The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c10.40

c10.40

Now, setting aside the furnaces in the southern part of the site as relics of a later and irrelevant phase, we may glance at the lay-out of the area as a whole. Be it repeated that its units consist of (i) ranges of barrack-like quarters within a walled compound, (ii) serried lines of platforms apparently for pounding grain, and (iii) a marshalled array of uniform granaries within easy reach of the (former) river. The barracks recalled to the excavator the workmen’s village at Tell el Amarna,¹ and he might have added comparable villages at Deir el Medineh, Kahun or Gizeh.² But the resemblance is not in reality very close. These Egyptian villages did in fact consist mostly of tiny uniform houses ranged in lines within an enclosing wall, and so far the comparison holds good. But an essential feature of them is their careful isolation. At Tell el Amarna (1369–1354 B.C.) the village, designed to house the tomb-makers, was tucked away out of sight, a mile from the fringe of the city. The village of Deir el Medineh (in and after the sixteenth century B.C.), similarly occupied by the tomb-makers of the Valley of the Kings, lay apart in a lonely and arid hollow. The villages at Kahun and Gizeh were the barracks of pyramid builders. In all these there was doubtless an appreciable degree of compulsion, though the borderline between that and the endemic regimentation of Egyptian life and death is hard to fix. But it may be affirmed of the Harappans that they at least had no excessive concern with mortality, and, whatever the function of the occupants of their compound, this was certainly integral with their daily life. Full in the public eye, and more especially in that of the rulers on the citadel, there was nothing furtive in the little Harappan cantonments. Rather might it reflect a servile or semi-servile element of the sort familiar in the theocratic administrations of Sumer: where the temple of the Moon God Nannar at Ur might administer within its precincts, in the name of god and the state, a cloth-factory employing ninety-eight women and sixty-three children, or the temple of Bau at Lagash might control twenty-one bakers with twenty-seven female slaves, twenty-five brewers and six slaves, female wool-preparers, spinners and weavers, a male smith and other artisans and officials. This kind of labour organization, with a measure of compulsion never far away, might best perhaps be called in to explain the Harappan lay-out.