Did this ancient society thrive without elites?

Mohenjo Daro, one of the major centers of the Indus Valley—or Harappan—civilization, was scrupulously planned, featuring water drainage systems, organized city streets, and structures made of standardized bricks. Its similarly sized homes even had early indoor plumbing.

But for all its meticulous organization, many things about this ancient metropolis—including its writing system and its social organization—remain mysterious. Excavations recently took place in the ancient city after a decades-long hiatus—as documented in the May issue of National Geographic—and researchers are digging back into some of the most pressing questions about Mohenjo Daro, including whether it even had elite rulers.

A new study published earlier this month in the journal Antiquity found that the cosmopolitan center may have been uniquely egalitarian in the ancient world, at least based off current archaeological evidence.

(Go behind the scenes to see how National Geographic documented Mohenjo Daro.)

Sir John Marshall, the director of the Archaeological Survey of England who oversaw the first excavations of Indus cities in the 1920s, noted an absence of palaces, royal tombs and statues, or monuments associated with elites.

Since Marshall’s excavations, however, many scholars have disputed the idea of a leaderless society. In the 1960s, several influential anthropologists attempted to fit the progression of all societies into a single model that linearly progressed from tribes to states. As a result, many archaeologists concluded that the Indus must have had a ruling class—and that proof of their existence simply hadn’t yet emerged from the dirt.

But Adam Green, an archaeologist at the University of York in England and author on the new paper, thinks that, had rulers existed, they would have appeared in the archaeological record by now. “Kings are not subtle,” he says.

The results from Green’s new study, suggest that as the Indus city Mohenjo-Daro expanded into one of the ancient world's first great urban centers, it even became more egalitarian, not less.

The artifacts and ruins left by an ancient society

In 2020, Green published a case for Indus egalitarianism in the Journal of Archaeological Research. Green argued that, after 100 years of research on the Indus, the missing evidence of elites wasn't a gap in the archaeological record. “Sometimes, the absence of evidence is actually evidence of absence,” he says.

Some of his peers were unconvinced. In a subsequent 2022 article in Archaeology Magazine, several scholars agreed that the Indus may not have had a single ruler, but didn’t think it was necessarily an equitable society.

But Green also sees plenty of material hints of equality. For example, he points out that items associated with wealth, such as beads and bangles, have been found in many homes in Indus cities like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa.

Excavations of possible residential areas have also revealed thousands of intricately carved stone seals, which were used to protect goods and assist in trade across Indus sites. In other societies of the time, like Mesopotamia, similar seals have been more commonly centralized in grand buildings like temples and palaces where rulers hoarded goods.

Green notes evidence of collective governance in the city’s architecture, too. In Mohenjo-Daro, buildings that lacked features found in the city’s homes, like hearths and interior courtyards, were positioned at prominent intersections with entrances on multiple sides, making them open and accessible. He argues that these were public spaces where people could meet, negotiate, and coordinate.

How scholars of the ancient world quantify inequality

Green tested his theories of Indus egalitarianism when he joined a group of researchers tracing patterns of inequality over more than 20,000 years. This endeavor, called the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project, is studying the distribution of wealth in 4,000 settlements around the world and assigning each a number they call the Gini coefficient.  Scores range from 0, which represents complete equality to 1, which reflects maximum inequality.

To analyze equality in the Indus Valley, Green and his colleagues looked at Mohenjo Daro houses unearthed by early 20^th century excavations. They used house sizes as a proxy for wealth, assuming differences in house sizes represented inequality. 

When the Gini coefficient for Mohenjo Daro was calculated and published on the GINI project database in 2025, it stood at 0.44. Even though the results showed that the Indus were more egalitarian than other West Asian cities at the time, such as Ur (0.71) and Ugarit (0.67), it was still “higher than I would have expected,” Green says.  But Green suspected that number was skewed by a dataset that spanned nearly 1,000 years from 2500 to 1900 B.C.E.

In the new study, researchers tracked the Gini over time in just one Mohenjo-Daro neighborhood  where the available data allowed them to group houses based on age. While the Gini starts at around 0.39 in 2500 B.C.E, it drops to 0.32 by the mid-phase of the civilization in 2300 B.C.E. By 2100 B.C.E, the city's biggest phase of growth, it reaches 0.23—as low as smaller and much less complex neolithic communities.

The apparent increase in equality also coincided with rising community organization and prosperity, such as the establishment of the street grid system and more standardized houses with courtyards and bathing platforms, suggesting to Green that the Indus society became more egalitarian over time.

Why questions remain

Some of Green’s peers think this new look at inequality in Mohenjo Daro is simply an intriguing datapoint.

“I think the results are interesting. If we accept house size as a proxy, they clearly do show a change over time with increased commercial activity in the streets,” says Danika Parikh, an archaeologist at the University of Sussex who has collaborated with the authors previously but wasn’t involved in the new study. “Mohenjo Daro is an exceptional site, so it would be really interesting to see these results contextualized in comparison to some of the other Indus cities.”

She noted research from Harappa, an Indus city around 400 miles away, that found evidence of violence and health disparities that suggest it might have had higher inequality than Mohenjo-Daro.

“What is useful about this kind of study is that, as the Indus is a massive civilization, we need as many different forms of inquiry as possible,” says Uzma Rizvi, a Pratt Institute Indus scholar who wasn’t involved in the study.

She questions whether house size alone can reliably stand in for wealth without the full context on how they were used, but she says Green’s approach shouldn’t be dismissed. “We don't all have to agree on it,” she says, adding that studying home sizes in the ancient city could yield clues to how this ancient society functioned.

Other Indus scholars say more field work could upend Green’s argument.

Massimo Vidale, an archaeologist at the University of Padua who was not involved in the research, believes that outlying suburbs of Indus cities, not built on mounds like the areas excavated to date, are still deeply buried in sediment, which would skew Green’s egalitarian interpretation.  Vidale thinks, “the common people were living under what is now covered by eight meters of silt and mud.”

No elite class has stood out, Vidale says, because the only neighborhoods excavated so far were the neighborhoods of elites. 

 “People like to dream of egalitarian societies of the past,” Vidale says. “It's just wishful thinking.”

Reexamining what we know about ancient societies

Outside the Indus Valley, scholars are finding new evidence of societies without despotic rulers.

Gary Feinman, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Chicago who is a collaborator of Green’s but wasn’t involved in the latest study, studies Monte Albán, an urban center that existed in southern Mexico around 500 BCE. This community also has limited evidence of rulers and a Gini coefficient of 0.38. 

Feinman scoffs at the idea that feats of cooperation, such as building a grid of streets, requires a centralized authority.

“That’s wrong. That’s simply wrong,” he says. “People can get things done without a domineering ruler.”

In his research, Feinman has found a spectrum of political hierarchy from collective governance to autocratic rule in the ancient world. “We found that the more democratic or collective the organization, the lower the degree of inequality.”

With this bird’s eye view of inequality across time and space, Feinman, Green, and others think ancient, more egalitarian societies could inform modern ones. Over the past three decades, Gini coefficients have been rising in nearly 90 percent of advanced economies, and around half of the world’s population lives in regions with increasing inequality.

“People need to know that inequality is not inevitable,” he says. “Inequality is something that we are collectively allowing to happen.”