporary residence; a kind of Mohenjo-daro motel—a place of public accommodation for the “bathing class(es)” of Indus society. The larger units to the north may have been for the permanent caretakers of the complex, or for the accommodation of very special visitors. The rooms to the south around the well would have been for service personnel, since the well implies that the “motel” bathing facilities were provided for from this source. The evidence for standing water pots and the accumulation of pointed-base goblets informs us that the visitors stopped there for drinking water also consumed by the “inn keepers.”

  VS Area is just to the north, along a modern footpath that approximates the alignment of First Street. It is up and over a hill, down, then up again, in the unexcavated ditch that should be East Street.

  Figure 11.17 Plan of VS Area (after Marshall 1931i)

  VS Area

  This area was first opened up by Vats in 1923—1924, the second season of work at Mohenjo-daro. In addition to exposing a substantial amount of architecture there, he confirmed the presence of deeply stratified deposits in the Lower Town. There are two sections to VS Area: VI-B to the east, and VS-A to the west of First Street (figure 11.17).

  VS-B Area

  The three houses in VS-B were not described by Sahni in Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization. There is no explanation for this—he just left them out. The only description is in the preliminary report for 1926—1927, when they were cleared, and it is perfunctory.51

  Figure 11.18 Plan of DK-A (after Marshall 1931i)

  VS-A Area

  VS-A Area is across First Street from VS-B, the lettering being just the reverse of HR Area. The alignment of streets here is relatively poor. Block 4 dominates this part of VS-A. There is something that makes the area not inviting, perhaps it is the concentration of human remains that were found here; the VS Area tragedy being in Block 3, in Lane 4, between Houses XVIII and XXXIII.52

  To the east of VS Area is the so-called Moneer Area, or Moneer Site, originally DK-I. This is the next place on our tour of the Lower Town of Mohenjo-daro.

  The DK Areas

  Moneer Area, or DK-I

  The first excavation in the Moneer Area was undertaken by Dikshit in 1924—1925. His trench was U-shaped and of no great width, if judged from his plan. There is evidence for lapidary work in semiprecious stones in this area. Puri found a large number of beads, sixteen small weights, and a pair of small copper scale pans together with a fulcrum in a room directly accessible from a lane, suggesting it was a lapidary workshop.53

  Figure 11.19 Plan of DK-B and DK-C (after Marshall 1931i)

  DK-A Area

  The principal feature of DK-A is the large east-west street of the Late Period, with its drain (figure 11.18). This may link up with the proposed street at the very southern end of DKG, an important, unresolved observation bearing on the reality of the grid town plan at Mohenjo-daro. The combined DK-B and DK-C Areas are 100 meters to the north. A modern footpath takes one over the rough terrain.

  DK-B Area

  DK-B is interesting since all architecture there is of the latest phase of occupation of the city (figure 11.19). DK-B provided the Marshall team with a good deal of information about this phase of city life. The construction here is a counterpoint to practices elsewhere.

  It will be noted in the plan that most of the walls of these houses are comparatively thin. They were also badly built, so much so that some have fallen down, undoubtedly from this cause. The bricks were placed in the queerest positions, some on edge, others showing their flats; joints agape have been left unbroken in many places. This kind of masonry illustrates the great deterioration that had taken place in the art of building since the preceding period; the difference in style of the masonry of the two periods is at once evident even to the casual eye.54

  The excavation in DK-B may confirm the presence of Second Street. This was found to be approximately 9 meters wide at this point, very similar to the width of First Street in HR Area. The priest-king statue was found in Block 2, House II, room 2 of HR-B.

  DK-C Area

  DK-C Area is contiguous to DK-B. It is composed of approximately 7,800 square meters of exposed architecture. Blocks 1, 2, and 3 are to the northern side of the wide, east-west street in this area. The street was well equipped with drains, one of which had a “pent roof.”55 The architecture is not especially interesting, but in room number 2 of Block 16 Dikshit found a hoard of jewelry packed in a silver vase about a meter below ground surface.56

  Trench E

  The first digging at the northern end of Mohenjo-daro was a long, narrow trench designated “E” by Dikshit. It ran east-west and was approximately 400 meters long. This trench, and a southern extension, were, for most of their course, about 3 meters wide, having been laterally expanded in two principal places (localities E and M) on account of the exceptional architecture found there.

  Figure 11.20 Plan of DK-G Northern Portion (after Marshall 1931i)

  The building at E is centered on a large courtyard 18.4 meters by 14.4 meters. In the northwest corner of room 1 of House I Dikshit found another hoard of jewelry.57

  DK-G Area

  The exposure of 2.8 hectares of northern Mohenjo-daro was Mackay’s principal occupation at the site from 1927 to 1931 (figures 11.20 and 11.21). This work revealed a major east-west road that passed through DK-G Area at about its midpoint. He called this Central Street, and it provided a convenient division of the DK-G Area into Northern and Southern Portions. There is a second large street in DK-G Area Northern Portion that runs parallel to First Street; he dubbed it “West Street.”

  The total Area of DK-G, both portions, is approximately 28,000 square meters. DK-G South is approximately 16,000 square meters and DK-G North is a
pproximately 12,000 square meters. There is a good deal of difference between the depth of digging in the two portions. Not only is DK-G South larger, but Mackay took many of the blocks well into the Intermediate Period. Virtually all of DK-G North is Late II and I.

  First Street Some observations on First Street are in order, since that is the feature that binds this district of Mohenjo-daro together. Mackay discusses it in some detail in his report, which is where the documentation for the following points is found.58

  Excavation of First Street went down to Mackay’s Intermediate III Period. At this time it was approximately 9.5 meters wide. As far as we know, First Street was always provided with street drainage. The roadway was paved during Intermediate II times with a mixture of broken bricks and potsherds in a clay cement. The excavator suspected that the road metal was laid down in wet weather to get a good firm setting, but found no evidence that it had been stamped or rolled. The streets and lanes of Mohenjo-daro were almost never paved. This occurrence in First Street and one at the eastern end of Crooked Lane in Intermediate II are the only good examples of this practice.