The Indus–Saraswati (Harappan) Civilization
Five thousand years ago, cities on the Indus and Ghaggar rivers had straight streets, covered drains and standard weights — more advanced in urban planning than anything else in the world at the time. Who built them, what did they believe, and why did they fade?
A civilization larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia
[Archaeological evidence]
The Harappan civilization, named after the first site excavated at Harappa in 1921, covered over a million square kilometres — from Balochistan to western Uttar Pradesh and from Jammu to Gujarat, with more than 1,000 known settlements. Its mature phase lasted roughly 2600–1900 BCE, within a longer span of about 3300–1300 BCE. Its great cities included Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in today's Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, Lothal, Kalibangan and Banawali in India. Rakhigarhi in Haryana is among the largest of all.
Cities planned like none before
[Archaeological evidence]
Streets ran in a grid. Houses of baked brick of standard proportions (1 : 2 : 4) had bathrooms connected to covered street drains, with inspection holes for cleaning. Weights were standardised across hundreds of kilometres. At Mohenjo-daro stands the Great Bath — a watertight brick tank sealed with bitumen, surrounded by rooms, which many scholars believe was used for ritual bathing. At Dholavira in Kutch, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021, an elaborate system of reservoirs stored every drop of rain. Near Dholavira's north gate lay something extraordinary: ten large signs of the Indus script, set in white stone — perhaps the world's oldest signboard. And that script is the greatest mystery of all…
The journey continues for members
- The script no one can read
- What did they believe?
- Lothal: dockyard or tank?
- Why did the cities fade?
- The ancestry debate
- What lives on
- What we can learn
Sources
- J. M. Kenoyer — Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (1998)
- G. L. Possehl — The Indus Civilization (2002)
- Shinde et al., Cell 179 (2019) — An Ancient Harappan Genome
- UNESCO World Heritage — Dholavira: a Harappan City (2021)
- S. R. Rao — Lothal excavations