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Moenjodaro Most of us have grown up, knowing of the Indus Valley Civilisation as the dawn of history on this sub-continent. Nothing, however, had quite prepared me for the mind boggling realization that I was actually standing on the ancient bricks that had been fired right here more than 4000 years ago by living people who worked, slept, ate and drank within these very walls ! I walked up to the Citadel and looked down upon the remains of the city stretched before me, bisected by straight streets into neat, right-angled blocks of houses, roughly 360 X 200 metres in size, within which ran a network of narrow lanes. To think that a thriving civilization existed when the rest of the world, barring Mesopotamia, Egypt and China lived in caves ! I was transported through time and space and a whirl of images came hurtling at me through the mists of antiquity. Walking along the 10 metre wide main street, split into two by a straight, covered drain with the early morning breezes wafting through, the picture vividly emerges of a thriving society where a mix of people go about their business. Some are fair with aquiline features of the Mediterranean type, some have broad noses, thick lips and dark skins and a few have narrow eyes and Mongolian features. A street stall offers water to the thirsty from earthen pitchers and the clay cups are thrown on the ground after use, as we do with our kulhars today. Prosperous merchants are hurrying about their business with their seals of ownership tied to their wrists or hung like medallions around their necks, perhaps followed by a bevy of slaves carrying bundles on their heads. Pedestrians make way for a loaded bullock cart or two, much like the ones in India today, enroute to the civic granary on the Citadel as some merchant’s contribution to tax, since grain is their currency. I arrive at the wood structured granary, high on its brick platform, with its triangular ventilation ducts clearly visible. Grain is being hauled up by pulleys to the level platform where a scribe has it weighed according to standard cubic weights and the quantity is duly noted in decimals before being sent inside for storage. His script is pictographic and there is much we could learn if we were able to decipher it today. Nearby, on this well fortified citadel, is the Great Bath where the High Priest sits in a large hall receiving supplicants, while the rest of the crowd awaits his summons in the verandah outside. Two storeys of rooms are ranged around the Great Bath behind the verandahs. Others are taking their ritual bath in the great tank before repairing to the wooden temple which stands just where the present Buddhist stupa was built 2000 years later. The deity in the temple is reminiscent of Shiva in the yogic attitude of meditation and priestesses dressed in ankle length robes attend to the ceremonies. The water in the Great Bath is clear and sweet after it has been filtered through a double walled well with sand between the vertical sides. The tank is emptied periodically through a high, corbelled drain for regular cleaning and repairs made when necessary to its bituminous lining. This is a popular meeting place as are the temples of latter day India. I follow a merchant home along the main street between rows of brick walled houses, windowless in its monotony and turn left on to a side street, narrower and featureless except for entrance doorways. The streets are clean and brick paved and I step over the drain in the middle which carries waste water away, cascading down the chutes from within the houses. Separate chutes empty refuse into a covered dump on the street which will be cleaned out by the sanitary squad. Civic amenities here are superior to those in our modern day towns. The merchant enters his two storeyed house into an open courtyard surrounded by rooms. The upper storey is of wood and the lower floor is constructed of baked brick, mud plastered on the inside. Corbelled niches in the rooms hold oil lamps and articles of every day use. The merchant has brought terra cotta toys for his young son, full of fun and whimsy - a monkey on a stick, funny faces of clay and a weighing scale to start the young one in his father’s trade. His wife emerges, short skirted all a-tinkle with bangles and armlets, earrings and rows of bead necklaces of steatite, lapis lazuli and faience with gold insets. Her hair is elaborately coiffured with copper pins and drawn in at the nape of her neck. The merchant doffs his cotton robe, which he wore draped around one shoulder. Water is drawn from his personal well in the courtyard and after taking his bath standing up, as we do in India even today, from a balti, he combs his beard and shoulder length hair before sitting down to his evening repast. A feast has been spread before him of chicken, wheat cakes, peas cooked in sesame oil, yoghurt spiced with mustard seed, followed by sliced melon and dates. He talks of his anxiety over his last consignment of cotton from Mesopotamia, via Baluchistan, from where his agent will arrange to send lapis lazuli and copper from Afghanistan and deodar wood from the high mountains on the return journey. His wife complains about the dampness in the walls of their house from the imminent monsoon rains. The Indus river has been flooding year after year, leaving behind a trail of devastation. They, like their neighbours, had raised the level of their house over the old foundations but the ground water level has been rising constantly and left them quite weary of this continuous process of building and rebuilding. Family health has also suffered and sapped their energy. Lower down and further away from the citadel area, the workmen’s quarters stretch out in serried ranks of two-roomed brick tenements. Within the narrow lanes there is a bustle of activity. Some are pounding grain in the circular mortars sunk into the floors of their huts. Fowl scrabble on the earthen floors and a goat or two is tethered in some courtyards. Dogs prowl the streets in search of scraps and a cat waits poised for the kill near the street well. Those with more space on the outskirts of the city have kept pigs, cows and buffaloes for milk and bullocks to till their fields of wheat, barley, millet and cotton with smaller plots on the side for vegetables. If they are lucky, they can barter for fish from the river people who ply their flat bottomed boats on the Indus river. The river people benefit much from navigation but are afraid of the time of floods when the river is treacherous. Few venture into the dense jungle beyond, alive with tiger, elephant, rhinoceros, crocodiles in the marshes, deer and the chatter of monkeys. Birds abound and peacocks strut in the glades. Fine clay is brought from the river bank and formed in wooden moulds before being sun dried and fired in kilns outside the city. Care is taken that the size and quality of bricks is uniform as the law for standard weights and measures is very strict. In fact, the norm has been maintained for centuries in all of the cities along the valley of the Indus. There are specialists in throwing wheel turned pottery as well as those who shape graceful urns and jars and paint them with soot black in geometrical designs and lithe animal motifs before firing. One lovingly shaped by hand a votive mother goddess. Others specialize in the making of seals which they finely incise with symbols of the fertility cult and realistic animal forms, particularly the dewlapped bull. They also make seals from steatite which are precisely carved with chisels before being heated and polished. Each potter stamps his wares with his own seal. Elsewhere, stone masons chisel flat axes which they haft into split ends of wood for handles and bind tightly together. Some have graduated to stone portraiture of important personalities which are tactile and realistic. They, like the bronze casters, are artists breathing life into their raw materials. The portrait of a young dancing girl, pert and saucy, is a masterpiece indeed. The bronze casters also make knives, swords and axes, fish hooks and copper pins. The blades are relatively soft as they are ignorant yet of iron. A carpenter sits at the door of his house, holding a piece of wood between his toes which he cuts with a fine toothed saw. A funeral procession passes by on its way to the cemetery outside where the deceased will be buried with his head to the north in a wooden coffin, together with some of his personal effects and clay vessels. Over this secure and ageless society rules the benevolent Priest King, conservative and predictable, as little has changed over the last few hundred years. The city is smug and stable, though of late population pressures have increased and consequently lowered the general standards of living. The main worry has been the constant, yearly flooding of the Indus river and the steady encroachment of the desert which has made agriculture difficult and put a strain on the economy. Few realize that with the gradual denudation of forests to feed the brick kiln fires, this was inevitable. Large tracts of Mohen-jo-daro have still not been excavated as the high water table has made it impossible to dig deeper that 10 metres, so the earlier levels of civilization are still unknown. To preserve what has been excavated so far, as the ancient bricks are being damaged through excessive salinity, 29 bore wells have been sunk around the perimeter of the city to lower the water table, with the assistance of the UNESCO and the Government of Pakistan. Perhaps, when further excavations are carried out, they will throw more light on our fascinating forbears. |