An Indus city had an elaborate drainage system more than 4,000 years ago.

Urban drainage sounds like the boring machinery of modern cities. Mohenjo-daro, one of the great Indus civilization sites, was different from that expectation by thousands of years. UNESCO describes the ancient city as having wells, soak pits for sewage disposal, public baths, and an elaborate drainage system. The site dates to the 3rd millennium BCE. That means people were planning water and waste infrastructure on a city scale while many of our mental images of ancient life still default to mud, dust, and improvisation. The surprise is how modern the civic problem already was.

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