What strikes me when I read the archaeological reports on the Seven Rivers civilization is the coherence of its vision. No palaces. No dominant temple. No army. No slaves. No statues glorifying a king. And at the same time: sophisticated drainage systems under the streets, present in the homes of the most modest inhabitants just as in those of the more affluent. This is not a technical detail — it is a declaration of values inscribed in stone and brick.
Water management was an absolute priority in this civilization. The infrastructure put in place to ensure the supply of drinking water was efficient, and a wastewater drainage system allowed it to be evacuated outside the city limits, thus avoiding any contamination of drinking water. Where other civilizations — in Mesopotamia, in Egypt — mixed potable and non-potable water more or less freely, forcing their inhabitants to drink beer to avoid dysentery and cholera, the Seven Rivers civilization had solved the problem at its source. This same logic of common good runs through their grid cultivation system: feed everyone without exhausting the resources.
Even the most modest homes were equipped with a bathroom and a sewage system, an innovation unknown anywhere else at that time. Archaeologists have unearthed dry toilets in every house. They have also found a few flush toilets — which did not exist anywhere else at that moment. At Mohenjo-Daro, it even seems there were public toilets. A civilization that lays drains under the streets of its working-class neighborhoods is not a civilization that thinks of its inhabitants in terms of classes. It is a civilization that thinks in terms of community, of common good, of shared health.
This choice is all the more remarkable because it required rigorous urban planning: the cities were built on a grid, with avenues running north-south and streets running east-west, exactly as if the builders had decided from the outset that the underground network should structure the network above ground. Wells complete this picture: numerous, some reaching thirty meters in depth, present at every crossroads and even in some homes, built with trapezoidal bricks of exceptional solidity. The whole forms a coherent system: clean water in, wastewater out, population protected.
In my view, all of this is inseparable from the general spirit of this civilization. A society without glorification of the ego, without visible hierarchy, without an army — it is also a society that invests in what protects everyone rather than in what exalts a few. I connect this with what I have studied in the Rig Veda: the leaders of this society drank soma, whose main property is to dissolve the ego. Without an inflated ego, without a desire for domination — you build sewers for the poor rather than palaces for yourself.
The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro, that vast shared pool used probably for ritual ablutions, fits the same logic: water as a tool of collective purification, accessible to all. This civil engineering was not engineering in the modern sense. It was applied philosophy.
