434 ANISrUAL EEPOKT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 2 



above the level of the oft-recurring floods. Streets and open spaces 

 there were, carefully planned out so that the buildings form rectangu- 

 lar blocks; and there is evidence that by-laws existed whose observ- 

 ance was enforced. To the sanitation of the city a degree of 

 attention was paid that is surprising, and to the elaborate drainage 

 system further reference will be made. 



Of the outskirts of the city, our knowledge is at present somewhat 

 dim. No walls and fortifications had been definitely located when 

 the book on the excavations up to 1927 was written. The remains 

 of city walls would now lie almost wholly buried beneath the thick 

 deposit of alluvium that the Indus has spread over all its valley 

 in the course of the ages. Their burnt-brick facings would in any 

 case have served as " brick mines " for near-by villages of later days, 

 as the vast ruins of Babylon have done. On the other hand, the 

 walls of Mohenjo-daro may not have been built on any very massive 

 scale. There is a curious lack of evidence of the raiding and de- 

 struction to which most cities of those days seem to have been sub- 

 jected. There are no quarters of the city as yet excavated which 

 were systematically destroyed by fire ; nor is there a great variety or 

 quantity of weapons found. A few spearheads, blade axes, mace 

 heads, and sling balls have been found, but all these may have served 

 more peaceful purposes, or have been used for protection against 

 brigands, as are the axes which the Sindhis of to-day carry about 

 with them in the jungle paths. The modern Sindhi also shoots 

 clay pellets from a bow to protect his crops from marauding birds. 



Though in cutting a well, masonry has been found at a depth of 

 some 26 feet below the general level of the plain, so that it is hard 

 to tell how far out from the present mounds earlier occupations of 

 the city extended, it is possible to delimit the latest city by the 

 presence of brick fields which must have lain outside the dwelling 

 quarters. These lie chiefly to the northeast and southeast of the 

 city, which implies that the prevailing winds, then as now, were 

 westerly. Potters' kilns, too, lay nearer in to the center of the 

 mounds in the latest period of the city's occupation. Indeed, in view 

 also of the fact that the masonry of the latest levels is markedly 

 inferior to that of the deeper earlier strata, it is clear that a definite 

 dwindling in both size and imi^ortance had set in before the city was 

 finally abandoned. 



Why the city should have been abandoned it is hard to say. There 

 are many possible reasons — flood, pestilence, or the attacks of ene- 

 mies; or the river may suddenly have changed its course and left 

 the city cut off from communication with the other cities of India, 

 and elsewhere, with which it had been wont to trade. There are 

 arguments for or against all these reasons, but the sum of the evi- 



