Vast in civil service

Vast in civil service

The house were on the average quite large, with a central court and with few or no street windows but eith huts for watchmen rather like the chaukidars of modern India. Everything to do with furniture or indoor decoration is a matter of surmise. We may suppose that the Harappan sat cross – legged for meals, since this posture is well attested. Above all the Indus cities boasted splendid drains, better than anything to be found in India before the advent of Western amenities. These drains emptied into main sewers going the length of the streets and well covered, unlike those of eighteenth century London, with manholes at intervals. Strangely enough, in spite of the elaborate bathrooms there is little evidence of privies another example of the strange inequalities of this civilization.

We can picture to ourselves something of the everyday life of the Harappans, Because so much survives in the corresponding details of life today. We find wells in courtyards where servants gathered for gossip, and even one floor which may have been that of a restaurant. We can picture the men in boats like those of today, hunting and fishing, and we must imagine a vast civil service to organize the enormous labour involved in building and maintain the cities.

A unique contribution of this culture to art is the vast number of steatite seals – over 1.200 have been found at Mohenjo – Daro alone. Most of them are square in shape with sides of roughly an inch. They have a fine white lustrous surface and depict a wide range of animals, associated with signs in a pictographic script. The most common animal is an ox – like beast with apparently one horn, standing in front of a curious object which has been variously identified as a standard, a bird – cage and a sacred manger. We find the buffalo, tiger and rhinoceros all rendered with astonishing vividness and actuality.

Over Mohenjo - daro rose the citadel, agroup of
buildings on a huge man - made platform guarded
by walls and towers, all built of baked clay bricks
neatly laid, as the tower. The citadel's building
included a large ritual bath, 39 feet long, for the priests
and a great granary, placed there to be safe from floods
or attack.

Apart from the Mesopotamia retains a world priority and which must have been taken from there by the Indus planners, there are few but quite definite evidences of contact between Ur and the Indus cities before the time of Sargon of Akkad. These consist of Indus seals found at Ur and of fragments of Sumerian pottery at low levels at Mohenjo – Daro. Later we find bronze or copper Indus knives at Hissar and pins and objects of lapis lazuli at Ur. But there is by no means as much evidence as might be excepted.

Much of the leisure of this of his apparently peaceable civilization must have been given over to myth and ritual. Over each city frowned its central citadel, placed high on an elevated platform supported by great walls with access through great gates at the top of an inclined plane. On this high place at Mohenjo – Daro, is a great bath, a group of buildings which has been tentatively identified as a priest’s house or college, while near the bath are small rooms where probably the priests prepared themselves for their ritual. There is also a great hall and the remains of a vast building identified by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1950 as the city granary, with a landing stage down by the level where the Indus was. The size of the granary indicates that it was a main source of wealth, and below it in the city are the remains of rows of little rooms which may have been coolie – lines for there are rows of circular platforms near them for the pounding of grain into flour for bread.