The city that got richer and more equal

Make an infographic: several related figures held in one composition, so a stranger reads a whole argument in one look rather than one fact. One still image, 4:3 landscape, briefed for a GPT Image 2 class model whose real ratio list is 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2 and 2:3. This family earns its place only when the content is genuinely multi-part, and this content is: 3 numbers, a direction of travel through time, and a comparison against other cities. FACT (locked, build on it, do not re-research): Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, in what is now Sindh in Pakistan, at its height around 2500 to 1900 BC. It had grid streets, covered drains, standardised fired brick and a great public bath, and archaeologists have never found the things that usually mark a ruling class in an ancient city: no palace, no royal tombs, no monuments to a named ruler. A study by Adam S. Green at the University of York, with Iqtedar Alam and Cameron Petrie, published in the journal Antiquity in 2026, measured inequality at Mohenjo-daro by comparing the floor areas of its houses over time. They used the Gini coefficient, a single number from 0 to 1 where 0 means everyone has an identical share and 1 means one household has everything. Mohenjo-daro scored 0.44 overall. Ur and Ugarit, contemporary cities in West Asia with clear evidence of elites, scored above 0.6. And in one excavated neighbourhood, the area known as DK-G South, the score fell to 0.23 by around 2100 BC, which is the sort of figure you get in a Neolithic farming village rather than a major city. The city was growing and getting more productive across that same stretch, so the gap between the biggest and smallest houses narrowed while the place as a whole got richer. Use these exactly and leave out any figure we have not locked. Do not invent a population figure, and do not claim the civilisation was egalitarian as a settled fact: the finding is about house sizes in one city, and in one neighbourhood in particular. GROUND (decide this, do not let the model default): sun-baked mud brick. The warm buff and grey-rose of fired Indus brick, laid in courses, with real dust in the joints and hard shadow in the mortar lines, filling the whole frame so the numbers sit on the material the city was actually made of. White, pale grey and navy are the defaults this brief FAILS on, and so is papyrus, an aged-parchment treasure-map cliche, and a dark museum backdrop with a spotlit artefact. LIGHT: hard and high, the light of a place with no shade. DISTANCE: the whole composition at arm's length, with at least one element close enough that the brick grain has real edge. FLOOR (hard, this is the material standard): made with a real frontier image model, GPT Image 2 class or better. Flat vector, hand drawn SVG or HTML, and screenshot collage all FAIL. Text belongs to the artwork: type shares the piece's light, grain and material and reads as printed with it, never bolted on after. Archives will not be considered. CRAFT STANDARD (read all of it before you start). Composition: one clear focal a stranger finds in under 3 seconds, then a second layer that rewards a longer look. Legibility: this will be judged first as a thumbnail on a phone, so the headline must survive at that size, and any label too small to read there should not exist. Palette: pick 2 or 3 inks and hold them. A piece with 8 colours reads as a template. Labelling: every label points at something real in the image, no floating decoration. Finish: real material behaviour carried consistently across the whole frame including the type. DIRECTION is yours. FOCAL: the narrowing inside DK-G South over time, ending at 0.23. That is the movement, and it has to be something a viewer feels physically rather than a number they read. DO NOT DRAW 0.44 FALLING TO 0.23 AS A SINGLE TREND. Those are 2 different things: 0.44 is the whole city measured across its span, 0.23 is one excavated neighbourhood at one point in time. Drawing them as one line is the single easiest way to get this piece wrong, and it will be scored as wrong. Keep the city figure and the neighbourhood figure visually separate and labelled as what they are. YOUR CALL: what carries the comparison. House footprints at true relative area is the most honest option and probably the strongest. Also yours: whether Ur and Ugarit appear at all, and whether the street grid appears at all. SURPRISE ME: the obvious take caps your score, the boldest true take wins. The obvious take is a bar chart with a downward arrow and a photograph of ruins behind it. JUDGED on wow, then subject, surprise, taste, craft, material. A piece where a stranger comes away genuinely surprised that a growing city got more equal beats a prettier piece where the surprise is buried. NOT THIS: no pharaohs, no pyramids, no Mesopotamian ziggurat, none of which are this civilisation. No Indiana Jones adventure styling. No crowd of generic robed figures. No modern skyline comparison. No political framing of any present-day country or economy. TEXT BUDGET: one headline that states the takeaway and names the subject, plus the 3 locked numbers, plus at most 3 further small labels, only if they stay legible at phone size. NOTHING ABOUT HOW THE PIECE WAS MADE GOES ON THE PIECE: no process notes, no verification lines, no model or tool credit, no house credit, no timing or deadline text. Do not render any label from this brief, and never render the NOT THIS list, as type. Credit your model in the submission text instead. DELIVER: one finished hero image at 4:3, plus concept-note.md and sources.md. Self contained, no links out. Name your model in the submission text.