Manasara Series (I. A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture; II. Indian Architecture according to Manasara-Shilpashastra; III. Manasara on Architecture and Sculpture: Sanskrit Text; IV. Architecture of Manasara: Translation; V. Architecture of Manasara: Illustrations; VI. Hindu Architecture in India and Abroad; VII. An Encyclopaedia of Hindu Architecture) v6.c40.s6.17

v6.c40.s6.17

The discoveries made at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have made it clear that the Indus peoples living in Sindh and the Punjab, and of the fourth and third millenia B. C., were in possession of a highly developed culture. 'At present our researches carry us back no further than the fourth millennium B. C., but even at Mohenjo-daro there are still earlier cities lying, one below the other . . . and also in other sites in Sindh and Baluchistan. One thing that stands clear and unmistakable both at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped on Indian soil, with many millenia of human endeavour behind it.'¹ Although 'India cannot be regarded as the cradle of human civilization, in fact no one country could be so regarded,' asserts Sir John Marshall, yet he would recognize India, along with Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, 'as one of the most important areas where the civilizing processes of society were initiated and developed.'¹ But, so far as architecture is concerned, he has no doubt that 'there is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley the picture is reversed, and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens. Temples, palaces, and tombs there may of course have been.' He recognizes 'the evidence, in the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro and in its roomy and serviceable houses with their ubiquitous wells and bathrooms and elaborate systems of drainage, that the ordinary towns-people enjoyed here a degree of comfort and luxury unexampled in other parts of the then civilized world.'²