RISING FROM THE FLOODPLAINS of Pakistan’s Sindh Province is a 750-acre testament to Bronze Age labor and ingenuity. This almost impossibly orderly city, now known as Mohenjo-Daro, is set on mudbrick platforms that were built up over the years to mitigate the danger posed by floods from the Indus River. It has a grid plan, covered sewers, and many tidy homes with shared walls. The city’s largely undecorated buildings are set at precise right angles. The order of Mohenjo-Daro, which may have been home to 40,000 or more people, stands up to close scrutiny. Nearly every one of the millions of fired clay bricks used to build the city comes in one of two sizes and has exactly the same proportions: one unit high, two units wide, and four units long. The same width-to-length ratio appears in the design of the houses and in the large, walled enclosure covering 20,000 square feet that may have been the city’s center of public life.
This high degree of standardization, which was first implemented nearly 5,000 years ago, does not appear only in Mohenjo-Daro, but across the Indus River Valley and beyond, in what is now Pakistan and western India, from coast to mountains, delta to desert. It is apparent in some 1,500 sites spread out over 300,000 square miles, from major cities such as Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, and Dholavira, to small farming hamlets. One might imagine that the level of cooperation required to achieve this magnitude of order would have to have been dictated from on high by an all-powerful ruler served by a bureaucracy of elites. But some scholars believe that the standardization of Indus buildings came about in
