The Indus Civilization c5: II. Architecture and Masonry
The Indus Civilization c5
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II. Architecture and Masonry
c5.2
FROM their foundation the cities of the Indus Valley appear to have been laid out in accordance with some pre-arranged scheme, whose nature is, however, easier to discern in the case of Mohenjo-daro, which is so much better preserved than Harappa. Here the streets run in straight lines, and are crossed by others at right angles, although a certain amount of inaccuracy has crept in, and there are several instances of a marked divergence from the straight; this is not altogether surprising when the date of the site is taken into consideration. In spite of these minor discrepancies it is quite clear that some definite authority must have existed to control the development of the city and to avoid tortuous alleys such as distinguish the older parts of Sukkur and Rohri, the largest living towns in the neighbourhood, and were also a feature, at a much later date, of the cities of mediæval Europe.
c5.3
This task was naturally rendered easier at both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa by the absence of awkward gradients in the flat alluvial plain upon which both were built, and though the levels of these cities were always steadily rising, this does not seem to have presented much difficulty. Where it was found necessary to raise the buildings on mud-brick platforms to keep them out of the reach of floods, the effect must have been rather uneven, but this was probably scarcely noticeable over a wide area.
c5.4
It is, of course, impossible to say whether a civic body or a single official supervised the building activities, but they were evidently in very competent hands, and it is interesting to note that the Indus Valley cities are the earliest sites yet discovered where a scheme of town-planning existed. There is no evidence of such a scheme at Ur as late as 2000 B.C., though there are traces of one at Babylon at about this date, and also at the Twelfth Dynasty town of Kahun in Egypt.
c5.5
Building regulations seem to have been strictly enforced in Mohenjo-daro for many years, and the greatest care was taken to prevent any structure from encroaching upon the streets. In actual practice, the latter grew wider as time went on. This was due to the fact that, from earliest times, the walls of both houses and public buildings were constructed with a pronounced batter or slope (Pl. E, b. c), which was always preserved by the masons when any raising or rebuilding had to be done. Cases of encroachment are, therefore, extremely rare in the lower strata of the city, which, although they were not so thickly populated, must have been extremely prosperous, to judge from the excellent masonry and carefully built houses. A very different state of affairs prevails at the latest levels, for here even streets and lanes were built upon, and the original lay-out of the city came to be disregarded. These levels, however, mark the period of Mohenjo-daro’s decline, and it is obvious that municipal law and order must then have been at a very low ebb.
c5.6
The streets of Mohenjo-daro were all aligned from east to west or from north to south, for the reason that the prevailing winds always come from the two latter quarters. A north or south wind, sweeping down a broad thoroughfare, would suck the stagnant air out of the smaller streets and lanes running at right angles which in this way would be amply ventilated. It is uncertain whether the builders of the city realized that this would be the case.
c5.7
the first or whether it was an entirely fortuitous arrangement; in any case it has also been observed in some of the Babylonian cities.
c5.8
Some of the main streets of Mohenjo-daro are of considerable size. One long street in that city, whose course has been traced for over half a mile, travels in a straight line from north to south and divides the largest mound into two parts. It must have been a most important thoroughfare, for in places it is over thirty-three feet wide, and could easily have accommodated several lines of wheeled traffic, the cart and chariot being in those days usual methods of transport (Pl. D, a).
c5.9
Another road, apparently wider than the first, crosses it at right angles at its southern limit, but as only a small part of this second street has been cleared, it is impossible to give the average width. A third road, also cutting the first, averages eighteen feet in width at the higher levels, which here are the only ones that have been excavated. The most important thoroughfare in the Stupa mound is about thirteen and a half feet wide, and runs from north to south, while the smaller streets range from nine to twelve feet in width, and the lanes and alleys from four feet upwards. Not one of these streets or lanes is paved, and the people who used them were probably ankle-deep in dust or mud, according to the season of the year. An attempt had been made to protect the surface of one of the main roads by using a mixture of broken bricks and potsherds, which were thrown down, probably on the wet earth, and trodden in; this method cannot have been a success, as it was only tried on one occasion in a single street.
c5.10
The excavated minor streets of Mohenjo-daro are much more impressive in appearance than the wider ones, as the buildings on the former are so much better preserved, a state of affairs due entirely to the rains which for centuries have poured down the wider streets and gradually reduced the height of the walls on either side. In spite of this, the walls of the principal street now stand some eighteen feet high, and will stand much higher when further digging has been done, as they obviously go still deeper into the soil. Some of the walls in the narrower streets are now over twenty-five feet high (Pl. E, c), though here also the lowest levels of the city have not yet been exposed.
c5.11
The angles of some of the smaller by-ways show evidence of having been rubbed by pack-animals or the clothing of passers-by, and in some cases the corners of a building were purposely rounded off so that loads should not become dislodged, a device which has also been observed in ancient Ur. Unless porters were largely employed, it must be assumed that the humble donkey was used in the narrow as well as in the wider streets, although its remains have not yet been discovered anywhere in the city.
c5.12
Both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were built entirely of burnt brick, except in those few places where foundations have been found composed of burnt and unburnt brick in alternate courses, or, more rarely still, of unburnt brick only. All the bricks, burnt and unburnt, are well proportioned; as a rule they are twice as long as they are wide and half as thick. They vary in size from 10·25 × 5 × 2·25 inches to 20·5 × 8·5 × 2·25 inches, but the very large bricks were intended only for special purposes—to cover drains, for example—and are not found in ordinary masonry, for which the most usual size of brick is 11 × 5·25 × 2·25 inches. Where unburnt brick was used, the sizes most favoured vary from 13·9 × 7·35 × 3·5 inches to 15 × 7·15 × 3·1 inches, all larger sizes than the common kind of burnt brick.
c5.13
The bricks were shaped in an open framemould of exactly the same type as that in use in India and other parts of the East to-day, and were made from the alluvial soil of the neighbourhood with no binding material. Surplus clay was removed by passing a piece of wood across the top of the mould, while the faces of the bricks were always smooth and flat, no examples of recessing or frogging being known. On the whole, they were well baked to a pleasing light red colour, the comparatively few over-fired specimens having a slightly vitrified surface of an apple-green hue. The fuel employed for firing was wood, of which there was a plentiful supply, and as no brick-kilns have been found the probability is that the bricks were stacked for firing in large heaps with flues between. The outside of the pile would then have been plastered with mud to keep in the heat.
c5.14
Bricks of other shapes were made for special purposes. Wedge-shaped bricks lined the wells (Pl. B, b), though, curiously enough, this kind of brick was never used for vaulting. Only the corbel-arch was in use (Pl. C, a), in spite of the fact that the true arch was known in Mesopotamia at the same period, or even earlier. For pavements and other special purposes, ordinary bricks were often cut down to a smaller size, such as 9·5 × 4·35 × 2 inches, and the edges and faces were then carefully rubbed smooth; in this way a bathroom pavement could be rendered practically water-tight. No patterns are ever found in these pavements, which are always severely plain, though care was taken to break the joints, and L-shaped bricks were occasionally used for corners.
c5.15
In building walls, what is known as "English Bond" was usual—that is, a course of stretchers alternating with a course of headers. Here, too, care was taken to break the joints by using a half-brick where necessary. A curious method of bricklaying sometimes employed was to set some of the bricks on end, with now the flats exposed and now the sides, a practice which has also been observed on Babylonian sites. Quite long walls were built in this way, and it must have been regarded as decorative, although this type of masonry could hardly have been as strong as the ordinary style, for some of the bricks had very little to bond them in. On the other hand, these walls may have been mud-plastered, though very few traces remain to prove that this was done; only where accidental fires had occurred was plaster found on the walls, sometimes plain mud-plaster, sometimes gypsum. It is not improbable that all the inside walls of the houses were plastered to hide the brickwork, and they may even have been decorated with colour.
c5.16
Mud-mortar, with no additional binding material, was almost universally used, and the height of some of the walls still standing proves that it served its purpose well. In special cases, such as the laying of drains, both lime- and gypsum-mortar were used, either separately or mixed with mud in varying proportions. The presence of gypsum in the interior of some of the walls is not always a proof that this mineral was extensively mixed with the mud-mortar; it is plentiful in the soil of Mohenjo-daro, and creeps into the joints of the brickwork, where it crystallizes in the form of selenite.
c5.17
Owing to the non-adhesive nature of mud-mortar, it was possible for the later occupants of the cities of the Indus valley to separate the bricks of the ancient buildings and use them again, which could not have been done had pure lime or gypsum-mortar been generally used, although mud-mortar served well to prevent lateral shifting of the bricks laid in it. Quarrying for bricks appears to have been a regular custom at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa from ancient times right up to the present day. The latter city has suffered more in this respect.
c5.18
Owing to its isolation, Mohenjo-daro has been more or less immune from such spoliation for many centuries, though old bricks were in great request before the abandonment of the city. Stacks of used bricks of varying sizes have been found, all ready to be taken away and used again, a practice of which there is also some evidence at Ur. The invariable use of burnt brick supports the theory discussed elsewhere that the climate of Sind was wetter in ancient times than it is to-day. In a hot climate a house of unburnt brick would certainly have been cooler; it could also have been built at much less cost.
c5.19
The visitor to Mohenjo-daro is inevitably struck by the plainness of its buildings (Pl. G), which lack even the brick decoration of recessing or pilasters so often seen on the contemporary buildings of Sumer. There is, however, a possibility that the upper stories were decorated with ornamental brickwork or with carved wood verandahs and screens, which have naturally long since perished. No stone seems to have been used to relieve the monotony, for though supplies of limestone exist at Sukkur, some fifty-six miles away to the north-east, it is so full of flint that it would have been difficult to work. Large stone rings have been unearthed which may have been threaded on poles to form columns; a description of these rings occurs later in this chapter.
c5.20
Apart from shops and booths, the main streets of Mohenjo-daro must have presented a somewhat depressing appearance, for not only were windows non-existent, but, where possible, the entrances to the houses were placed in narrow by-ways. This, of course, was more often the case where the building was a large one, and it is more than likely that the owner of the house preferred to conceal his wealth behind blank walls, as is still the custom in many Eastern cities; indeed, the strategic position of certain rooms in some of the houses seems to suggest that they were provided for watchmen, a theory which is borne out by the fact that the only means of entrance is from the street. A certain amount of evidence exists to prove that Mohenjo-daro was divided for its protection into wards, and that it was carefully policed, at any rate by night, if not by day. An important city, whose buildings, no doubt, contained much valuable merchandise in addition to personal property, would always be a tempting place for the evil-doer, and theft, if no worse crime, was probably as prevalent as it is in large cities to-day.
c5.21
The ground-floor of a small house averaged 27 × 30 feet, measured outside, and a large one was about double this size. There are, of course, larger houses than this, but in some cases it is difficult to say whether they were used solely for domestic purposes and even whether they were occupied by one or more families. The walls of every house, both inside and out, had to be raised from time to time (Pl. G, a), as the rubbish and ashes thrown out of doors, the mud washed down from walls and roofs, and the deposit of wind-borne dust, all combined to raise the levels of the streets. Even to-day a ground-floor room in the East gradually becomes a cellar, which in turn becomes too deep to be used, so that the walls have to be built up to provide fresh accommodation above. The same process goes on in modern cities, though here it is extremely slow, owing to our higher standards of cleanliness.
c5.22
Some of the houses in Mohenjo-daro are separated from their neighbours by at least a foot of space between the walls. Party-walls may, perhaps, have led to disputes and even to litigation, with the result that it was sometimes considered less troublesome to build houses with their own four walls. The narrow space left between such separate houses was, however, bricked up at either end, doubtless to prevent cat-burglars from scaling the walls undetected.
c5.23
The thickness of most of the walls—whether of houses or public buildings—suggests that they were two or more stories in height, and in many cases the presence of square or rectangular holes indicates where the beams were laid across to form the upper floors and roof. Upon these beams, some of which were of very large size, reed-matting was spread, and this, in its turn, was covered with a thick coating of mud. In several places where it was obvious that a fire had occurred, slabs of mud from the roof, found baked hard, actually bore the impression of the matting; even the cords with which the reeds of the matting were tied together had left their impress.
c5.24
The lower portion of many a staircase of burnt brick, which once led to the upper floors and roof, still survives, and is always solidly constructed with no space left underneath. In some houses no means of reaching the upper stories now exists, so it must be assumed that staircases were occasionally made of wood, which has, of course, long since perished. To economize space in what appears to have been a very overcrowded city, the stairways have high narrow steps, sometimes fifteen inches high and but five inches wide, which the average European finds somewhat difficult to negotiate (Pl. E, d). In a few of the public buildings, however, the steps are of a more modern pattern, and in one especially important house, which evidently belonged to a person of considerable wealth, a very spacious double staircase was discovered with treads only about two and a quarter inches high and eight and a half inches wide (Pl. F, b). Occasionally a house has an outside staircase from the street, which suggests that the floors were occupied by different families, but the usual place for a stairway was in an inner court, where more room could be found for it.
c5.25
The roofs of the houses must have been flat, and were probably surrounded with a parapet, a common custom in the East to-day. It is not known how these roofs were protected from the rain, but they were drained by projecting gutters made of pottery, and doubtless also of wood, which poured their contents into the street below. This method of draining the roofs is quite usual in most parts of India at the present time. As no roof tiles have been found, it is probable that the covering used was the same as that of many of the lower floors, namely stamped clay, which needed frequent repair and the constant use of a mallet or roller to keep it in good condition. The importance of a flat roof is very great in a country where people sleep out at night during the hot weather, and in so crowded a city roof accommodation must have been doubly useful.
c5.26
There is at present no evidence that the houses had windows, and light and air seem to have been admitted chiefly through the doorways. Grills of pottery and alabaster have been discovered whose use appears to have been to cover small apertures set high up in the walls, but these gratings are comparatively rare, probably because the majority of them were made of wood, which has not survived. Windows are not really necessary in a hot country, where the heat has to be shut out as we exclude the cold. Some houses appear to the visitor to have them, but these openings are really the doorways of a higher level of the city (Pl. G, a).
c5.27
It is not at all likely that the absence of windows implies that the women of Mohenjo-daro were kept in strict seclusion, for, in spite of the fact that little is known of the domestic life of the Indus Valley people, there is nothing in the planning of the houses to suggest a *harīm* or *purdah*. It is quite probable that the women had considerable social status, for the present Indian custom of carefully guarding the womenfolk is of comparatively recent date and was apparently unknown in early historic times.
c5.28
Examination of the doorways of the houses does not throw much light on how the doors were fixed. Door-sockets of brick or stone cannot have been much used, as they are not often found; possibly hard wood was made to serve this purpose, or the doors may have been set in wooden frames, which would account for the fact that no trace of any attachment is to be found on the brick door-jambs and sills.
c5.29
The only doorway of which the top has survived is crowned by a corbelled arch; wooden door-lintels may have been common, for wood was probably very plentiful in those days, but they would have had to be extremely thick to support the weight of the brickwork above. Only one or two doorways seem to have had bolt-holes or stops for the door.
c5.30
The doors themselves were of various sizes, the width perhaps being in some cases a multiple of the height. The most usual width was three feet four inches, although doorways have been found large enough to take a door as much as seven feet ten inches wide. It seems likely that these exceptionally large doorways belonged to houses whose owners continually made use of animal transport.
c5.31
It is not yet certain whether the round column was ever used at Mohenjo-daro. In large rooms one or more pillars of burnt brick have often been found that once supported a roof. Only one tapering pillar has come to light, measuring three feet square at the base and narrowing to two feet six inches at the top; all the rest are either square or rectangular in section and the same size all the way up.
c5.32
Excavations at early sites in Babylonia have shown that the round column, whether of burnt or unburnt brick, was a common feature of early architecture in that country, and it is curious that it was not also used in the buildings of the inhabitants of the Indus valley, who had been trading with Sumer since as early as 3000 B.C. It would have been an easy matter to use wedge-shaped bricks for round columns for, as I have said, this type of brick was employed in the construction of wells (Pl. B, b); the only explanation which seems to account for their not being so used is that the people of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were too conservative to try any new experiments in building, though that they had the requisite skill is proved by their endeavours in other respects.
c5.33
We may perhaps be disparaging them, since stone pillars may have been constructed of limestone rings threaded on wooden poles; as I have mentioned before, stone rings, varying from 16.5 to 19.1 inches in diameter and from 9.8 to 11.2 inches in height, have been found at several places in Mohenjo-daro. Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni unearthed a number of them, together with two capitals, which had all been roughly piled up in a heap in a room, and whose damaged condition suggested that they had been preserved for the value of the material. Small pittings on them, which are evidently numbers, point to their belonging to two series. The presence of these numbers seems to support the theory that the rings were originally segments of two columns, which perhaps once supported the portico of a building. On the other hand, it is claimed by some, including the finder of these stone objects, that they were *yonis* such as are commonly associated with phallic emblems.
c5.34
A finer type of matting than that used in the construction of ceilings and roofs may have lined the walls and covered the floors of the better-class houses, although the poorer dwellings probably had floors of beaten earth coated with cow-dung, such as are still to be seen in most parts of India. The inhabitants of some of the houses owned very large pottery jars, which, judging from their contents when discovered, must have served as cupboards; this custom, too, is still adhered to, for very large vessels of unbaked clay are made to serve exactly the same purpose by the people of the modern villages round the city.
c5.35
In some of the larger houses, however, deep recesses have been found in the walls, and these, in all probability, were once fitted with wooden shelves. Chests of wood must also have been used for storage purposes; to them probably belonged the numerous pieces of shell inlay that have been found. Fasteners of bone and shell attest the use of boxes, and we can safely say that beds and stools were also ordinary articles of furniture. Some of the latter had their legs carved in the shape of a bull’s foot, after the manner of ancient Egypt, for a stool of this type appears on a seal, but nothing very definite can be said on the subject of furniture as not a single article has survived.
c5.36
Although most of the cooking was done in the courtyards—to be described later in this chapter—the houses also contained small kitchens, where the fuel was placed upon a raised platform of brick. One kitchen found in a large establishment was more elaborate in construction, for in the floor was a series of brick channels to contain fuel, over which the cooking utensils were placed. Such an arrangement is still to be seen in India, where cooking is done for a large number of people.
c5.37
Pottery vessels were found sunk in the floor of some of the kitchens, and into these waste water was thrown, which gradually ran away into the earth through a small perforation in the bottom of the jar. The use of the modern “serving-hatch” seems likely to have been known in those days, since in two instances a small room, thought to be a kitchen, communicated with a larger one by means of an aperture in the wall.
c5.38
Practically every house had its bathroom, which was always placed on the street side of the building for the convenient disposal of water; in a number of cases where a latrine was also present this lay between the bath and the street wall, obviously for the same reason. The bathrooms and latrines were sometimes on the ground-floor and sometimes on the floor above, in which case the water and fæces usually ran down a brick channel in the thickness of the wall, or, more rarely, down an open channel outside it. Both these methods are to be seen in some of the towns in Sind at the present day.
c5.39
The spill-way of many of these channels was stepped at varying angles, so that the water pouring down should not splash the passer-by in the street. It is quite evident that the people of Mohenjo-daro were proud of their drainage system, for the wall immediately round a drain-hole was often built of bricks so carefully rubbed down and fitted together that the joints are, even now, hardly visible. This excellent masonry sometimes projects slightly, and often provides a decorative feature in an otherwise blank wall.
c5.40
The bathroom itself was usually a small square or rectangular room with a carefully-laid brick pavement sloping towards one corner. In this corner was the outlet for the water, which, in some cases, also ran through the latrine. The walls surrounding the bath pavement were invariably wainscotted with bricks laid on edge so as to stand about three inches above the level of the floor (Pl. B, a). The slope of the pavement and the close-setting of the bricks of which it was made provided against the infiltration of water, but, as a further precaution, the pavement was sometimes laid on a thick bed of pottery débris.
c5.41
Pottery pipes, each provided with a spigot so that they fitted together, were occasionally used for drainage purposes, and these have been found in both horizontal and vertical positions.
c5.42
In some cases the brick floors of the bathrooms had been polished by the friction of bare feet, while in others they show a deep red deposit, which may have been caused by perspiration or by the use of oil to prevent the skin from cracking—a custom prevalent in India at the present day. Some bathrooms contained the remains of water-jars, and, to judge from the number of pottery models that have been found in the drains, it would seem that the childish habit of taking playthings into the bath has persisted for thousands of years. Certain clay objects found from time to time are thought to be strigils with which the people of Mohenjo-daro used to rub themselves down; it is certain that they used pottery rasps to remove thickened cuticle.
c5.43
Although the smaller houses were entered directly from the side streets, the larger ones were approached through a courtyard open to the sky; in one of its sheltered corners the greater part of the cooking was done. In one such place a round bread-oven was found with a small aperture at the base; there was perhaps originally a domed roof. The bread was baked by heating the oven to the required temperature with wood fuel, then raking out the ashes and clapping the cakes of dough against the hot inner side. Very similar ovens were in use in Mesopotamia at about the same date, as Dr. Woolley has shown.
c5.44
Numbers of saddle-querns and curry-stones, on which grain was ground and herbs pounded, have been discovered in the courtyards of Mohenjo-daro, for the latter would be the scene of household work, cooking, sewing and other tasks whenever the weather permitted, just as in the East to-day. Animals may have been kept there as well, for feeding-bins have also been unearthed; but it is doubtful if the larger animals were housed for the night in the courtyards, as the size of the city seems to be against it. I have already stated that the doorways are sometimes so large that it is quite possible that they were intended for pack-animals as well as pedestrians. Oxen and donkeys were doubtless used extensively for transport purposes in so large a trading community, but there is no evidence that the existence of the camel was even known to the people of the Indus valley.
c5.45
It must be borne in mind, however, that the descriptions of the various rooms and buildings given above apply more closely to the earlier than to the later levels of Mohenjo-daro, for the masonry shows a marked deterioration in the period prior to the abandonment of the city. To house the ever-growing population, buildings were erected where none had ever stood before, and large houses were subdivided among several families, partly because of overcrowding, probably also because it was the custom, as it still is in the East, for the married sons to bring their wives to live at home.
c5.46
In this way a house originally intended for one rich family and many servants gradually deteriorated by constant subdivision; each room would be turned into several smaller ones, doorways would be cut through partition walls, and even the courtyard would ultimately be threatened. It is probable that the latter was not entirely given up until the family was absolutely forced to it; but it certainly became smaller and smaller, and it is difficult to be certain whether or not it was entirely covered in during the last stages of the city’s decline.
c5.47
Sometimes the houses would be converted into a series of flats occupied by separate families, each flat with its own staircase and sometimes, though not always, with its own drainage system.
c5.48
Although the people must have lived in extremely cramped conditions in the later days of Mohenjo-daro, it is more than likely that the very poor did not live in the city at all, but dwelt outside it in daub-and-wattle huts of which, it is likely, no trace remains. It will not be possible to confirm this theory until further excavation has been done, for a considerable amount of alluvium has been deposited by the river, and the remains of such huts, if they existed at all, must be buried many feet deep. In any case, the cultivators of the fields and gardens around the city would have lived in near-by villages, very similar to those now existing in the neighbourhood.
c5.49
The method of drainage adopted by the Indus Valley people is especially well preserved at Mohenjo-daro, and is certainly the most complete ancient system as yet discovered. A brick-lined channel flowed down every street, sometimes even down small lanes (Pl. C, b), and into this main drain ran smaller tributary drains from the houses on either side. The main channels varied from about twelve inches deep and nine inches wide to roughly double this size, according to the amount of water it was calculated the drain would have to carry away. They were made of ordinary bricks cemented with mud-mortar, although in better-class work lime or gypsum, or both, was mixed with the mud in order to make it more watertight. The drains were generally covered over with loose bricks laid a few inches below the level of the soil, which could be easily lifted when it became necessary to inspect or clean the channel underneath. Exceptionally wide channels were spanned with roughly hewn limestone blocks or, more rarely, with very large bricks; the latter were, however, liable to break under pressure, which explains why stone was evidently preferred for this purpose.
c5.50
The rain-water and sewage from the various houses were usually not permitted to flow into the street drain direct, but had first to enter a sump or cess-pit in which was deposited the solid matter. When the sump was three-quarters full, the water flowed into the main drain, and by this method the street drains were prevented from overflowing. Some of the houses in the poorer part of the city evidently could not afford such costly brick cess-pits, and a large jar was used instead to receive the water; these jars sometimes had a hole in the base which allowed the contents to drain gradually away.
c5.51
Very long drain channels were sometimes provided at intervals along their length with capacious brick-lined sumps. Occasionally steps were built into the walls of these sumps so that they might be entered more easily, and all of them doubtless had stout wooden covers lying a few inches below the level of the street. An advantage of this system was that blockages in channels leading into, or out of, sumps could easily be cleared by means of rods, and periodical cleaning of this kind was probably carried out by municipal officials, who seem, on the whole, to have done their work well. Little heaps of material, mostly sand, have frequently been found lying alongside drainage channels, which shows that the débris was not always carted away when the drain was cleared.
c5.52
Where one drain entered another from a higher level, a little brick-lined pit was provided at the point of entry so that the water should not escape into the soil, and where a drain had to turn at an angle it was often slightly curved in order to prevent friction. Wedge-shaped bricks were used to make these curves, and after they were laid in position their inner surfaces were carefully rubbed smooth; indeed, much more care seems to have been taken over the drains than with some of the buildings above ground.
c5.53
As the level of a street rose, it was also necessary to raise the level of its drain. At first this was done without much expense by heightening the walls of the channel, but this process could not go on for any length of time, as the channel would then become too deep in proportion to its width. When the bed of a drain ultimately was too low down to be properly inspected and cleared, an entirely new channel was constructed on top of the old one; in many cases, however, all the bricks of the old drain were removed and re-used to build the new one.
c5.54
Another feature of the Indus Valley drainage system was the large brick culverts with corbelled roofs which were constructed on the outskirts of the city to carry away storm water, for much more rain fell in Sind five thousand years ago. The culverts, some as large as two and a half feet wide and between four and five feet high, had a channel of ordinary size in the floor to carry off the normal flow of water, while the larger area above only came into use at times of heavy weather. Their very fine masonry and clever workmanship make these culverts excellent examples of sanitary engineering, and they show to what a high degree of civilization their builders must have attained.
c5.55
Like all systems, however, the method of drainage adopted by the people of Mohenjo-daro had its limitations. In some cases it has been found that a drain was placed much too close to a well, so that a certain amount of seepage from one to the other must inevitably have taken place. Perhaps this was not so serious a matter as it sounds, especially if the well was in constant use, for the people of the city were, no doubt, more or less immune to typhoid; but a case of cholera in the vicinity of a well would have produced very serious results.
c5.56
Apart from the danger mentioned above, it is evident that Mohenjo-daro had an excellent water-supply, for brick-lined wells are a common feature, most of the larger buildings and houses having their own, to which the poorer people frequently had access. In the early days of the city it is probable that some of the wells were quite private, as there seem to be no means of reaching them from the street, but later on, as the population grew, they were thrown open to public use. The rooms in which the wells were situated were, as a rule, carefully paved, and the floor in many cases was marked with deep depressions where countless water-jars had been set down (Pl. B, b). Occasionally low brick platforms provided seats, and the sight of a knot of people gathered round a well waiting their turn to draw water and exchanging gossip meanwhile, must have been as common in Mohenjo-daro as it is in the East to-day.
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The coping of the well was generally only a few inches above the pavement, and, in the case of the larger ones, it is still deeply grooved by the friction of the ropes. As the drawer of the water usually stood straddle-legged over the well, the most convenient, and therefore the most ordinary, size was about three feet across, but wells have been found as small as two, and as large as seven feet in diameter. As the level of the city rose, the steering of the wells had to be raised from time to time, and, after the surrounding soil has been cleared away an inspection of its outer face, necessarily less carefully finished off than the inner one, provides valuable information concerning the upward growth of the city (Pl. E, a).
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Owing to the fact that the silt brought down by the Indus has raised the level of its bed and of the surrounding country by about fifteen to twenty feet in the past five thousand years, it has not been possible to excavate the wells to the bottom, nor to recover the various articles which must have been accidentally dropped into them. A few have been partially cleared and put into use again, but the level of the water at the present day is very considerably higher than it was in ancient times. These wells must have been a great danger to young children, yet only two have been found with copings sufficiently high to prevent a child from falling in. In several cases, it was found that the well had ceased to be used some time before the abandonment of the city, and in all probability this was because somebody had been drowned in it.
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Before closing this chapter a short account must be given of several interesting buildings unearthed at Mohenjo-daro, of which some have been briefly referred to earlier in this book.
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First must be mentioned a large structure at Harappa partly excavated by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni in 1924-5 and from then until 1928-9 by Mr. M. S. Vats, but of which no plan or detailed description has as yet appeared except in annual reports. This building, which has suffered considerably at the hands of brick-robbers, contains in its eastern portion twelve parallel walls, each about fifty-two feet long, arranged in pairs at intervals of some seventeen feet, with roughly five feet distance between each pair. The walls are in two series, a western and an eastern, divided by a broad way about twenty-three feet across.
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This great building, which at present extends about one hundred and sixty-eight feet from north to south and some hundred and thirty-four from east to west, may prove even larger when entirely excavated. The foundations of some of the walls, which are no less than nine feet thick, are composed of clay between retaining walls of burnt brick, while the walls themselves are of the latter material only. It is not yet known what purpose this building served, but it may have been a gigantic storehouse, whose design is singularly like a pictograph that frequently appears on the seals (Pl. M, 1). At all events, the details of its construction will give rise to much speculation when they are made public.
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At several street corners at Mohenjo-daro, buildings have been found whose large rooms have stoutly paved floors with shallow cup-like depressions in them of wedge-shaped bricks. These, too, would probably have been taken for storehouses, were it not that their prominent positions make it much more likely that they were used as restaurants, and that the depressions in the floors held large pottery jars of liquid. This theory seems to be substantiated by one particular building where a well-made flight of steps leads down from it into the street; here a smaller room adjoining, and communicating with, a large public one was fitted up as a kitchen. In these restaurants the inhabitants of the city probably met to combine gossip with eating and drinking, and the latest peccadilloes of the city fathers were doubtless retailed with gusto over rich food and the stronger kinds of drink.
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Some distance to the south of the stupa mound is a large building which was probably a feature of the commercial life of the city. This is a spacious hall, some eighty-five feet square, with a roof supported by twenty rectangular brick piers set with great accuracy in four rows of five piers each. Owing to later building, to alterations, and denudation, the ground-plan is somewhat confused, especially on the northern and eastern sides, which are close to the slope of the mound.
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The four well-paved aisles separated by the rows of columns are aligned north to south and there are unpaved strips about three and a half feet wide running between them. Raised benches must have originally stood along these strips, though all traces of them have now perished, and Sir John Marshall has compared this arrangement with the Buddhist rock-cut temples where the monks sat side by side in long rows. It is conceivable that the building was used for religious assemblies, but at the same time it is at least two thousand years earlier than any Buddhist structure, and the writer is more inclined to the view that it was intended for a large market-hall, with lines of permanent stalls along the aisles.
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To the west of the stupa, but in the same mound, is situated perhaps the most interesting building yet discovered at Mohenjo-daro. It was excavated by Sir John Marshall in the season 1925-6, and contains a large bath, built entirely of burnt brick and measuring thirty-nine feet three inches in length and twenty-three feet two inches in width (Pl. A). This bath can be entered at either end by means of a staircase with treads a little over nine inches wide and eight inches high, each tread being recessed at the ends to take a plank, which shows that the steps were originally covered with wood. Immediately below the foot of each stairway is a broad platform sixteen inches high and thirty-nine inches wide, which extends the width of the bath; this was perhaps intended for a safe bathing place for children. A paved walk, about fifteen feet across, which surrounded the top of the bath, rested on foundations composed of burnt brick cells filled with solid masses of clay, while round this promenade is a fenestrated wall whose upper portion has been badly damaged by denudation. The openings in the wall provided access to a cloistered walk seven feet wide which continues right round the bath, save only in the north-west corner; outside this cloister there is a series of chambers of various sizes.
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When the bath was emptied the water flowed through a small square hole in the south-west corner into a passage with a flat roof supported by transverse wooden beams. A vertical manhole at the western end made it possible to inspect and clear the passage. The water passed out thence through a culvert about two feet four inches wide, with a corbelled roof built high enough to allow a man of moderate height to walk through without stooping (Pl. C, a). Unfortunately the denudation of the mound prevented the final destination of this culvert from being discovered.
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A large well in a room to the east of the bath is accessible from a street alongside, as well as from the inside of the building. The water from this well may have been used to fill the bath, but it could have been obtained more easily by way of the culvert, whose height would thus be explained. By closing the outfall with a sluice, the culvert could have been refilled with clean water, which, by its own pressure, would have refilled the bath.
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To avoid the risk of water-logging, the burnt brick facing of the bath was backed by a layer of bitumen, and beyond this again was a thickness of puddled clay between two brick walls. Presumably the floor as well as the walls was so treated, but it is impossible to test this point without destroying a portion of the pavement, whose excellent state of preservation deprecates any damage being done to it. Despite these ingenious precautions, a small amount of subsidence has actually occurred, though not apparently destroying the water-tightness of the bath.
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North of this bath is a group of bathrooms of exceptional interest (Pl. B, a). These are eight in number, four north and four south of a passage with a drain along its centre to carry away the water. Each room is carefully paved and contains the remains of a stairway which led to an upper storey now destroyed, and another striking feature is the very narrow doorway giving on to the passage, which has jambs so thick that it would be extremely difficult for anyone to see into the room from outside; moreover, no door exactly faces another. The whole arrangement suggests that it was designed for members of a priestly order, each living in a cell above his bathroom, which he entered by his private staircase. The central passage was probably used by the servant whose duty it was to supply the water. A large oval well in a room in the south-east corner of the same building was the source of supply, and the grooves cut by the ropes which drew up the buckets are still seen in the well-preserved coping.
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As we have seen before, the presence of the great bath and the smaller bathrooms strongly suggests that bathing was a ritual of the people of Mohenjo-daro and that both priests and laymen had regular ablutions to perform at stated times of the day. The great bath, capacious as it is, could not have been used every day by the whole population; and since many of the houses had their own bathrooms and wells, it is far more likely that it was used only on certain ceremonial occasions, a suggestion which seems to be borne out by the close proximity of what is probably a sacred building beneath the stupa. Alternatively, the bath may have been used for sacred fish or crocodiles, but there is no evidence to support this idea, and, indeed, the whole design of the bath and its surrounding cloister, rooms, and corridors is against it. The two stairways, for example, would not have been needed for a crocodile-tank or sacred fish-pool, nor would it have been necessary to case the steps with wood.
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In the north of the city an even larger building has to be further excavated before its nature can be established. This structure, which is about two hundred and forty-two feet in length and one hundred and twelve in width and has outer walls over five feet thick, was bounded on the south and west by two very important thoroughfares. Its interior is filled with small roughly-built rooms which are clearly no part of the original design, and it does not seem likely that the place was ever used as a temple.
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A short distance south of it is what appears to be a palace—a large, straggling building of excellent masonry, arranged round two spacious courtyards, with servants' quarters, a number of storerooms and, in its earlier days, accommodation for metal-workers as well. It is about two hundred and twenty feet long and one hundred and fifteen feet wide, with walls in some places well over five feet thick; and, surrounded as it is by important streets, it seems to form an island in an otherwise undistinguished quarter of the city.
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As the alignment of its outer walls is unchanged from the surface to a depth of twenty-two feet—where the excavations at present cease—it is probable that this building was occupied for some three to five hundred years. Possibly it combined the residence of the governor with the administrative offices of the city; the fact that it kept its character for so long argues its importance. It is most unlikely that this building was a temple. It is entered from a narrow lane, as is the case with most of the houses, and has no less than three wells, two of which seem to have been entirely private.
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No evidence has as yet come to light to show that the Indus Valley people used foundation deposits, although this custom was very prevalent in Babylonia and in Egypt. It is unfortunate that nothing of this kind has been discovered at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, for where such deposits have been unearthed elsewhere they have greatly assisted the excavator to fix the date or history of a building. If only longer inscriptions than those which appear on the seals had come to light in the Indus valley, they might have supplied welcome information.
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It is true that the bricks seem to vary in size according to the level of the city, but here again the excavator is thwarted by so much old material reappearing in the upper levels; as before mentioned, stacks of bricks, obviously taken from derelict buildings, have been found in courtyards, waiting to be used again, and these bricks are of many varying sizes. The custom of burying bodies in or underneath the corners of walls, so that the spirit of the dead might protect the building, is also unknown in the Indus Valley cities, and from the little pictorial material extant it is quite impossible to say whether special ceremonies accompanied the laying of foundations, as was the case in contemporary Sumer and Egypt.
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Although in the material used and in the stability and carefulness of their construction these burnt-brick cities are certainly equal to any later work found in India or elsewhere, they are far from remarkable for beauty, refinement, or decorative value. One house is so like another, with its plain, unrelieved walls, that to the modern eye something seems sadly lacking in the mental and spiritual equipment of the builders. Except for occasional floods, there must have been little to upset the humdrum routine of these busy communities of traders, a state of affairs which doubtless brought about the atrophy of the artistic qualities of their members.
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Another aspect of the building activities of the Indus Valley people has lately been revealed by Mr. Majumdar after his examination of two sites in Sind, both in the narrow corridor between the Indus and the Baluchistan border. Here on rocky ground were two large settlements, each protected by massive stone fortifications. These two sites have not yet been thoroughly examined, but it would seem that one at least was guarded by a double wall built of rough boulders; at the other settlement the wall was built of roughly dressed blocks of stone averaging 2 × 1 × 1 feet in size. This latter fort, known as Ali Murad, commands a still much-used pass in the adjacent Kirthar Range, and its presence there provides additional proof that the Indus Valley cities were menaced by the tribes of Baluchistan.
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