Did the Indus Valley Civilization Solve Inequality? New Evidence from Mohenjo-daro

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]4,000 years ago, one of the world's first major cities arose along the Indus River. Mohenjo-Daro had planned streets, sophisticated drainage systems, standardized construction, and a population numbering in the tens of thousands. According to traditional scholarship on ancient societies, cities like this should also produce extreme inequality with powerful elites, royal palaces, and concentrated wealth.

[00:00:29]But a new study published in Antiquity suggests the exact opposite may have happened at Mohenjo-Daro.

[00:00:38]Using excavation data and Gini coefficient analysis, I will explain what that is later, researchers argue that inequality in Mohenjo-Daro may actually have declined as the city grew larger and more prosperous. So, how did one of the Bronze Age's most advanced urban societies avoid the levels of hierarchy seen in Egypt and Mesopotamia?

[00:01:01]Did the Indus civilization organize itself in a totally different way? And what do the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro tell us about urban life in that part of the ancient world?

[00:01:15]>> [music] >> The ruins of Mohenjo-Daro were first excavated during the early 20th century.

[00:01:24]There archaeologists uncovered an enormous Bronze Age city with planned streets, mortared brick houses, wells, drainage systems, and sophisticated urban infrastructure dating back more than 4,000 years. This Bronze Age city was a part of the Indus civilization, also known as the Harappan civilization, which flourished at the same time as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

[00:01:49]Over the following decades, archaeologists exposed major parts of the city, including the famous Great Bath, granary structures, residential districts, and a central marketplace. It was divided into two sections, an elevated mud-brick mound referred to as the citadel and a lower city. The settlement was surrounded by huge mud-brick walls with guard towers.

[00:02:14]Many different artifacts excavated from Mohenjo-Daro help us to understand the day-to-day life of the inhabitants. They left behind copper and stone tools, carved figurines, seals, weights and scales, ivory rulers, jewelry, and children's toys, as well as lots of pottery. The city was abandoned around 800 years after it was founded, and it's not clear why. Some scholars think repeated floods made the area uninhabitable.

[00:02:42]The Indus civilization had its own written script, which has only been partially deciphered. These symbols have mostly been found on stamp seals, pottery, weapons, tools, and bronze and copper plates. It's not clear if the roughly 400 symbols identified so far made up a fully fledged writing system.

[00:03:01]The Pashupati seal excavated from Mohenjo-Daro is one of the most complicated ones to have been found. It has seven Indus script symbols at the top, as well as a human figure surrounded by wild animals. For a long time, archaeologists have debated how socially stratified Mohenjo-Daro really was. Some scholars argue that a city this complex could only have been organized through a state-like system, while others believe it functioned more like a chiefdom. More recent research into its urban planning and labor systems has led many archaeologists to describe the civilization as heterarchical or polycentric, meaning power may have been shared across multiple groups rather than concentrated under a single ruler or elite class.

[00:03:49]What makes Mohenjo-Daro unusual is that unlike ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the archaeological evidence doesn't clearly point to powerful kings, royal palaces, or a rigid social hierarchy.

[00:04:04]The aim of this new study was to move past these qualitative interpretations and test these ideas using quantitative evidence instead. The Global Dynamics of Inequality, or Gini project, was designed to analyze the long-term history of human wealth and inequality.

[00:04:23]In the context of Mohenjo-Daro, the new study uses its coefficient to analyze residential disparity. Now, of course, this is not a perfect way of understanding inequality. For example, it doesn't take into account people who did not have residences. However, it does help to test ideas on this subject and pose new questions related to it.

[00:04:44]It's also important to remember that some of the excavations at Mohenjo-Daro were carried out in the early 20th century, meaning the archaeological record isn't always complete or consistent across the site. And because this study focuses on residential disparity, essentially comparing the size of houses, there's also some debate over what should actually be classified as a residence in the first place.

[00:05:07]Analysis of other ancient cultures in the Gini database shows that the potential for economic inequality increased over time, but that egalitarianism was persistent.

[00:05:19]Sometimes, inequality could exist at different levels within the same societies, and residential disparities could be lower within a single neighborhood than across the city that the neighborhood was a part of.

[00:05:31]The database shows that high levels of productivity actually produced low levels of inequality, but over hundreds of years, this inequality increased.

[00:05:42]It's generally thought that the size of a residence reflects income or wealth.

[00:05:46]So, the average size of a residence in a particular sample should equal the mean income or wealth of that sample. An increase in the size of the average residence over time would then reflect economic growth. Excavations and geophysical surveys over the years have revealed that Mohenjo-Daro was made up of hundreds of rectilinear houses, many with bathing platforms and private wells, as well as large non-residential buildings that lacked features associated with a seat of authority.

[00:06:17]The houses appear to have become more uniform over time, eventually aligning with the street pattern. And this is relevant when looking at the statistical analysis of inequality as well. In the study, 309 residence areas were used to calculate Gini coefficients for Mohenjo-Daro in the Gini database.

[00:06:38]I won't go into the mathematics behind the number that is the Gini coefficient, but put simply, zero means equality. So, the further you get from zero, the more unequal the area under analysis becomes.

[00:06:51]Overall, the residential disparity at Mohenjo-Daro yielded the Gini coefficient of 0.44.

[00:06:59]Compare that to the Minoan site of Knossos in Greece of 0.86, and the classical Maya site of Palenque of 0.75, and you see that inequality was lower at Mohenjo-Daro than at these other ancient sites. This makes sense because we know from the rest of the archaeological record that Knossos and Palenque were hierarchical.

[00:07:21]Other contemporaneous cities in West Asia, Ur and Uruk, scored 0.6, so higher in terms of inequality than Mohenjo-Daro, but lower than Knossos and Palenque. However, does this mean that the Gini coefficient of 0.44 is egalitarian per se? It's certainly less egalitarian than earlier Neolithic settlements, which usually have a Gini coefficient of 0.2 or lower.

[00:07:52]Going into more detail, the researchers noticed that residential disparity at Mohenjo-Daro varies depending on the location within the site and the chronology of a particular residential area.

[00:08:04]The sub areas HR and DKG North both have coefficients of 0.44, similar to the overall score. Each of them has buildings that may not have been residences, including one that could have been another great bath, and 16 smaller ones that may have been shops.

[00:08:23]In some areas, the coefficients are lower, which may be because of a lack of public buildings or because these particular neighborhoods had lower perceived inequality compared to the rest of the city. In the sub area labeled as DKG South, previous work was done well enough that a clearer chronology exists compared to other areas. Here, the researchers found that the larger residences are the earliest.

[00:08:48]The median residence of the intermediate three period, which dates to around 2500 BCE, measures 161.39 square meters and the Gini coefficient is 0.39.

[00:09:02]During the late three period, 300 years later, the median residence reduces in size to 98.02 and the Gini coefficient decreases to 0.3.

[00:09:14]However, 100 years later, when the Gini coefficient is at its lowest in this sub area at 0.23, the median residence size rebounds to 141.13.

[00:09:29]This is interesting because it implies that inequality decreased over time, and this may have been an intentional effort by the inhabitants of the city to constrain it. However, it also shows that as productivity increased, inequality decreased. Evidence for craft production in the late period also supports the idea that productivity increased over time. It's possible that as residences became more uniform and streets were laid out better, some system of governance was at play and that this helped to boost productivity.

[00:10:02]However, unlike other less egalitarian cities, at Mohenjo-Daro, the power was distributed amongst the people.

[00:10:10]Interestingly, seals and ceilings, which were used to monitor credit and debt, were excavated from residences. At other sites, they tend to be found in temples or palaces. So, overall, the researchers have found that Mohenjo-Daro was more egalitarian than other contemporaneous cities and that inequality declined over time. Since the residential layout of the settlement became more uniform over the centuries, with intense development taking place along streets, it's likely that some form of collective governance was at play. This is a really interesting discovery and is in alignment with what some scholars already thought from qualitative research that had been carried out at the site. I haven't personally read much about wealth inequality in the Bronze Age, but from what I do know, Mohenjo-Daro really stands out as quite unusual.

[00:11:03]Let me know what you think about this in the comments. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.