In 1924, when John Marshall announced the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation, he described the street layout at Mohenjo-daro and noted that the city's main arteries ran due north-south and east-west, dividing the settlement into rectangular blocks — a grid. He was describing something that scholars of classical antiquity had celebrated in Hippodamus of Miletus (5th century BCE) as a revolutionary innovation. The Harappan engineers had done it fifteen hundred years earlier, and on a far larger scale.
The Two-Part City: Citadel and Lower Town
The most consistent feature of Mature Harappan cities is their division into two distinct zones. The Citadel (also called the Acropolis or Upper Town) is a raised platform to the west — typically 6 to 12 metres higher than the surrounding terrain, built on a massive mud-brick podium and surrounded by a thick defensive wall with towers. At Mohenjo-daro, the citadel mound rises about 12 metres and measures approximately 400 metres north-south and 200 metres east-west. The citadel housed the most important public buildings: the Great Bath, the possible granary complex, and what Wheeler interpreted as a collegiate building.
The Lower Town lies to the east of the citadel and is where the bulk of the residential and commercial life occurred. It is in the lower town that the famous grid streets and the elaborate drainage network are found. The lower town at Mohenjo-daro covered roughly 200 hectares and may have housed 40,000–80,000 people at its peak. This two-part form — raised public/administrative zone and lower residential zone — is consistent across Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Kalibangan, Banawali, and most other major Mature Harappan sites.
Grid Streets and Urban Layout
The lower town was laid out on a roughly grid pattern, with main streets running approximately north-south and east-west. Main roads at Mohenjo-daro were about 9 to 10 metres wide — wide enough for two bullock carts to pass. These principal arteries divided the city into large rectangular blocks (insulae), which were then further subdivided by narrower lanes of 1.5 to 3 metres width providing access to individual houses.
A critical UPSC testing point about street layout: Harappan houses typically had their doors and windows facing the side lanes, not the main street. The walls facing the main road were largely blank, broken only by drainage outlets. This design prioritised privacy and reduced street noise — a deliberate urban design choice, not accidental. Some scholars interpret this as evidence that the main streets were functional arteries (trade, traffic) rather than social spaces.
Which one of the following is NOT a feature of Harappan towns?
The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro
The Great Bath is located on the citadel mound of Mohenjo-daro and is the most famous and most discussed structure of the entire Indus Valley Civilisation. It is a large rectangular tank measuring approximately 12 metres long, 7 metres wide, and 2.4 metres deep, constructed of carefully fitted baked bricks. Between the brick layers, a coating of bitumen (natural tar/asphalt) was applied as a waterproofing layer — a technically sophisticated solution that kept the tank watertight. Wide staircases at the north and south ends led down into the pool. A series of rooms surrounded the bath on three sides, possibly changing rooms or priests' quarters.
The purpose of the Great Bath is debated but most scholars believe it was used for ritual purification — a collective bathing ceremony of religious significance. This connects the IVC to the later Hindu tradition of ritual bathing in temple tanks (pushkarinis) and sacred rivers. The fact that the bath is located on the citadel (with public buildings, not in the residential lower town) strongly implies an official or religious rather than recreational function.
The Great Bath also connects to a broader pattern visible in Harappan religion and symbolism: water and purification appear to have been central concerns, manifested in the elaborate drainage system, the ubiquity of house bathrooms, and the wells found in almost every residential block.
Granaries and Public Buildings
Adjacent to the Great Bath on the Mohenjo-daro citadel is a large structure that Mortimer Wheeler initially identified as a granary — a massive storage facility for grain. It measures approximately 55 metres by 37 metres and features a series of brick plinths with narrow passages between them (interpreted as ventilation channels to prevent grain from rotting). Wheeler compared it to the state granaries of ancient Egypt as evidence of centralised economic control.
However, subsequent scholarship has questioned whether this structure was truly a granary. No grain has been found inside it, and the identification rests primarily on its large scale and the ventilation-like passages. Some scholars now suggest it may have been a large assembly hall or administrative building rather than a granary. At Harappa, a separate complex of circular working platforms and a row of barracks near a possible granary suggest an organised processing system for grain or other commodities.
The Drainage System
The Harappan drainage system is justifiably one of the most discussed features of the civilisation because it demonstrates a level of civic engineering and social organisation unmatched in the ancient world for its period. Every major Harappan city had a comprehensive network of covered brick drains running alongside the streets, connected to individual house drains through small covered openings.
The system worked as follows: wastewater from bathroom floors and kitchen areas in individual houses drained through small brick-lined channels into the main street drain. Street drains ran alongside the main roads under removable brick-slab covers (which could be lifted for cleaning and maintenance). The main drains then led outside the city walls to soakage pits or discharge points. Almost every house — even small ones — was connected to the drainage network, suggesting that sanitation was a universal expectation rather than a privilege of the wealthy.
The sophistication of Harappan drainage is most clearly demonstrated by comparison: neither ancient Egypt nor ancient Mesopotamia developed comparable urban drainage infrastructure at this time period. Roman sewer systems (the Cloaca Maxima, 6th century BCE) are often cited as the first systematic urban drains in Western history, almost two thousand years after Harappan drainage. This comparison is a standard UPSC framing point.
Residential Architecture
Harappan residential architecture reflects consistent planning principles across the civilisation. Houses were built around a central courtyard — open to the sky — which provided light, ventilation, and a private domestic space. Rooms surrounded the courtyard on some or all sides. The courtyard also served as the social centre of household life.
Most houses had at least one bathroom — a paved area with brick floors sloped to drain wastewater into the street drain system. This is significant: the provision of bathrooms as a standard residential feature (rather than an elite luxury) is not found in any other ancient civilisation of comparable age. Many houses also had private wells — some excavations have found evidence of multiple wells per city block.
The relative equality of house sizes across the lower town — with no single structure dramatically larger than others — has been interpreted as evidence of relative social equality, or at least a relatively uniform standard of living across the urban population. There are no identified "palaces" in any Harappan city, though some houses are clearly larger than others. Ground floors appear to have been used for storage and craft activity; upper floors (traces of staircases exist) for living. First floors and roofs were likely residential.
Which of the following is/are the characteristic/characteristics of the Indus Valley Civilisation?
- It was built of baked bricks
- The towns had well-planned drainage systems
- The people used iron
Select the correct answer using the code below:
Standardised Bricks
The Harappan bricks are kiln-fired to high hardness — not merely dried in the sun. But what makes them truly distinctive is their standardisation: across thousands of kilometres of the IVC's territory, from Harappa in Punjab to Lothal in Gujarat to Dholavira in the Rann of Kutch, bricks consistently maintained the same ratio of 1:2:4 (thickness : width : length). The actual dimensions varied between different sites and contexts (larger bricks for city walls, smaller for houses), but the ratio remained constant.
This standardisation across an area larger than modern Western Europe implies either a strong central authority imposing uniform building standards, or — more plausibly — a widely shared and rigorously maintained cultural norm about the "right" way to make a brick. It stands in striking contrast to Mesopotamian mudbrick construction, which was site-specific. Harappan bricks also appear to have been manufactured in large-scale kilns at or near the major cities, implying specialised brick production rather than individual house-builders making their own.
The Absent Temple
One of the most important and perennially debated features of Harappan urban architecture is what is not there: a clearly identifiable temple or palace. In Mesopotamia, the ziggurat complex — a massive stepped temple with the deity's earthly residence at the summit — was the physical and spiritual centre of every major city. In Egypt, the temple and tomb dominated the landscape. In the IVC, no building of comparable religious grandeur has been identified.
This absence has produced several interpretations. Some scholars argue the Great Bath itself functioned as a religious centre. Some propose that religion was conducted in smaller household shrines (terracotta figurines are found in domestic contexts). Some argue that a fire altar complex at Kalibangan suggests fire worship comparable to Vedic yajna. Others propose a merchant-republic governance model in which no single theocratic ruler commanded monumental temple construction.
The absence of a temple is connected to another absence: there are no clearly identifiable royal tombs, no inscribed monuments proclaiming a king's name, and no war imagery in Harappan art. The contrast with Egypt and Mesopotamia — where kings built for immortality — is so striking that it has led many scholars to question whether the IVC had a recognisable state at all in the conventional sense. The religion and script article explores what the seals and figurines do tell us about Harappan belief.
Exam Takeaway Four UPSC-critical facts from this article: (1) Harappan house doors/windows faced SIDE LANES, not main streets — this is directly tested; (2) Iron was NOT used in the IVC — it is a Bronze Age civilisation; iron comes with the later Vedic period; (3) the Great Bath waterproofing material is bitumen (natural tar), not cement; (4) the brick ratio is 1:2:4 (standardised across the civilisation). Bonus fact often tested: the IVC had NO confirmed temple and NO identifiable royal palace or tomb — the absence of these is as important as what is present.