Here is the problem that every archaeologist who has excavated sites of the 7 Rivers civilization has encountered, and that nobody has yet resolved satisfactorily: how could a civilization spread across more than one million square kilometres, comprising hundreds of cities and millions of inhabitants, function for fifteen centuries without a king, without a palace, without an army, without a state temple, without a visible centralized bureaucracy?
This is not a rhetorical question. It is a real scientific question — and the honesty of the most serious archaeologists is to recognize that they do not have a definitive answer.
What archaeology does not find
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I list what the excavations — on more than a thousand sites, over a century — have not found. No palace. No monumental temples. No statues of sovereigns. No bas-reliefs of battles or chained prisoners. No lavish royal tombs. No war weapons in sufficient quantity to equip an army. No destruction levels from fire or violence.
This list of what is missing is in itself extraordinary. All the great contemporary civilizations — Egypt, Mesopotamia, ancient China — left abundant traces of their hierarchical structure in their artefacts. The pharaohs are everywhere in Egyptian archaeology. The Akkadian kings are everywhere in Mesopotamian archaeology. The victory stelae, the palaces, the royal tombs say clearly: here, someone commanded.
In the 7 Rivers civilization: silence. A silence that is not a void — it is the sign of a radically different organization.
What archaeologists attempt to explain
The three archaeologists who have most deeply examined the question of this civilization’s governance converge toward the same conclusion, formulated in different words.
Kenoyer, in his work cited in The Civilization of the 7 Rivers:
“Archaeological evidence suggests that the Indus civilization was characterized by a relatively egalitarian social structure, with no clear evidence of a centralized state or ruling elite, but that it was also not governed by a rigid hierarchical system.”
Possehl:
“The absence of palaces, large temples or large tombs in the Indus Valley suggests that power and wealth were not concentrated in the hands of a few. Instead, governance may have been carried out by local councils or assemblies, indicating a decentralized but cooperative societal structure.”
Wright:
“The Indus civilization appears to have functioned through a series of autonomous, interconnected urban centers rather than through a single, centralized state. This decentralized system facilitated cooperation and mutual support among the different city-states.”
These three citations say the same thing: there was governance — the standardization of weights, measures and bricks across one million square kilometres proves it — but this governance was not centralized, not hierarchical, not coercive. It was consensual.
And this is precisely what archaeologists cannot explain. How does consensus function at this scale? What were the concrete mechanisms of collective decision-making in cities of fifty thousand inhabitants? How was standardization maintained without empire or police?
The Ego as explanatory key
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I propose a hypothesis that I fully embrace: the leaders of the 7 Rivers civilization were not characterized by an oversized Ego.
This formulation may seem psychological rather than archaeological. But it has concrete implications. A leader with an oversized Ego leaves traces: they have themselves depicted, glorified, a palace built for them, they accumulate wealth in their tomb to take with them. None of these traces exist in the 7 Rivers civilization.
And the reason for this absence of oversized Ego is, I believe, directly linked to soma. In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I document it: a civilization in which all leaders regularly drink soma cannot be a society like those we know. The regular experience of Ego dissolution — which soma produced — was institutionalized in the sacrifice. Every “householder,” every leader, had to participate.
A leader who regularly undergoes an experience of Ego dissolution cannot durably believe that their power belongs to them personally, that they are superior to others, that their personal interests take priority over the common good. The experience puts them back in their place — not through a rule imposed from outside, but through a truth experienced from within.
Hymn 10.191: theory and practice
The last hymn of the Rig Veda — 10.191 — formulates what archaeology observes without being able to explain:
10.191.2 — Come together. Speak together. Know through your minds.
10.191.3 — Common is the mantra, common is the assembly, common is their thought through their mind.
10.191.4 — Common is our desire. Common are our hearts. May your thought be common so that you are truly together.
The common assembly. The common thought. The common desire. This is not an abstract utopia — it is the description of a concrete social institution: the public sacrifice, where all community members gather, drink soma together, and deliberate together on what concerns the community.
The governance by consensus of the 7 Rivers civilization was not a formal political system with written rules, parties and elections. It was a practice — a regular, ritual, communal practice that created the psychological and spiritual conditions in which consensus became possible.
What this says for today
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I do not mince my words: the urban societies of our time are governed by individuals with oversized Egos and authoritarian power. Dictatorships, where power is concentrated in the hands of one or a small group, perfectly illustrate this reality. Even in some regimes that claim to be democratic, free elections are influenced by a ruling class that has no desire to lose its power.
The 7 Rivers civilization demonstrated, for fifteen centuries, that another organization is possible. Not utopian — historically attested. Not perfect — but functional, durable, and productive of a quality of life that the archaeological data confirm.
What archaeologists cannot explain is perhaps not inexplicable. It is simply without equivalent in the categories of Western political thought — because we have never institutionalized the regulation of the Ego as a condition of governance.
This may be the most disturbing — and most necessary — lesson of the 7 Rivers civilization.
