Indus standardized weights
How did distant cities share one standard of weight?
That time, that place
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro on the Indus were carefully planned cities, with gridded streets and covered drains. They lay hundreds of kilometers apart, yet traded with each other — and with Mesopotamia far beyond.
Why this question
Trading across distance runs into one awkward problem: if my scale and your scale disagree, no one can tell who is being cheated. Trust had to begin with weight.
What was found
They cut cubes of stone into weights that doubled — 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. The remarkable part is the precision: weights found in cities hundreds of kilometers apart match almost exactly. Bricks too were standardized at 4:2:1. Someone set a rule, and a vast region kept it.
Weight was whatever the scale's owner said it was
Weights from different sites match one another
The Indus script is still undeciphered, so we don't know who set the standard