The Indus Civilization, although ranked alongside the other great Bronze Age civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China in terms of its technological advance and urban and literate culture, has usually been seen as having a quite different model of social development, without the hereditary elites and centralised political units which characterise those civilizations. This study re-examines the Indus Civilization and its relation to this developmental paradigm, focusing in particular on domestic architecture, metalwork and settlement patterns, and, by taking a strongly comparative approach, questioning many existing presumptions.