Extra Wheat on the Indus: A Village Council Debates

Surplus Along the Indus

1Farming villages appeared in the Indus River valley, in present-day Pakistan and northwest India, thousands of years before its cities. At Mehrgarh, people were growing barley and wheat and herding cattle, sheep and goats by about 7000 BCE. Each summer, melting mountain snow and heavy rains made the rivers flood and spread fresh silt over the fields.

2By about 2600 BCE, large cities such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro had grown up. Mohenjo-daro may have held tens of thousands of people, though estimates vary. Its brick streets were laid out in a grid, and many houses had their own wells and drains. Farmers in the surrounding villages raised wheat, barley and cotton, and their extra grain fed people in the cities.

3Archaeologists have found workshops where craft workers made pottery, copper tools and stone seals carved with animals and short lines of writing that no one has yet been able to read. At a town called Chanhudaro, bead makers drilled long beads of red carnelian stone. Experiments suggest a single long bead could take days of drilling. Merchants weighed goods with stone cubes made in a standard set of sizes.

4Indus goods traveled far. Indus seals and carnelian beads have been found in cities of Mesopotamia, more than 1,000 miles away. Mesopotamian writings mention ships from a land called Meluhha, which many historians think was the Indus region.

5Most houses at Mohenjo-daro were built of baked brick. Some have many rooms around a courtyard, while others have only one or two rooms. Part of the city stood on a raised mound with large public buildings, including a brick pool now called the Great Bath. Archaeologists have not found palaces or grand royal tombs, so they still debate who led these cities and how sharply people were divided into classes.

The council meets

1A wheat farmer: This year our fields gave far more wheat than our families can eat. Let us build one shared storehouse of mud brick. From it we can feed two families who will make beads and copper tools full time instead of farming.

2A bead maker: If I spend every day drilling carnelian instead of working in the fields, my beads will be finer than any part-time worker's. Merchants in Harappa will trade copper tools for them, and with copper tools our farmers will work faster.

3A herder: Look at the records. The river does not give the same harvest every year. In a bad year the storehouse will be empty, and the craft families will have no fields of their own to fall back on.

4An elder: Whoever holds the key to the storehouse will decide who eats first. Before long, that family will live in a house of many rooms, and the rest of us will work for them.