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By the Fourth Century BC, urban culture was clearly defined across the Nanda lands of India, much as it was in contemporary China. Cities were a sometimes confusing, haphazard agglomeration of isolated or block houses, with limited urban planning: covered drains are found in some places, but none in others; round refuse bins appear to have been set in open squares and streets, at least in the larger cities.
As in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent and China, Indian upper-middle class houses consisted of rooms arranged around an open courtyard, usually paved with stone. Some of the larger houses had two courtyards.
As in most places, palaces were just overgrown grand houses full of meeting places and yet more courtyards. Just like in China, no civic monuments of note were still to be seen: nothing, at any rate, like the already decaying pharaonic glories of Egypt, the grand palaces and temples of Babylon and Susa, or the newer, fancy wonders to be found in the wealthiest Greek cities.
Physicians, surgeons, scribes, accountants, money-changers, actors, dancers, magicians, acrobats, drummers, female fortune tellers, courtesans and ordinary prostitutes described as separate, well-established professions in religious texts written in the liturgical Aryan language Pali, traditionally believed to be the Buddha's own language, and the main derivation of Sanskrit during this era.
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