Excavations at the Mature Harappan site of Rakhigarhi have brought to light a unique administrative wing attached to the city’s massive central granary. Archaeologists discovered a cache of over 200 terracotta sealings and tablets belonging to an official titled the Master of the Granary-Floors. Remarkably, several tablets contain pictographic sequences that researchers interpret as earliest known protocols for rodent control, detailing the placement of terracotta traps and the sealing of ventilation shafts with specific mineral pastes.
The archive also contains meticulous ledgers of "loss-prevention," recording the volume of grain protected versus the volume lost to pests or moisture. This find demonstrates that the Indus Valley Civilization possessed an incredibly granular level of administrative oversight regarding food security. Dr. Rajesh Sahni, the lead archaeologist, noted that the standardized nature of these rodent-control seals suggests this was a centralized practice implemented across major Harappan urban centers to preserve the surplus that fueled their trade empire.