Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Adam S Green

doi:10.1007/s10814-020-09147-9

Abstract

The cities of the Indus civilization were expansive and planned with large-scale architecture and sophisticated Bronze Age technologies. Despite these hallmarks of social complexity, the Indus lacks clear evidence for elaborate tombs, individual-aggrandizing monuments, large temples, and palaces. Its first excavators suggested that the Indus civilization was far more egalitarian than other early complex societies, and after nearly a century of investigation, clear evidence for a ruling class of managerial elites has yet to materialize. The conspicuous lack of political and economic inequality noted by Mohenjo-daro’s initial excavators was basically correct. This is not because the Indus civilization was not a complex society, rather, it is because there are common assumptions about distributions of wealth, hierarchies of power, specialization, and urbanism in the past that are simply incorrect. The Indus civilization reveals that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity.

Highlights

There is nothing that we know of in prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro
Archaeological data from South Asia have greatly improved since the Indus state debate that culminated in the 1990s (e.g., Petrie 2019; Ratnagar 2016; Shinde 2016; Wright 2018); numerous Indus sites are known to archaeologists, and the environmental contexts in which South Asia’s first urbanization and deurbanization occurred are much clearer
Class in particular, archaeologists have honed a strong set of arguments about mortuary data, palace assemblages, aggrandizing monuments, and written records (Feinman 1995), and efforts are underway to develop similar indices for household data as well (Kohler and Smith 2018)

Summary

Introduction

There is nothing that we know of in prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. Large-scale investments in labor are used to infer the concentration of wealth in the hands of a ruling class, whether or not there is evidence for that class This is doubly unfortunate, as the best lesson to be derived from collectivity in the archaeological record is that there appear to have been many different ways of governing complex societies. 76) advocated the state-level position, critiquing the “stateless” paradigm’s reliance on trait lists developed in other social contexts but suggesting that a lack of evidence for a ruling class in the Indus civilization was the result of vagaries in archaeological excavation and recording, not the actual absence of a ruling class In his view, the presence of craft specialization was enough to place the Indus civilization into the state category and to infer stratification without direct evidence, a position that was foreshadowed in a growing body of work on craft production at Mohenjo-daro (e.g., Vidale 1989).

Discussion

Conclusion

Bibliography of Recent Literature