Indus planners abandoned a 40,000-person brick metropolis
Mohenjo-daro—“Mound of the Dead Men” in Sindhi—rose about 2500 BCE as one of the Indus Valley Civilisation’s largest cities in Pakistan’s Larkana District. At least 40,000 residents prospered for centuries before abandonment around 1700 BCE with other Indus giants.
The ruins lie off the west bank of the lower Indus in Larkana District, Sindh, on a Pleistocene ridge in the river’s flood plain about 28 kilometres from the town of Larkana. The modern name is usually read as Mound of the Dead in Sindhi. What its builders called it is unknown; the epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan suggested Kukkuṭārma, city of the cockerel, from a seal he linked to ritual cockfighting.
The Indus, or Harappan, Civilisation to which it belonged grew out of earlier local cultures around 3000 BC, and the city ranked among its biggest. At its peak that civilisation stretched across much of Pakistan and northern India, west to the Iranian border, south to Gujarat and north to an outpost in Bactria, with other great centres at Harappa, Lothal, Kalibangan, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi. When it declined abruptly around 1700 BCE, the city was deserted.
Its rectilinear buildings follow a grid, mostly in fired and mortared brick with some mud-brick and timber upper parts. The city covered an estimated 300 hectares, and one handbook offers a cautious peak population of about 40,000.
The ruins went unrecorded for some 3,700 years until R. D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India visited in 1919–1920, drawn by a Buddhist stupa, and found a flint scraper that convinced him of the site’s age. Large digs followed under Kashinath Dikshit and John Marshall, later Ernest Mackay, Mortimer Wheeler and finally George Dales in 1964–65, after which excavation was banned because exposed walls were weathering. UNESCO listed it in 1980, the first World Heritage Site in South Asia.
Source: Mohenjo-daro
