Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.90

c12.90

Following normal oriental customs, the outside walls of houses fronting the streets were as featureless as possible and broken only by doorways. These had an average width of about 3 feet 4 inches, and normally had flat timber lintels, though some were corbelled. Practically no trace of windows was found, even in well-preserved walls, and they were probably very high in the room and small, with gratings of which some fragments in stone survived. Marshall commented on the forbidding blank walls of brick which front one today in the excavated streets of Mohenjodaro, and aptly compared the site to the ruins of a Lancashire industrial quarter – even with plaster and colour the smaller lanes and alleyways must have been strange and secret places to walk in.