Who Makes the Rules in Egalitarian Cities? A View from Bronze Age South Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

By 2600 BC, the first cities had emerged in South Asia. Expansive and dynamic, the Indus civilization prompted the growth of massive settlements like Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan and Rakhigarhi in India. Both cities were part of a prosperous agropastoral economy that supported the invention of writing, long-distance exchange, large non-residential buildings, planned neighborhoods, and a host of sophisticated craft technologies. And yet, like many of the world’s first large-scale societies, the Indus civilization was conspicuously egalitarian, its people eschewing palaces, ostentatious tombs, asymmetrical wealth distributions, and individual-aggrandizing art. Where did the “rules” of Indus egalitarianism come from? This paper addresses this question, drawing from work of the economist Thomas Piketty. In this chapter, I grapple with the tensions between ideology and economic growth. If the rules of urban egalitarianism were simply upscaled from the pre-urban settlements, why were they so long lived, and how did they adapt to the growth in the urban phase? If, on the other hand, we detect glimpses of inequality in pre-urban settlements, then Indus egalitarianism was established within the Urban communities. This would suggest that Indus cities “invented” egalitarianism and prompt consideration of how its ideologies and technologies may have discouraged nontrivial disparities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38240.0