Mohenjo-daro and Harappa
Cities built to a grid, in standard bricks, with drains along every street.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 600 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
The major Indus cities are laid out on street grids oriented to the compass, built from kiln-fired bricks in a consistent 1:2:4 ratio across sites hundreds of kilometres apart, with covered drains, rubbish chutes and wells. Mohenjo-daro's Great Bath is a watertight brick tank with a bitumen lining. The uniformity implies coordination on a scale that has to be explained, and the sanitation exceeds anything in the region again until the nineteenth century.