Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.16

c12.16

The absolute uniformity in the products of the Harappā Culture cannot wholly be explained by a rigidly enforced set of laws. There must have been a strongly established commercial code and a standardized technique of production which could control the sizes of bricks, the capacity and type of pots (turned out on the wheel in a variety of depressingly utilitarian forms), and the system of weights and measures. At Mohenjo-daro itself the strict observance of street frontages through successive centuries of the town’s rebuilding implies heredity of land tenure and trade such as might lie in guilds and a caste system. At Harappā we shall see that the agricultural output was under municipal control, with great granaries strangely foreshadowing those of the Roman Army. In the absence of any effective grinding machinery, flour was produced by organized grain-pounding by coolie labour, which was housed in miserable rows of identically planned two-roomed cottages. There is a terrible efficiency about the Harappā civilization which recalls all the worst of Rome, but with this elaborately contrived system goes an isolation and a stagnation hard to parallel in any known civilization of the Old World, though perhaps not without comparable situations in the New, among the ancient South and Central American civilizations.