Page 34 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

J --------- ’ --------- O------------- ---------XiUUUlUU
miles from the sea. And the upper Indus is ruled from Harappa,
almost five hundred miles farther to the northeast.
They are large cities by the standards of the time. It takes a
full thirty minutes to walk from one end to the other, even along

the broad thoroughfares which divide the cities into regular
blocks. A visitor from Memphis or from Ur, used to the winding

haphazard streets, broken by the colorful fronts of temples, of
his native city, would find these wide straight dusty avenues,
with their central drains and endless windowless facades of

whitewashed brick houses, outlandish in the extreme, and highly
monotonous. But the cosmopolitan crowd that throngs the streets
knows no other type of city, and in any case the variegated cos­

tume of the inhabitants does much to relieve the austerity of
the architecture. Many races are to be seen here: wool-clad Mon­
gols from the northern hills; and dark, almost negroid, Dravidians

in cotton robes from the south; beak-nosed Armenoids; and
sallow dark-haired individuals who would not have excited re­

mark on the shores of the Mediterranean.
The monotony of the buildings is broken by the massive
walls of the citadel, rising, both at Harappa and at Mohenjo-

daro, to the west of the town. The citadel is not merely the cen­
ter of government. It is also the center of religion, and of trade

and taxation. A countryman, entering Mohenjo-daro from the
west, climbs up a steep staircase in the thickness of the citadel
wall and, pausing for breath at the top, can see to his left the

massive bulk of the municipal granary. There, on the ramp be­
low, four-wheeled oxcarts are unloading sacks of wheat and bar­

ley, and perhaps bales of cotton, to be swung up on ropes to
the granary floor above. He does not regard the grain merely as
a food reserve. It is the universal medium of payment, and the

granary is national bank and state revenue department in one,
and therefore has its natural place in the citadel (or at Ha­

rappa close by). From where the visitor stands he cannot see the
rows of brick grinding floors, where municipal workers pound
the grain to the flour in which payment is generally made, but

he knows that they must be hard by. He begins, on his way
into the town beyond, to see the other state buildings of the cita­

del, the great bath lying between the granary and the temple,