Mohenjo-daro

Mohenjo-daro is the ruin of an ancient city on the west side of the lower Indus River, in the Larkana District of Sindh in southern Pakistan. Built around 2500 BCE, it ranked among the largest settlements of the Indus Valley Civilisation and one of the earliest major cities anywhere, contemporary with the cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Its carefully planned streets, wells and drains have made it the best-known example of Indus urban life.

Nobody knows what its builders called the place. The modern Sindhi name is usually translated as "Mound of the Dead". The city was laid out on a grid of straight streets, and most of its buildings were made of fired brick set in mortar, with some mud-brick and timber above. Estimates of its extent vary from around 250 to 300 hectares, and the Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History puts the peak population at perhaps 40,000, while warning that the figure rests on weak evidence.

The settlement had two parts: a raised Citadel on a mud-brick mound about 12 metres high, and a larger Lower City. Water supply seems to have been planned from the start. Excavators have found more than 700 wells, roughly one for every three houses, and covered drains ran along the main streets to carry away waste water. Some houses had rooms set aside for bathing.

On the Citadel stands the Great Bath, a brick pool about 12 metres long, 7 metres wide and 2.4 metres deep, sealed with bitumen and reached by steps from a colonnaded court. It may have served for ritual purification. Nearby, the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler identified a building in 1950 as a "Great Granary", but Jonathan Mark Kenoyer has pointed out that no grain was ever found there and suggested calling it a hall of unknown use. Wheeler also argued that the city was flooded and rebuilt several times; Gregory Possehl instead blamed repeated small floods combined with exhaustion of the surrounding land.

The finds include carved seals bearing the still undeciphered Indus script, weights and scales, copper and stone tools, jewellery, toys and an ivory ruler marked in fine decimal divisions. A bronze figure about 10.5 centimetres tall, found in 1926 and known as the Dancing Girl, shows that the city's metalworkers knew lost-wax casting. A soapstone bust found in 1927 was nicknamed the "Priest-King", although there is no evidence that priests or kings governed the city. One seal shows a cross-legged figure among animals that some scholars read as a yogi and others as an early form of Shiva.

Mohenjo-daro prospered for several centuries but, like the other large Indus cities, it was abandoned around 1700 BCE as the civilisation declined. Much later a Buddhist stupa was built on the highest mound, and it was this that drew R. D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India to the site in 1919 and 1920, under the British Raj. His finds led to large excavations by K. N. Dikshit, John Marshall and Ernest Mackay in the 1920s and 1930s, by Wheeler in 1945 and finally by George Dales in 1964 and 1965.

When British India was partitioned in 1947, the finds, some 12,000 objects, were divided between India and Pakistan; Pakistan received the Priest-King and India kept the Dancing Girl. Some pieces are now held in Karachi by the National Museum of Pakistan, others in New Delhi and a museum at the site itself.

Large-scale digging was stopped after 1965 because exposed walls were weathering badly, and since then only salvage work, surveys and conservation have been allowed. In 1980 Mohenjo-daro became the first World Heritage Site in South Asia, and UNESCO organised international funding to protect it from flooding. Responsibility passed to the government of Sindh in 2011. Rising salty groundwater and poor restoration remain serious threats: many walls have collapsed, and in 2012 Pakistani archaeologists warned that the ruins could vanish by 2030 without better care. A core drilling in 2015 showed that the city extends beyond the area excavated so far.