Fast-forward now 1,000 years from the Uruk expansion to around 2600 BC. On the banks of the Indus River, in what is today the Pakistani province of Sindh, a city was founded on virgin soil: Mohenjo-daro. It remained there for 700 years.83 The city is considered the greatest expression of a new form of society that flourished in the valley of the Indus at the time; a form of society which archaeologists have come to know simply as the ‘Indus’ or ‘Harappan’ civilization. It was South Asia’s first urban culture. Here we will find further evidence that Bronze Age cities – the world’s first large-scale, planned human settlements – could emerge in the absence of ruling classes and managerial elites; but those of the Indus valley also present some uniquely puzzling features, which archaeologists have debated for more than a century.84 Let’s introduce both the problem and its key locus – the site of Mohenjo-daro – in a little more detail.
On first inspection, Mohenjo-daro bears out its reputation as the most completely preserved city of the Bronze Age world. There’s something staggering about it all: a brazen modernity, which was not lost on the first excavators of the site, who didn’t hesitate to designate certain areas ‘high streets’, ‘police barracks’ and so on (though much of this initial interpretation, as it turned out, was fantasy). Most of the city consists of the brick-built houses of the Lower Town, with its grid-like arrangement of streets, long boulevards and sophisticated drainage and sanitation systems (terracotta sewage pipes, private and public toilets and bathrooms were ubiquitous). Above these surprisingly comfortable arrangements loomed the Upper Citadel, a raised civic centre, also known (for reasons we’ll explain) as the Mound of the Great Bath. Though both parts of the city stood on massive artificial foundations of heaped earth, lifting them above the floodplain, the Upper Citadel was also encased in a wall of baked bricks made to standard dimensions which extended all the way round it, affording further protection when the Indus broke its banks.85
In the wider ambit of Indus civilization, there is only one rival to Mohenjo-daro: the site of Harappa (whence the alternative term ‘Harappan civilization’). Of similar magnitude, it lies about 370 miles upstream on the Ravi River, a tributary of the Indus. Many other sites of the same date and cultural family exist, ranging from large towns to hamlets. They extend over most of the area of modern-day Pakistan, and well beyond the floodplain of the Indus, into northern India. For instance, perched on an island amid the salt flats of the Great Rann of Kutch lie the striking remains of Dholavira, a town equipped with over fifteen brick-built reservoirs to capture rainwater and run-off from local streams. The Indus civilization had colonial outposts as far as the Oxus River in northern Afghanistan, where the site of Shortugai presents a miniature replica of its urban mother-culture: ideally placed to tap the rich mineral sources of the Central Asian highlands (lapis, tin and other gemstones and metals). Such materials were prized by lowland artisans and their commercial partners as far away as Iran, Arabia and Mesopotamia. At Lothal, on Gujarat’s Gulf of Khambhat, lie remains of a well-appointed port town facing the Arabian Sea, presumably built by Indus engineers to service maritime trade.86 The Indus civilization had its own script, which appeared and vanished together with its cities. It has not been deciphered. What survives to us are mainly short captions, stamped or incised on storage jars, copper tools and the remnants of a lonely piece of street signage from Dholavira. Short inscriptions also feature on tiny stone amulets, captioning pictorial vignettes or miniature animal figures, carved with striking precision. Most of these are realistic depictions of water buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, tiger and other local fauna, but they also include fantastic beasts, most often unicorns. Debate surrounds the amulets’ function: were they worn as personal identifiers, for passage through the city’s gated quarters and walled compounds, or perhaps to gain entry to ceremonial occasions? Or were they used for administration, to impress identifying signs on commodities passing among unknown parties: a Bronze Age origin of product-branding? Could they be all of these things?87
Aside from our inability to make sense of the Indus script, there are many puzzling aspects of Harappa and Mohenjo- daro. Both were excavated in the early twentieth century, when archaeology was a large-scale and broad-brush affair, with sometimes thousands of workers digging simultaneously. Rapid work on this scale produced striking spatial exposures of street plans, residential neighbourhoods and entire ceremonial precincts. But it largely neglected to chart the site’s development over time, a process that can only be disentangled with more careful methods. For instance, early excavators recorded just the baked-brick foundations of buildings. The superstructures were of softer mud-brick, often missed or unwittingly destroyed in the course of rapid digging; while the upper storeys of large civic structures were originally of fine timber, rotted or removed for reuse in antiquity. What seems in plan to be a single phase of urban construction is, in reality, a false composite made up of different elements from various periods of the city’s history – a city inhabited for over 500 years.88
All of which leaves us with plenty of known unknowns, including the city’s size or population (recent estimates suggest up to 40,000 residents, but really we can only guess).89 It’s not even clear where to draw the city boundaries. Some scholars include only the immediately visible areas of the planned Lower Town and the Upper Citadel as part of the city proper, yielding a total area of 100 hectares. Others note scattered evidence for the city’s extension over a far greater area, maybe three times this size – we’d have to call them ‘Lower, Lower Towns’ – long since submerged by floodplain soils: a poignant illustration of that conspiracy between nature and culture which so often makes us forget that shanty dwellers even exist.
But it’s this last point that leads us in more promising directions. Despite all its problems, Mohenjo-daro and its sister sites in the Punjab do offer some insights into the nature of civic life in the first cities of South Asia, and into the wider question that we posed at the start of this chapter: is there a causal relationship between scale and inequality in human societies?
Let’s consider, for a moment, what archaeology tells us about wealth distribution at Mohenjo-daro. Contrary to what we might expect, there is no concentration of material wealth on the Upper Citadel. Quite the opposite, in fact. Metals, gemstones and worked shell – for example – were widely available to households of the Lower Town; archaeologists have recovered such goods from caches beneath house floors, and bundles of them are scattered over every quarter of the site.90 The same goes for little terracotta figures of people wearing bangles, diadems and other flashy personal adornment. Not so the Upper Citadel. Writing, and also standard weights and measures, were also widely distributed across the Lower Town; so too evidence for craft occupations and industries from metalworking and potting to the manufacture of beads. All flourished down there, in the Lower Town, but are absent from the city’s Upper Citadel, where the main civic structures stood.91 Objects made for personal display had little place, it seems, in the most elevated quarters of the city. Instead, what defines the Upper Citadel are buildings like the Great Bath – a large sunken pool measuring roughly forty feet long and over six feet deep, lined with carefully executed brickwork, sealed with plaster and bitumen and entered on either side via steps with timber treads – all constructed to the finest architectural standards, yet unmarked by monuments dedicated to particular rulers, or indeed any other signs of personal aggrandizement.
Because of its lack of royal sculpture, or indeed other forms of monumental depiction, the Indus valley has been termed a ‘faceless civilization’.92 At Mohenjo-daro, it seems, the focus of civic life was not a palace or cenotaph, but a public facility for purifying the body. Brick-made bathing floors and platforms also were a standard fixture in most dwellings of the Lower Town. Citizens seem to have been familiar with very specific notions of cleanliness, with daily ablutions apparently forming part of their domestic routine. The Great Bath was, at one level, an outsized version of these residential washing facilities. On another level, though, life on the Upper Citadel seems to negate that of the Lower Town.
So long as the Great Bath was in use – and it was for some centuries – we find no evidence of industrial activities nearby. The narrowing lanes on the acropolis effectively prevented the use of ox-drawn carts and similar commercial traffic. Here, it was the Bath itself – and the act of bathing – that became the focus of social life and labour. Barracks and storerooms adjacent to the Bath housed a staff (whether in attached or rotating service, we cannot know) and their essential supplies. The Upper Citadel was a special sort of ‘city within the city’, in which ordinary principles of household organization went into reverse.93
All this is redolent of the inequality of the caste system, with its hierarchical division of social functions, organized on an ascending scale of purity.94 But the earliest recorded reference to caste in South Asia comes only 1,000 years later, in the Rig Veda – an anthology of sacrificial hymns, first committed to writing around 1200 BC. The system, as described in later Sanskrit epics, consisted of four hereditary ranks or varnas: priests (brahmins), warriors or nobles (kshatriyas), farmers and traders (vaishyas) and labourers (shudras); and also those so lowly as to be excluded from the varnas entirely. The very top ranks belong to world-renouncers, whose abstention from trappings of personal status raises them to a higher spiritual plane. Commerce, industry and status rivalries may all thrive, but the wealth, power or prosperity being fought over is always seen as of lesser value – in the great scheme of things – than the purity of priestly caste.
The varna system is about as ‘unequal’ as any social system can possibly be, yet where one ranks within it has less to do with how many material goods one can pile up or lay claim to than with one’s relation to certain (polluting) substances – physical dirt and waste, but also bodily matter linked to birth, death and menstruation – and the people who handle them. All this creates serious problems for any contemporary scholar seeking to apply Gini coefficients or any other property-based measure of ‘inequality’ to the society in question. On the other hand, and despite the great gaps in time between our sources, it might allow us to make sense of some of Mohenjo-daro’s otherwise puzzling features, such as the fact that those residential buildings most closely resembling palaces are not located on the Upper Citadel but crammed into the streets of the Lower Town – that bit closer to the mud, sewage pipes and paddy fields, where such jostling for worldly status seems to have properly belonged.95
Clearly, we can’t just project the social world evoked in Sanskrit literature indiscriminately on to the much earlier Indus civilization. If the first South Asian cities were indeed organized on caste-like principles, then we would immediately have to acknowledge a major difference from the system of ranks described over a millennium later in Sanskrit texts, where second-highest status (just below brahmins) is reserved for the warrior caste known as kshatriyas. In the Bronze Age Indus valley there is no evidence of anything like a kshatriya class of warrior-nobles, nor of the kind of aggrandizing behaviour associated with such groups in later epic tales such as the Mahabharata or Ramayana. Even the largest cities, like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, yield no evidence of spectacular sacrifices or feasts, no pictorial narratives of military prowess or celebrations of famous deeds, no sign of tournaments in which anyone vied over titles and treasures, no aristocratic burials. And if such things were going on in the Indus cities at the time, there would be ways to know.
Indus civilization wasn’t some kind of commercial or spiritual arcadia; nor was it an entirely peaceful society.96 But neither does it contain any evidence for charismatic authority figures: war leaders, lawgivers and the like. A small, cloaked sculpture made of yellow limestone from Mohenjo-daro, known in the literature as the ‘priest-king’, is often presented as such. But, in fact, there’s no particular reason to believe the figure really is a priest-king or an authority figure of any sort. It’s simply a limestone image of an urbane Bronze Age man with a beard. The fact that past generations of scholars have insisted on referring to him as ‘priest-king’ is testimony more to their own assumptions about what they think must have been happening in early Asian cities than anything the evidence implies.
Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley. Can we speak, then, of ‘egalitarian cities’ here as well, and if so, in what sense? If the Upper Citadel at Mohenjo-daro really was dominated by some sort of ascetic order, literally ‘higher’ than everyone else, and the area around the citadel by wealthy merchants, then there was a clear hierarchy between groups. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that the groups themselves were hierarchical in their internal organization, or that ascetics and merchants had a greater say than anyone else when it came to matters of day-to-day governance.
Now, you might at this point be objecting: ‘well, yes, technically that may be true, but honestly, what’s the chance that they weren’t hierarchical, or that the pure or the wealthy did not have greater say in running the city’s affairs?’ In fact, it seems very difficult for most of us even to imagine how self-conscious egalitarianism on a large scale would work. But this again simply serves to demonstrate how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative in which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together (and, by implication, that something called ‘democracy’ emerges only much later, as a conceptual breakthrough – and most likely just once, in ancient Greece).
Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.97 We could speculate about where this habit of thought comes from, but it wouldn’t help us to decide if the everyday governance of early Indus cities could have proceeded on egalitarian lines, alongside the existence of ascetic social orders. It is more useful, we suggest, to level the interpretive playing field by asking if there are cases of such things happening in later, better-documented periods of South Asian history.
In fact, such cases are not difficult to find. Consider the social milieu from which Buddhist monasteries, or sangha, arose. The word sangha was actually first used for the popular assemblies that governed many South Asian cities in the Buddha’s lifetime – roughly the fifth century BC – and early Buddhist texts insist that the Buddha was himself inspired by the example of these republics, and in particular the importance they accorded to convening full and frequent public assemblies. Early Buddhist sangha were meticulous in their demands for all monks to gather together in order to reach unanimous decisions on matters of general concern, resorting to majority vote only when consensus broke down.98 All this remains true of sangha to this day. Over the course of time, Buddhist monasteries have varied a great deal in governance – many have been extremely hierarchical in practice. But the important thing here is that even 2,000 years ago it was not considered in any way unusual for members of ascetic orders to make decisions in much the same way as, for example, contemporary anti-authoritarian activists do in Europe or Latin America (by consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote); that these forms of governance were based on an ideal of equality; and that there were entire cities governed in what was seen to be exactly the same way.99
We might go further still and ask: are there any known examples of societies with formal caste hierarchies, in which practical governance nonetheless takes place on egalitarian lines? It may seem paradoxical but the answer, again, is yes: there is plenty of evidence for such arrangements, some of which continue to this day. Perhaps best documented is the seka system on the island of Bali, whose population adopted Hinduism in the Middle Ages. Balinese are not only divided by caste: their society is conceived as a total hierarchy in which not just every group but every individual knows (or at least, should know) their exact position in relation to everyone else. In principle, then, there are no equals, and most Balinese would argue that in the greater cosmic scheme of things, this must always be so.
At the same time, however, practical affairs such as the management of communities, temples and agricultural life are organized according to the seka system, in which everyone is expected to participate on equal terms and come to decisions by consensus. For instance, if a neighbourhood association meets to discuss repairing the roofs of public buildings, or what to serve for food during an upcoming dance contest, those who consider themselves particularly high and mighty, offended by the prospect of having to sit in a circle on the ground with lowly neighbours, may choose not to attend; but in that case they are obliged to pay fines for non-attendance – fines which are then used to pay for the feast or the repairs.100 We currently have no way of knowing if such a system prevailed in the Indus valley over 4,000 years ago. The example merely serves to underscore that there is no necessary correspondence between overarching concepts of social hierarchy and the practical mechanics of local governance.
The same is, incidentally, true of kingdoms and empires. One very common theory held that these tended to first appear in river valleys, because agriculture there involved the maintenance of complex irrigation systems, which in turn required some form of administrative co-ordination and control. Bali again provides the perfect counter- example. For most of its history Bali was divided into a series of kingdoms, endlessly squabbling over this or that. It is also famous as a rather small volcanic island which manages to support one of the densest populations on earth by a complex system of irrigated wet-rice agriculture. Yet the kingdoms seem to have had no role whatsoever in the management of the irrigation system. This was governed by a series of ‘water-temples’, through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex system of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves.101
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