On the citadel of Mohenjo-daro stands one of the most enigmatic structures in all of ancient archaeology: a large rectangular pool, built in brick, some 12 metres long, 7 wide and 2.5 deep. Staircases descend into the water from both ends. Small rooms surround it. This is what archaeologists have called the Great Bath.
What it is, what it is not
This pool is not a swimming pool in any sense we would recognise. It is not a drinking-water reservoir — Mohenjo-daro had its own wells, hundreds of them, some reaching 30 metres in depth. It is not a domestic facility either: it stands in the citadel, the raised part of the city, alongside the community granary and the large common hall. It is a public, collective space, and manifestly exceptional.
John Marshall, who directed the first excavations from 1927, was the first to see it as a place of ritual purification. Mortimer Wheeler, who later refined excavation method, confirmed this reading. This bath was probably used for purification rituals, as my archaeological sources state.
Purification in the Seven Rivers civilisation
What I take from my work on this civilisation is that purification was not a hygienic act — it was a spiritual act. Water is, in the Vedic symbolic order, the pre-eminent symbol of purification. “The Waters drive out disease, the Waters are the remedy for all things,” says hymn 10.137 of the Rig Veda. But the Waters are also, in my lexicon of symbols, inner purification — a return to clarity of mind.
This civilisation had no temple in our sense. Vedic sacrifices were conducted in the open air, on ground rented for a cow, far from the cities. But it had this pool. This place of descent into water, of contact with the purifying element, held in its collective life a place comparable to what the temple would later hold in other civilisations.
The small rooms around the pool
Archaeologists found small rooms all around the pool — cells, one might say. Did priests reside there? Ascetics? Officiants preparing for the purification ritual? No one can answer with certainty. But the parallel with what I know of Indian tradition is inescapable: the sādhus bathing at the ghats of Varanasi before dawn, the priests purifying themselves before the sacrifice, the faithful descending into the Ganges to wash away what obscures their inner sight.
At Mohenjo-daro, this tradition may have been four thousand years old already.
A link with Rudra?
In my view, yes — indirectly. Rudra, whom I discuss in my companion article on rigveda.blog, is both the most fearsome of the gods and the master of remedies. His domain is purification through fire and the destruction of darkness. Water and fire are the two agents of purification in the Vedic world. If the Great Bath was the place of purification through water, the ritual hearths discovered at Lothal and Kalibangan by B. B. Lal were the places of purification through fire.
Two faces of the same act: making oneself pure in order to approach the Brahman.
What the Great Bath tells us about this civilisation
A civilisation that places a purification pool at the heart of its citadel — where other civilisations placed the king’s palace or the statue of a god — is saying something essential about its values. It is not political power that is at the centre, nor the representation of a deity. It is the act of purifying oneself. Of descending. Of coming back up clean.
To my mind, this is the most truthful image we have of the soul of the Seven Rivers civilization.
