Archaeological evidence from the Indus Valley suggests that some of that civilization's pottery was mass-produced. If this is so, it would mean that manufacturing methods in Harappa were several thousand years ahead of their time. In most ancient societies, craftsmen produced goods by slow and painstaking processes, performing all the operations involved in making the product. The same worker might shape a clay pot, bake it, paint the finished product, and perform all the other necessary operations. This was the way for thousands of years, until the Industrial Revolution in England in the mid-1700s brought about mass production. The Industrial Revolution transformed the economic systems of Europe and North America, which had formerly been centered around agriculture, to systems based on manufacturing.
In 1 776, the British economist Adam Smith (1 723-1 790) offered an example of the difference between old production methods and mass production. Visiting an old factory that produced straight pins, Smith found that there were eighteen separate operations or jobs involved in manufacturing a pin. By the old preindustrial methods, a single worker would perform all the operations and could produce as many as twenty pins a day. But then Smith visited a new-style factory, which employed ten people. Instead of performing all eighteen operations, each worker performed one or two. When they had completed their job, they passed the pin on to the next worker, who performed another operation on it, and so on.
One might think that ten people would produce about ten times as many pins as the single worker did, but that was not so. Using mass-production methods, the workers in the second factory produced more than 2,400 times as many pins as a single worker in the old factory— well over 4,800 pins per worker.
About the political organization of the area, but it is safe to guess that the Harappans lived under a powerful government, just as the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom did. The Egyptian pyramids and the great cities of the Indus Valley both seem to suggest a highly organized society, something that does not simply happen by itself.
Without a strong ruler or a belief system to unite them (a religion, for instance, or in America, love of liberty), people tend to be disorganized, like the Israelites in the time of the
Judges. It is clear that the Harappans had strong leadership. It is just as clear that at some point, the power of their leaders began to fade. Between 1900 and 1700 b. c., the Indus Valley civilization underwent a long period of decline and decay. Again like Egypt, this fact is strikingly obvious in the Harap-pans' architecture. Just as Egyptian pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty proved to be far less enduring than the ones of the Fourth Dynasty, later Harappan structures were poorly built, often constructed with used bricks.
A number of outside factors contributed to the decline of the Indus Valley civilization. It appears that the Harappans faced a series of environmental problems, including flooding and deforestation (dee-fohr-es-TAY-shun) caused by poor farming methods. Another environmental factor may have been an increase in the salt content of the water they used to irrigate their fields. Furthermore, it is quite possible that disease spread among the inhabitants of the great Indus Valley cities, a situation that may have resulted from the breakdown of their plumbing and sewer systems. Whatever the case, by about 1700 B. C., the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were virtually deserted. The land was ripe for new conquerors.
World History
