The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c11.s1.8

c11.s1.8

Of the excavated buildings within the citadel, the most famous is the Great Bath or Tank, which has often been described (fig. 7 and pl. VIII A). It is 39 ft. long from north to south, 23 ft. broad and sunk 8 ft. below the paving of a courtyard on to which, on all four sides, a corridor opened through ranges of brick piers or jambs. The floor of the bath is approached from the north and the south by flights of brick steps formerly furnished with timber treads set in bitumen or asphalt, presumably obtained from known deposits in the Baluchistan foothills. At the base of the northern staircase was a low platform and a small further step. To ensure that the bath was watertight, the floor was of bricks set on edge in gypsum mortar; the sides were similarly mortared, and behind the facing-bricks was an inch thick damp-proof course of bitumen held by a further wall of brick which was in turn retained by mud-brick packed between it and an outer baked-brick wall. Near the south-west corner was an outlet admitting to a high and imposing corbel-arched drain (pl. X A) which wound down the western side of the citadel-mound. At the back of three of the enclosing verandas are ranges of rooms, in one of which is a large double-lined well wherefrom the bath was doubtless supplied. In another a staircase led to a former upper story or flat roof, represented perhaps by the "quantities of charcoal and ashes" found in the course of the excavations. Later, the northern end of the building was filled in solid, at a time when building-levels were everywhere rising at Mohenjo-daro, in step perhaps with the steadily rising level of the alluvial plain. Further north, across a lane, was a block which included eight small bathrooms arranged in two rows on each side of a passage along which ran a drain. These bathrooms, each about 9½ × 6 ft., had been carefully and solidly built, with finely jointed brick floors, drained by runnels communicating with the main drain in the passage. Every room, in spite of its minuteness, contained a brick staircase which, in view of the thickness of the walls, led probably to an upper story rather than merely to the roof. The doorways were disposed so that none opened opposite any other, thus securing privacy. The whole structure suggests an extension of the function of the adjacent Great Bath; the excavator was inclined to regard it as having "provided for the members of some kind of priesthood", who lived in the rooms above and descended at stated hours to perform the prescribed washings, whereas the general public performed their ablutions in the Great Bath itself.¹ At any rate it is a fair supposition that the whole complex related to the religious life of the city or its rulers. In modern [Figure: MOHENJO-DARO SD. AREA TANK SECTION