A section from the journey

The Great Bath

High on the citadel of Mohenjo-daro lies a sunken brick tank, about twelve metres long. Its builders made it so tight that water could not leak away. Steps lead down at each end, and small rooms stand around it. Many scholars believe it was not for ordinary washing, but for some kind of ritual bathing. It is one of the most striking buildings these people left.

Let us climb the high mound at the heart of , the greatest of these cities. Up here stood the largest buildings. And here, sunk into the ground, lies something that still stops visitors in their tracks.

It is a great tank, a pool built of brick. We call it the . It is about twelve steps of a grown person long, and seven wide, and deep enough to stand in well over your head. Wide stairways lead down into it at each end. Small rooms stand around its edge.

Now think like a builder. To hold water, a pool must not leak. The makers of the Great Bath solved this with great skill. They set the bricks so tight, and coated the whole tank with a black tar-like layer, that the water stayed in. Four thousand years on, we can still see how well they worked.

So we have a fine, watertight pool, set in the most important part of the city. The question that follows is simple, and it is the heart of the matter. What was it for?

It was surely not just a place to get clean. We know that, because the people of these cities could wash at home. Most houses had their own bathing floor. You did not need to climb to the city's high mound, to a grand public pool, simply to rinse off the day's dust.

So many scholars think the Great Bath was built for ceremony. For a special kind of bathing, done together, that carried meaning beyond cleaning the body. Perhaps it washed away more than dirt. We use the word for such acts: things done in a set way because they are felt to be sacred.

Here your guide must be honest, the way we always try to be. We have no writing from these people that we can read. No one left us a note saying what the Great Bath was for. So we cannot be certain. We are reading the meaning from the stones, and we say so plainly.

And yet. A pool this grand, this carefully made, set in the city's holiest-seeming place, must have meant a great deal to those who built it. That much the stones do tell us.

Now hold one gentle question, lightly, as a thread to carry forward. In the long ages to come, the people of this land would bathe in sacred rivers and in the tanks beside their temples, to make themselves pure. Was that love of clean, holy water already stirring here, by this ancient pool? We cannot prove it. But it is a beautiful thing to wonder.

Water that cleans the body, and water that seems to cleanse something deeper than the body, are not quite the same thing. Have you ever felt washed clean on the inside, not just the outside, by stepping into water? The builders of the Great Bath may have known that feeling too.