Who ruled Harappa?

Harappa is an archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, about 24 kilometres west of Sahiwal, near an old course of the Ravi River. In the third millennium BCE it was one of the two greatest cities of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation, which is often called the Harappan civilisation after it. Abandoned as a city more than three thousand years ago, it was the first Indus site to be excavated, and it gave the world its first glimpse of a forgotten civilisation.

The roots of Harappan culture lie in older farming communities of the region, such as Mehrgarh, which dates back to around 5200 BCE. The excavators of Harappa divide its occupation into several phases. The earliest, called the Ravi phase, ran from about 3300 to 2800 BCE, and the settlement may already have covered some 25 hectares. Clay and stone tablets from this period, carbon-dated to around 3300 to 3200 BCE, bear marks resembling the later Indus script, though whether they count as true writing is debated. A Kot Diji or Early Harappan phase followed, from about 2800 to 2600 BCE.

In the Mature Harappan phase, from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, Harappa reached its greatest size, covering around 150 hectares with clay-brick houses. Estimates suggest it may have had as many as 23,500 inhabitants, a large city for its time. Like its sister city of Mohenjo-daro on the lower Indus, it had distinct residential areas, brick houses with flat roofs, and walled centres for administration or religion, though comparisons show the two cities were not laid out to a single standard plan.

Nobody knows who ruled Harappa or how, and the Indus script, found on many small square soapstone seals, has never been deciphered. Yet the remarkable uniformity of weights, measures and brick sizes across the civilisation suggests some form of central authority within each city, though whether power lay with a merchant oligarchy is uncertain. Harappans grew wheat and other crops, wove and dyed cotton, worked copper and bronze, and traded carnelian and lapis lazuli by river and sea as far as Mesopotamia and Elam.

From around 1900 BCE the city entered a transitional phase and then a Late Harappan phase lasting to about 1300 BCE, during which features such as writing and hydraulic engineering disappeared. There is no sign that the city was destroyed by invaders, and the evidence points mainly to natural causes, including a gradual drying of the climate. Skeletons from a cemetery outside the walls show rising levels of injury and disease such as leprosy and tuberculosis in the later period, which researchers link to social stress after the collapse had begun. Over time the centres of settlement shifted east towards the Ganges valley.

The first modern account of the ruins came from Charles Masson, who had deserted from the East India Company army, who saw them in 1829 and published a description in 1842, wrongly linking them to the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Alexander Cunningham of the Archaeological Survey of India visited in 1853, hoping to identify a Buddhist city described by Xuanzang. When he returned he found that the top layers had been stripped: in 1857 engineers building the Lahore to Multan railway under British rule had carted away the ancient bricks as track ballast. Cunningham published a Harappan seal in 1875 without understanding its age.

Under John Marshall, director of the Survey, the archaeologist Daya Ram Sahni was sent to excavate the site's two mounds. Only when similar seals turned up at Mohenjo-daro did scholars grasp that both sites belonged to a single, very ancient civilisation, announced by Marshall in the Illustrated London News in 1924. Excavation has continued since, including work by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project.

The modern village of Harappa, less than a kilometre from the site, is a small crossroads town of about 15,000 people with a railway station from the period of the British Raj. The ruins were placed on UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage sites in 2004. In 2005 a plan to build an amusement park at the site was abandoned after builders uncovered large numbers of artefacts.