City of fountains and canals - water luxury 4,500 years ago

Frontinus Supplement - Volume 2

Author: Michael Jansen

Mohenjo-Daro, “Hill of the Dead,” as the Bronze Age city dating back to the third millennium BC on the lower reaches of the Indus River is called in the Sindh language, was the presumed capital of the third early advanced civilization of humanity, the Indus Civilization. Excavated primarily in the 1920s, this prominent monument on the UNESCO World Heritage List is threatened with complete decay.

This book presents a special aspect of the city’s structure: the luxurious use of water within an urban complex for its time, evident in a unique infrastructure of water supply and disposal through hundreds of wells and a dense network of sewers. The “Great Bath,” a comfortable bathing facility in the citadel area, is considered unique.

The author, a lecturer in architectural history at RWTH Aachen University from 1988, led the “Mohenjo-Daro” research project in Pakistan from 1979 to 1987. For this book, he compiled all available information on water supply and sanitation and placed it in a generally understandable descriptive context about the massive city of Mohenjo-Daro.

What makes the book particularly valuable are the maps and the many, largely unpublished photos from the 1920s. In addition, the English version is printed in the column next to the German text.