Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.84

c7.84

But first the principal characters of the Civilization may be recalled. Both at Harappā and, more clearly, at Mohenjo-daro excavation has revealed the general shape of the great cities in their prime and decadence. At the earliest period known to us, they were already rigorously planned in regular rectangular blocks, each measuring about 400 by 200 yards, divided from one another by broad main streets, and containing methodically drained lanes and buildings. So far as present evidence goes, they possessed no general system of urban fortification, though there is the possibility that at Mohenjo-daro an ancient embankment designed to restrain the Indus floods may be of this period. The recent report that Lothal in Kāthiāwād, a similarly regimented coastal township of the same Civilization, had been protected after a flood-disaster by an embankment upwards of eight feet high is incorrect.⁵¹ On the other hand, both Harappā and Mohenjo-daro were dominated by an embattled acropolis or citadel, occupying a marginal block and built up with mud and mud-brick to a height of forty or fifty feet above the featureless plain with a revetment of baked brick. Upon this acropolis were ritual buildings and places of assembly. That at Mohenjo-daro also carried the State Granary, which must have been the economic focus of the régime; at Harappā, less known to us, equivalent or supplementary granaries were marshalled on the lower ground between the acropolis and the river. From its acropolis we may suppose that each city was regarded by rulers who may on general probability have had priestly attributes but, as their well-ordered towns and evolved dwellings imply, were essentially secular in outlook; sufficiently benevolent or far-sighted, at the least, to nurture an uncommonly high general standard of living,∗ and at the same time sufficiently authoritative to ensure that this general standard was long maintained. In this sense the contrast with Pharaonic Egypt, where, under a totalitarian god-bound administration, civic life in any liberal usage of the phrase scarcely existed, is manifest, To the nearer analogy of Mesopotamia we shall turn in a moment.