Mohenjo-daro

Read its story

• A city built to a plan, by people we cannot readDrains, standard bricks, an undeciphered script, and a river that moved.4 chapters · about 9 min · 2 sources

Where it is

Mohenjo-daro sits on the right bank of the Indus in Sindh, southern Pakistan, on a plain that the river built and that the river has repeatedly re-crossed. The site is a set of mounds above the floodplain — the name means mound of the dead in Sindhi — and the water table beneath is high and saline, which is the central problem of preserving it. The surrounding land is now irrigated by one of the largest canal systems in the world.

The land and water around it

• The Indus floodplainriver

  A river that shifts course across a very flat plain and floods on a scale that has repeatedly changed where settlement is possible. The city was built with that in mind — on raised platforms — and was still overwhelmed more than once.

• The saline water tablebasin

  Modern canal irrigation raised the groundwater, and evaporation draws salts up into the ancient brick. Crystallising salt breaks the bricks apart from inside. The threat to the site is a side effect of agriculture around it.

• The Ghaggar-Hakra channelsriver

  A now largely dry channel system east of the Indus with many Harappan sites along it. Whether it was a major perennial river during the civilisation's height, and what its drying meant, is actively argued.

Its history, in short

It was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, occupied in roughly the third millennium BCE, and it was laid out to a plan from the beginning: streets on a grid, standardised fired bricks in a fixed ratio, covered drains along the streets, wells in most blocks, and a raised western mound carrying large public structures. It was excavated from the 1920s, which is when the civilisation itself was recognised at all. The city was abandoned in the early second millennium BCE. Its script is undeciphered, so a large, literate, planned urban society is known almost entirely from what it built and threw away rather than from anything it said.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• The Great Bathc. 2500 BCE

  A watertight brick tank on the western mound, sealed with bitumen, with steps at both ends. Usually read as ritual rather than recreational, though that reading is an inference from later South Asian practice rather than from anything the builders wrote.

• The drainsc. 2500 BCE

  Covered brick drains running along the streets, fed from houses, with inspection holes. Domestic sanitation at this level is not seen again in the region for a very long time.

• The sealsc. 2500 BCE

  Small carved stone seals showing animals and short sign sequences. Thousands survive; the longest inscriptions run to a few dozen signs, which is part of why the script resists decipherment — there is no long text and no bilingual.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereMohenjo-daro is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest
2. 2Read why the language is what it isThe quest for this place covers how its languages got here and who speaks them.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• What is missing from Mohenjo-daro that archaeologists expect in a city of its size?

  A palace, a royal burial, or any unambiguous image of a ruler

  Standardisation across hundreds of kilometres implies coordination, but what kind of authority produced it is genuinely unknown.

• What is destroying the brickwork?

  Salt drawn up by a water table raised by modern canal irrigation

  Crystallising salt breaks the bricks from inside — a side effect of the agriculture around the site.

Worth arguing about

• A large, planned, literate society with no evidence of a king. What do we assume about power that this site does not support?
• The script may never be read. What should a museum say about a civilisation whose own account of itself is lost?

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