Victorian railway builders crushed a Bronze Age city of 23,500 people into track ballast
In 1857, engineers laying the Lahore–Multan railway needed rubble to bed their tracks. They found an endless supply of fired bricks in a ruin near the Ravi River. Those bricks had once formed Harappa, one of the great cities of the Indus civilisation, home to perhaps 23,500 people more than four thousand years earlier.
At its height in the Mature Harappan phase, roughly 2600 to 1900 BC, Harappa covered about 150 hectares of clay-brick houses, a large city by the standards of its day. Along with Mohenjo-daro it anchored a civilisation spread across the Indus valley, with urban centres, drains, a possible script and a varied economy. The culture grew from much older roots, such as the farming settlement of Mehrgarh around 5200 BC, and was rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1920s.
Its people traded widely. Merchants moved cotton cloth and farm produce to Mesopotamia and Elam, kept trading posts in Mesopotamia, and prized carnelian and lapis lazuli. Weights and measures followed a strict standard scale, and carved seals may have marked property and shipments. They worked copper and bronze but not iron, grew wheat and rice, and domesticated the humped bull. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are often described as having similar planning, but compared closely, their layouts turn out to be quite different.
From around 2000 BC the civilisation slowly came apart, a decline lasting until about 1300 BC. There is no sign of conquering invaders; the evidence points instead to a climate that grew steadily drier, in an area that is now the Thar Desert. Writing and water engineering fell out of use, and cities along the Ganges rose in importance. Skeletons show that injuries, along with leprosy and tuberculosis, became more common during this collapse, perhaps reflecting scarcity and social stress.
Today the ancient site lies less than a kilometre from a crossroads town of about 15,000 people, with a railway station left over from the Raj. It was placed on UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list in 2004, and a year later a plan to build an amusement park there was dropped after construction turned up a wealth of artefacts.
Source: Harappa
