The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c10.43

c10.43

Nor at Harappā need we look far for other details of the picture. The serried lines of circular platforms for the pounding of grain, and nearby the municipal or state granaries themselves, sufficiently suggest the occupation of the barrack-dwellers. Here (we may imagine) the flow of grain, doubtless the principal source of civic wealth, was regulated and distributed by government officials with their clerks and labourers; and the picture will be amplified when we find that at Mohenjo-daro the Great Granary was in the citadel itself (p. 31). In both instances we may fairly assume that the granaries were replenished by a system of state-tribute, and that in some measure they fulfilled in the state economy the function of the modern state-bank or treasury. In a moneyless age, their condition at any given moment must have reflected, however partially, the national credit and the efficiency or good fortune of the administration. In the Tigris-Euphrates Valley all the important cities possessed granaries, often of considerable size. Some were attached to temples, others were situated on the banks of canals (compare the Harappā complex) or dispersed in other parts of the cities. A text from Ur¹ implies that one of the granaries stored enough barley to provide wages for 4020 days; another text¹ refers to the commandant of the granary who was responsible for seeing that 10,930 man-days’ payment was made out of his store, presumably in barley, to meet the wages of workers from the town: the workers included scribes, overseers, shepherds and irrigators. Another text² refers to royal barley, to be returned with interest, received by Lulamu from the granary of the canal-bank. All these documents are of *c.* 2130–2000 B.C., which is unlikely to be far from the optimum period of the Harappan civilization. Other examples could be given. Another tablet of the same period³ records a harvest gathered from certain fields belonging to the temple of Nan-she in Lagash. Here we have an account of five different granaries and the quantity of grain stored in each, amounting (if Nies is correct in his assessment of the *Ur* measure) to a total of about two tons. So too in Egypt. The White House or treasury of Upper Egypt had a granary as one of its chief sub-departments for the collection of taxes in kind or “labour”,⁴ and the monarch would have his own granary for the collection of the revenues of his domain.⁵ Unfortunately for comparative purposes no very satisfactory archaeological equivalents are forthcoming. In Mesopotamia, we cannot point to any buildings which were exclusively used as granaries, although the excavator suspected that the palace of Naram-Sin, *c.* 2300 B.C., at Brak in central Syria was in part used as a granary,⁶ and remarked that a building not altogether dissimilar in plan at Ashur, perhaps some centuries later in date, was probably used for a similar purpose, as indeed were many of the rooms contained within the early Sumerian and Babylonian temples. But there is at present no granary in the pre-classical world comparable in specialization of design and in monumental dignity to the examples from the two Indus cities.