Five thousand years ago, in the cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, a modest inhabitant — a craftsman, a small trader, a worker — came home in the evening to a house that had a bathroom and a connection to the wastewater drainage network.
This was not a privilege reserved for the wealthy. It was the standard for everyone.
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I document this plainly: even the houses of the poor were equipped with a bathroom and a sewage system — an innovation unknown elsewhere at that time. Unlike other civilizations, even the simplest dwellings had these facilities.
One sentence. And behind it, an entire philosophy of urban planning — the most radically egalitarian philosophy that archaeology has ever documented.
What the excavations reveal concretely
The excavations of Mohenjo-Daro, conducted since 1927, have uncovered thousands of houses at different occupation levels. What strikes archaeologists is the consistency: regardless of the size of the house, regardless of the presumed wealth of its occupants, certain characteristics are always present.
A bathroom — a room dedicated to ablutions, with brick-jointed and waterproofed flooring, slightly sloped toward a drain. Dry toilets — brick structures allowing the evacuation of faecal matter. And a connection to the underground drainage network running beneath the streets.
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I detail this architecture precisely: archaeologists have unearthed dry toilets in every house. They have also found a few flush toilets — which did not exist anywhere else at that time. It also seems that there were public toilets at Mohenjo-Daro, though not all archaeologists agree on this point.
The houses of wealthy families were distinguished from those of poor families mainly by the presence of additional rooms. Some houses had one or two additional floors. But what was identical in all houses — rich and poor — was access to basic hygiene.
The comparison with Egypt and Mesopotamia
In regions such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, where potable and non-potable waters were more or less mixed, people had to drink beer to avoid diseases related to poor water quality, such as dysentery and cholera. At Mohenjo-Daro, everyone drank clean water — thanks to the trapezoidal wells at every crossroads and the drainage network that separated clean water from wastewater.
In Egypt, the palaces of pharaohs and the houses of nobles were built in durable stone. The houses of craftsmen and peasants were in mud-brick — constructions that did not withstand time and had no sanitary facilities. Social hierarchy expressed itself directly in the quality of materials and access to infrastructure.
In Mesopotamia, Sumerian cities had clearly separated rich and poor quarters. The houses of notables had latrines. The houses of craftsmen and workers generally did not.
In both cases, hygiene was a privilege — a mark of social status, not a universal right.
The drainage network: a political infrastructure
What makes the sanitary system of the 7 Rivers civilization particularly remarkable is that it was collective. It was not up to each family to manage its wastewater individually. There was an underground network of brick channels running under all the streets, collecting water from all houses and channelling it outside the city limits.
This network is a political infrastructure in the deepest sense. Deciding to build a collective sewage network that serves all houses — rich and poor — is a societal choice. It is deciding that public health takes priority over social status. It is deciding that bodily dignity is not a privilege but a right.
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I state it clearly: what is certain is that all dwellings, whether modest or not, were designed in the interest of their inhabitants by ensuring their comfort and well-being, whatever their social status.
What this says about the Vedic conception of the body
In the Rig Veda hymns to the Waters — notably hymn 10.9 — the Waters are invoked as purifiers of the body as much as the spirit:
10.9.7 — O Waters, bring healing and protection for my body and may I see the Sun for a long time.
10.9.8 — O Waters, carry away whatever affliction is in me, or whatever disease.
Bodily purity is not a luxury in the Vedic vision. It is a condition of health, of the capacity to participate in social and spiritual life, of the very possibility of “seeing the Sun for a long time” — that is, of living well and fully.
A civilization that deifies the purifying Waters and builds bathrooms in every house without exception says the same thing in two different languages: the body of every human being deserves to be clean, whatever their social position.
What this says for our time
In 2026, according to WHO data, approximately 3.5 billion people do not have access to safe and hygienic toilets. Millions of children die each year from diarrhoeal diseases directly related to the absence of sanitation — diseases that the 7 Rivers civilization had structurally prevented five thousand years ago.
This is not a technical problem. The solutions exist. It is a problem of political choices — the same choices that the 7 Rivers civilization made differently. A civilization that builds its monuments to the glory of its sovereigns rather than sewage networks for its most modest inhabitants says something about its values. And a civilization that does the opposite says something too.
The modest house of Mohenjo-Daro with its bathroom and connection to the sewage network is perhaps the most mundane — and most revolutionary — archaeological proof of what the 7 Rivers civilization was.
An urban planning principle as simple as it is radical: bodily dignity is universal, or it is not.
