MOHENJO-DAKO — MACKAY 435 



dence points to floods being at all events the predisposing cause of 

 the population going elsewhere. 



The evidence that the city suffered ver}'^ badly from the devastating 

 effect of floods and that the inhabitants lived in constant dread of 

 them is overwhelming. Wherever you walk in the excavated streets 

 and lanes, you see walls that lean precariously — the tops of some have 

 had to be removed lest they fall upon the diggers at their work — 

 and others which have sunk, so that the courses of the bricks wave 

 up and down. Quite often, indeed, when a house fell into ruin its 

 walls were filled up with mud brick to make a platform, on which 

 the new house would be moderately secure from flooding. Yet oft- 

 times the water penetrated into these artificial platforms, especially 

 where there was any admixture of the rubble of broken brick and 

 potsherds, of which so much is seen in the latest strata of the city. 



If one pictures the people of Mohenjo-daro as dependent only on 

 their fields for supplies, the annual floods from the Indus would 

 have been a veritable godsend to them, bringing the fertilizing silt 

 for the wheat, which the examination of carbonized grains found in 

 the ruins has proved them to have grown, as well as for other crops. 

 But they were also traders, as their seals bear witness ; and to be iso- 

 lated even for a short period would have proved disastrous. In 

 years of exceptional flood they were probably driven, as are the 

 people of the two modern Sindhi towns, Shikarpur and Larkana, 

 from time to time, to leave their city and take refuge temporarily 

 elsewhere. To such evacuations of the city perhaps may be ascribed 

 the two great breaks in the continuity of occupation which are ap- 

 parent. Merely the threat of such an upheaval a few times within 

 a short space of years would have sufficiently urged a change of site. 



Again, the river may have shifted its bed, as it did in the summer 

 of 1927, when from a distance of over 4 miles away it came to within 

 3 miles of the ruins. The blow that it would have been to the city's 

 trade, if the river had suddenly left its quays — for the Indus, or a 

 branch of it, seems to have flowed beside the city in the days of its 

 prosperity — can be imagined. Ur and other Sumerian cities met 

 with that fate and fell. 



Pestilence may also have been a contributory cause of the fall of 

 Mohenjo-daro. It is a settled policy in India to-day that a village 

 stricken with plague is temporarily abandoned; and if most of its 

 inhabitants fall victims to the disease, which they may take away 

 with them, the village is perhaps never reinhabited. The hoards of 

 jewelry, and copper and bronze tools and weapons that have been 

 found below floor level strongly suggest that their owners buried 

 them for safety during a temporary absence, but never returned to 

 retrieve them. 



149571—33 29 



