CHANHU-DARO— MACKAY 477 



Sumerian sites, but insufficient numbers have been found at the 

 Indian sites to warrant the assumption that they were put to a lilve 

 use. They may have been cult objects, or even skittles to be knocked 

 over with marbles; I am inclined to regard them as the former, for 

 they appear among the motifs on some of the painted pottery. 



A largo number of chert weights, carefully made and polished, 

 form part of the Museum collection. They are nearly always cubi- 

 cal, and they belong to a definite system, with the simple ratios 1, 

 2, 4, 8, etc. In weight thej^ vary remarkably little from those found 

 at Mohenjo-daro, and similar weights from Harappa, more than 400 

 miles NE. of Chanhu-daro, have the same actual weights according 

 to their respective sizes, proof that the authorities of those days 

 exercised strict supervision over this very necessary adjunct of trade. 

 Indeed, it is probable that some of the more carefully finished weights 

 exhibited in the Museum were master weights by which others could 

 be tested and rectified. 



In the uppermost level of the Harappa culture there were but few 

 intact buildings, though relics of houses and an extensive drainage 

 system were found in this stratum all over Mound II. The occupa- 

 tion level below was in a better state of preservation, and streets 

 and lanes, each with its houses and drains, were more or less intact 

 and could be satisfactorily planned. Remains of a still earlier oc- 

 cupation were revealed in the upper part of a large cutting that was 

 made in the western side of the mound to test the strata below (pi. 7, 

 fig. 2), and at still lower levels were found traces of other occupations 

 until the subsoil water prohibited any further digging. One very 

 striking feature of these occupation levels in Mound II was that each 

 was separated from those below and above by a considerable lapse of 

 time. At Mohenjo-daro one occupation followed on another in swift 

 succession, the later builders simply using the walls of their prede- 

 cessors as foundations, thus preserving the alinement of the streets 

 and houses over a very long period. At Chanhu-daro quite a consid- 

 erable amount of debris separated the two uppermost Harappa occu- 

 pations, and the buildings in the stratum next below these two were 

 orientated quite differently from those above them. Indeed, we found 

 ample evidence that it was destructive floods that caused the city to 

 be deserted for considerable periods of time, during which large quan- 

 tities of bricks were removed to build elsewhere. The walls of the 

 three upper occupations of the Harappa culture had in some cases 

 been so undermined by flood water, and tilted by the consequent 

 subsidence, that we had to remove the upper parts to avoid risk of 

 their falling on our workers. Even the brick flooring of rooms had 

 subsided here and there. We at first thought that this irregularity 

 of the walls was due to earthquake; but, had that been so, the rooms 

 would have contained fallen bricks. At least three floods, the third 

 of which was perhaps the great flood that led to the desertion of 



