Amogh N P
✦ In loving memory of Amogh N P — Architect · Designer · Visionary ✦
Excavated Mohenjo-Daro seen from the great stupa mound — the brick streets and walls of one of the world's first planned cities.
Unit I25ART201 · History of Architecture - I

The Beginning of Architecture

From the first shelter to the first cities — the Indus Valley and West Asia.

≈ 30 min + study task

Architecture has no single birthday — it begins the moment people stop sheltering in what they find and start shaping where they live. This unit follows that shift: from the cave and the hunting camp, to the first villages, to the world's earliest planned cities in the Indus Valley and the monumental mud-brick of Mesopotamia and Persia. We read history not to copy old forms, but to understand the forces — climate, material, belief and technology — that still shape every building.

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to — mapped to the course outcomes for History of Architecture I:

1
CO1 · Understand

Explain why the history of architecture matters to a designer working today.

2
CO1 · Understand

Outline how shelter developed across the Old, Middle and New Stone Ages.

3
CO1 · Analyse

Describe the planned form of an Indus Valley city — grid, drainage, citadel and Great Bath.

4
CO6 · Apply

Compare the building character of the Indus, Sumerian and Persian cultures.

The long view

Why an architect studies history

Every building is an answer to a question its age was asking — how to keep out the rain, honour a god, hold a city together. History is the record of those answers and why they worked. It trains the eye to read a building's logic, gives a designer a library of tested ideas, and guards against repeating old mistakes. Across the Old, Middle and New Stone Ages, shelter moved from natural caves to built huts, and finally — once farming let people settle — to permanent mud-brick villages such as Çatalhöyük.[2]

c. 2600–1900 BCE

The first cities — the Indus Valley

Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are the earliest planned cities we know — laid out on a grid, zoned into a raised citadel and a lower town, built of standardised kiln-fired brick, and served by a city-wide network of covered street drains. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro is among the earliest public water structures anywhere.[1, 5] A useful caution: we still cannot read the Indus script, so much about how these cities were governed remains genuinely unknown — beware confident stories.

The first planned city — Mohenjo-Daro in plan Citadel — raised on a brick platform (west) Great Bath Granary Lower town — gridded streets & brick houses (east) covered street drain N
DiagramSchematic plan of an Indus Valley city — a raised citadel with the Great Bath and granary to the west, and a gridded lower town to the east served by covered drains
Excavated Mohenjo-Daro seen from the great stupa mound — the brick streets and walls of one of the world's first planned cities.
PhotoExcavated Mohenjo-Daro seen from the great stupa mound — the brick streets and walls of one of the world's first planned cities.Saqib Qayyum · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro — a watertight brick tank reached by steps, among the earliest public water structures.
PhotoThe Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro — a watertight brick tank reached by steps, among the earliest public water structures.Saqib Qayyum · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Mud brick & the monument

West Asia — Mesopotamia & Persia

With little stone or timber, the river civilisations of Mesopotamia built in sun-dried mud brick, saving kiln-fired and glazed brick for facings. Their great monument is the ziggurat — a solid stepped platform that lifts a small shrine toward the heavens, like the Ziggurat at Ur built under Ur-Nammu. Later the Achaemenid Persians gathered ideas from across their empire into the columned palace — the apadana hall of Persepolis, with the Palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad before it.[2, 6]

The ziggurat — a stepped platform for the temple temple frontal stair / ramp sun-dried mud-brick core kiln-fired brick facing solid mass — no interior space; the shrine sits on top, near the heavens.
DiagramSection through a ziggurat — a solid stepped platform of a mud-brick core with kiln-brick facing, climbed by a frontal stair, carrying a small temple at the summit
The reconstructed stepped façade and stair of the Ziggurat at Ur, a solid mud-brick platform for the temple above.
PhotoThe reconstructed stepped façade and stair of the Ziggurat at Ur, a solid mud-brick platform for the temple above.Alli Khalil · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
The slender stone columns of the apadana hall at Persepolis, with a grand ceremonial stairway.
PhotoThe slender stone columns of the apadana hall at Persepolis, with a grand ceremonial stairway.Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Read across

Three early civilisations, compared

Pick a culture to see how it built.

Harappa & Mohenjo-Daro (c. 2600–1900 BCE)

The earliest planned cities — a raised citadel to the west, a gridded lower town, standardised kiln-fired brick (ratio 1:2:4), and the world's first city-wide covered drainage. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-Daro is among the earliest known public water structures.[5, 1]

AspectIndus ValleyMesopotamia & Persia
Main materialkiln-fired & sun-dried bricksun-dried mud brick, glazed brick facing
City formrectilinear grid, zoned, citadel + lower towntemple/palace precinct dominant
Signature monumentGreat Bath, granary, citadelziggurat, palace, apadana hall
Water & sanitationcovered street drains, wells, bathcanal irrigation, less domestic drainage
What survivesstreet plans, foundations, sealsziggurat cores, palace terraces, reliefs
Apply it

Study task

Re-draw the plan of Mohenjo-Daro from memory at a small scale, labelling the citadel, lower town, Great Bath and main drains. Then, in two or three sentences, explain one thing the Indus builders did that a modern Indian town still struggles with.

Check your understanding

Self-assessment

1. What makes the Indus Valley cities historically remarkable?

2. A ziggurat is best described as a —

3. The apadana — a hall of many slender columns — belongs to which tradition?

In a nutshell

Recap

We study history not to copy old forms but to understand why buildings took the shape they did — climate, material, belief and technology.
Shelter evolved from caves and hunting camps (Palaeolithic) to settled mud-brick villages like Çatalhöyük (Neolithic).
The Indus Valley gave the world its first planned cities — gridded streets, zoning, standard brick and covered drainage.
Mesopotamia and Persia, short of stone, built monumental mud brick: the stepped ziggurat and the columned palace.
The evidence

References & further reading

  1. [1]UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro (inscribed 1980). https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/138
  2. [2]Francis D.K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek & Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
  3. [3]Percy Brown, Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Period). Bombay: Taraporevala & Sons, 1983.
  4. [4]Satish Grover, The Architecture of India (Buddhist and Hindu). New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1981.
  5. [5]Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford University Press, 1998.
  6. [6]Christopher Tadgell, The History of Architecture in India. London: Longman, 1990.

Further reading

  • Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture. London: Royal Institute of British Architects / Architectural Press.
  • Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. Oxford University Press.
  • D.K. Ching, A Global History of Architecture — for the West Asian and prehistoric chapters.

Sources gathered and fact-checked June 2026. Published values vary by source, sample and method — treat as indicative and confirm against the cited standard before structural use.