154 Part III: South Asia
istan, though now the languages of the northern states are all Indo-European.
Or were they the Aryans, the Indo-European-speaking writers of the Vedas, the
foundational documents of Hinduism, as some argue? We will return to this
question shortly.
They certainly had a well-organized and centrally planned society, but
what kind of political order was responsible for this is not clear from the
archaeological record. They had a script, but what ideas—if any—were cap-
tured by it is unknown because the script has never been deciphered. The reli-
gious ideas that motivated their lives have left traces only in rough sculptural
form. It is tempting to guess what ideas might lie behind the ruins, sculptures,
and seals, but they are only guesses.
The cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were the most modern cities of
their time. They were built on a grid plan, with a broad north-south street
bisected by narrower east-west streets. Houses built on these streets were often
large and multiroomed with windowless exterior walls, inner courtyards, and
flat roofs. Such houses are the main house style in much of India to this day,
allowing family life to be lived in inner privacy in the courtyard and, on hot
nights and cool winter days, on the rooftop. Many had private interior wells
with outlets in several rooms of the house. Bathrooms were built against an
exterior wall, with sloping floors and chutes that drained bathwater to the lane
outside. From there, sewage was disposed through brick-lined covered channels
to cesspits outside the city. This water and sanitation engineering was
unmatched prior to the last few centuries, and there are Indian towns today
that do not match it.
You might think a society this technologically advanced would be able to
write its language. Contemporary civilizations had this knowledge: Sumerians
had developed cuneiform and Egyptians had hieroglyphics, both of which can
now be read. Early Chinese civilization, which developed later, also had a
script that can be read today. And Indus Valley traders must have known of
cuneiform writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics. But Indus Valley Civilization
does not appear to have advanced far along this route. All known samples of
Indus script come from some 2,000 seals and a bit of graffiti on pottery. These
“seals” were terra cotta rectangles an inch or two in dimension. Most seals
carry two types of inscription: charming images of animals or seated figures,
and abstract figures that look like possible writing (see box 5.2).
There are 419 to 676 characters with 200 in frequent use (Robinson 2015).
Over a hundred efforts have been made to translate them, none of them yet suc-
cessful. Most scholars agree there are too many characters to be an alphabetic
script like ours, and not enough for a logographic one like Chinese. If the char-
acters formed an actual language, it may have been a logo-syllabic script like
Sumerian cuneiform. But there are no true texts; the longest string of charac-
ters is a mere 26 signs, and the average is more like five or six. Thus it is
unlikely that the script was used to express complex ideas. Possibly the inscrip-
tions were names of merchant families used to identify goods in long-distance