Mohenjo-daro

We don't even know that 4,500 years ago, humans were nomadic, pastoral, agriculture was not developed.

The first traces happened to be in Babylon, happened to be in the Mohenjo Daro region.

Right.

And this is the first time we've seen advanced civilisations, megalithic structures, agriculture, etc.

home to cities with advanced drainage systems and standardized weights and precise city planning, a civilization that thrived for centuries and then, seemingly, just stopped.

We're talking about skeletons found in the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, lying in positions that some researchers have controversially claimed suggest sudden catastrophic death.

We're talking about submerged coastal ruins near modern Dwarka, a city mentioned in ancient texts as being swallowed by the sea.

Two mysteries tangled together, impossible weapons described in sacred literature and impossible disappearances written into the archaeological record.

The cities themselves.

Harappa.

Mohenjo-daro.

Dolavira.

Good idea.

We are starting our journey in the Indus Valley civilization around 2600 to 1900 BCE at the archaeological site of Mohenjo-daro.

A massive, incredibly advanced ancient city.

Absolutely.

We don't know their language.

for a civilization that lasted two thousand years and covered an area larger than ancient egypt and mesopotamia combined we know almost nothing about how they actually lived think about that for a second the harappan civilization as archaeologists call it had a population estimated at five million people at its peak five million that's more people than lived in all of ancient egypt during the old kingdom they built over one thousand four hundred settlements including massive cities like mohenjo-daro and harappa with populations reaching forty thousand or more these weren't primitive villages these were planned cities with grid layouts advanced drainage systems public baths and multi-story buildings they were doing urban planning that wouldn't be matched in europe until the roman empire and yet when you walk through a museum and look at egyptian artefacts you can read the hieroglyphs understand the religious texts know the names of pharaohs and the stories of their gods But when you look at Indus Valley seals with their mysterious symbols, all you get is silence.

Beautiful, intricate, maddeningly silent.

The archaeological evidence of Harappan sophistication is everywhere once you start looking.

Mm.

They're saying, "Ham, ham log Harappa ke bare mein kyun nahi baat karte hain? Why don't we talk about Mohenjo-daro?"

Mm-hmm.

We just don't, you know? And, uh, they are saying that, "Iske liye paise chahiye honge.

Most Romans never had all four.

But a resident of Mohenjo-daro in 2600 BCE had a toilet hole that flushed with a jar of water into a covered brick drain that ran to a soap pit.

That's closer to a modern system than anything London had in 1850.

almost every house at harappa and mohenjo-daro had a private bath and toilet area more than seven hundred wells at mohenjo-daro alone the upper story bathrooms ran through enclosed terra-cotta pipes into the street drains and the drains had inspection holes at regular intervals that's not a society figuring out sanitation That's a society that already treats it as infrastructure.

The skeptic's note here is worth keeping.

Shireen Ratnagar wrote a paper with a title that sounds like a podcast episode in itself.

The drainage systems at Mohenjo-daro and Nausharo, a technological breakthrough or a stinking disaster.

Her point is that finding drains doesn't tell you what flowed through them or how well they

But water isn't just for drinking and eating.

Like, those of you who remember the Indus Valley episode recall that Mohenjo-daro featured a giant basin that we called the Great Bath, which historians believe had a ritual function.

And even if it didn't, bathing is important for keeping clean.

You know, one of the things that we use water for is sanitation and hygiene.

It's, you know, coming from the US, we think something built in the 1800s is pretty old, right? And then you go to Europe, and it's like things built in the 1300s.

But I went to Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan, which is 4000 years old.

It's just a whole nother scale of time there.

Yeah, it kind of reframes your, I don't know.

It moves.

The big, dense urban centres of the western Indus, places like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, start to shrink.

Monumental public works and meticulous street grids give way to more haphazard building.

Some neighbourhoods are abandoned, while others get reoccupied in smaller, more informal ways.

And this is where we have to zoom our camera away from the famous brick cities of the Indus and look at the countryside that surrounded them.

Because cities can die while people do just fine.

One of the big patterns archaeologists see in the centuries around, and after 2200 BCE, is what they call ruralisation – large urban centres of the Indus world – Big, gridded places like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa lose population, see public works fall into disrepair, and eventually stop being maintained at all.

If you just walked those ruins, you could tell yourself a familiar story.