The Many Ways of Being Human

4.1

The Indus Culture

At the center of a city on the Indus sits a basin of fired brick, roughly twelve meters long, with a bitumen seam under its floor and a drain that lets bathers watch the water leave. Next to it there is no palace, no ruler's statue, no victory inscription. The chapter follows cities that traded as far as Mesopotamia for about seven hundred years and left no face of anyone powerful.