Levka on Nostr: #archeology #inequality #IndusValley "No Palaces, No Pyramids: How This Ancient City ...

#archeology #inequality #IndusValley

"No Palaces, No Pyramids: How This Ancient City Got Rich Without Inequality

There was something notable about Mohenjo-daro, the largest city of the Indus civilization that settled across parts of Pakistan and India between 2600-1900 BCE: it flipped the normal rules of history in one specific way.

While the growth and rise of a civilization – from small villages into sprawling cities – usually widens the inequality gap between the rich and the poor, in Mohenjo-daro the opposite happened.

In a new study published in Antiquity, researchers from the University of York and the University of Cambridge in the UK have outlined findings based on 309 residences excavated at the ancient site of Mohenjo-daro, in the Sindh province of Pakistan.

Using house size as a proxy for wealth, the researchers found the spread from the most to the least well-off was much smaller than in comparable ancient Greek or Mayan cities. As the homes could be dated too, the team could see that inequality shrank over time as Mohenjo-daro continued to prosper.

'Legacy data from the ancient city shows that as the city matured, the gap between the largest and smallest homes narrowed,' says archaeologist Adam Green, from the University of York."

https://www.sciencealert.com/lesson-for-modern-societies-this-4000-year-old-city-defied-the-rules-of-history