🤯 Did You Know (click to read)
Mohenjo-Daro had multi-story homes with private bathrooms over 4,000 years ago.
Around 2500 BCE, Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley Civilization was a marvel of urban planning, complete with grid streets, standardized bricks, and indoor plumbing that Europe would not match for millennia. The city’s sanitation system was so advanced that nearly every home had access to drainage. But maintaining that infrastructure required constant centralized authority and labor coordination. When climate shifts reduced monsoon rains, agricultural output faltered, straining the system. Without surplus food, maintaining drains, brick kilns, and trade networks became unsustainable. As flood patterns shifted along the Indus River, rebuilding became repetitive and exhausting. Over time, the city appears to have gradually depopulated rather than dramatically destroyed. Its very sophistication may have made it brittle when environmental stress arrived.
💥 Impact (click to read)
The irony is striking: the more complex a system becomes, the more maintenance it demands. Mohenjo-Daro’s standardized bricks required enormous amounts of fired clay, which in turn demanded fuel and organized labor. When environmental instability hit, the city could not simply downsize without breaking the systems that made it exceptional. Imagine a modern metropolis losing power but still having to maintain subway tunnels and sewage plants. The collapse was less a fiery apocalypse and more like a slow municipal budget crisis that lasted generations. Archaeologists find layers of rebuilding that suggest exhaustion rather than invasion. The decline feels eerily modern in its bureaucratic fragility.
This pattern challenges the popular idea that ancient cities fell only to war. Instead, Mohenjo-Daro suggests that environmental change plus administrative overload can quietly hollow out even the most advanced urban centers. The collapse also demonstrates how tightly early mega-cities depended on predictable climate systems. When rivers shifted course, entire neighborhoods became impractical. The people did not vanish; they dispersed into smaller settlements. In a sense, the city dissolved into villages. Civilization did not end, but mega-urbanism did.
Source
Archaeological Survey of India reports on Indus Valley urban decline
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