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.