On a ridge in the Indus flood plain
The ruins stand in Larkana District, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, about 510 km north-east of Karachi. The city was built on a natural ridge that rose like an island from the flood plain of the Indus. Over the centuries, layer upon layer of houses and massive mud-brick platforms raised it higher still, and its mounds now stand up to 12 metres above the modern plain.
The place was well chosen. Mohenjo-daro lay between two great rivers, the Indus to the west and the Ghaggar-Hakra to the east, and it could control the river trade between the coast and the northern plains as well as the routes towards the passes of the Bolan valley. Today the Indus flows to the east of the site, and the Ghaggar-Hakra is dry.
How old is Mohenjo-daro?
It is older than it looks. The earliest levels, from around 3500 BCE, lie below the water table and were reached only in a small excavation by Mortimer Wheeler in 1946. What visitors see belongs to the great city of the Indus Valley Civilisation, from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, and to the phase that followed its peak.
Only two radiocarbon dates have been processed from the later levels, and they place the last occupation of one district, the HR area, between 2200 and 1900 BCE. Life may have gone on a little longer elsewhere on the site. So the 4,500 years usually quoted refer to the city at its height, when its streets were busy in the same centuries that the great sarsen stones of Stonehenge were raised.
A name with more than one meaning
Nobody knows what the people who lived here called their city. “Mohenjo-daro” is a modern name, and even its spelling varies: read as Mohenjo-daro it means “the mound of Mohen”, or of Mohan, while the spelling Moenjo-daro gives the version you will often hear, “the mound of the dead”.
Found in 1922, under a Buddhist stupa
The city was identified in 1922 by R. D. Banerji, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, two years after excavations had begun at Harappa, some 590 km to the north. What caught the eye first was a later monument: on top of the western mound stands a Buddhist stupa of mud brick, built in the Kushan period, around the second century CE, more than two thousand years after the Indus city was abandoned. Part of the mound beneath it has never been dug.
Large-scale excavations followed under John Marshall, K. N. Dikshit, Ernest Mackay and others through the 1930s. They were dug by large teams of local workmen and without the layer-by-layer recording that archaeologists use today, so much of what was found can no longer be placed exactly. Even so, the records are still being studied.
Citadel and lower town
Mohenjo-daro is the largest of the Indus cities, extending over more than 250 hectares, about the size of 350 football pitches. Its buildings are mostly of fired brick, and they survived better than those of Harappa for an unexpected reason: when the railway was built, it ran along the east bank of the Indus and used crushed rock from the Rohri hills, so nobody needed the bricks of Mohenjo-daro for the track bed.
The high western mound, nicknamed the “citadel” by its excavators, holds the best-known building of the site, the Great Bath. It is a tank about 12 metres long and 7 wide, with a maximum depth of 2.4 metres, reached by two wide staircases. Its floor and walls are of bricks set on edge in gypsum plaster, sealed with a thick layer of bitumen, a natural tar, to keep the water in. Nobody knows exactly what it was for; it may have served as a public or ritual bath.
Beside it rises a solid brick foundation 50 metres long and 27 wide, cut into 27 blocks by narrow passages, which once carried a timber building. The excavators called it the “Granary”, but no burnt grain, storage jars or sealings from bundles of goods were found there, and the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer prefers to call it the “Great Hall”. Other buildings got equally hopeful labels, such as the “Assembly Hall” and the “College”.
To the east lies the lower town, a group of lower mounds that may have been separate walled neighbourhoods. Earlier scholars thought the city was divided by function, with rulers on the citadel and ordinary people below, but every sector turned out to have large brick houses and workshops, and power seems to have shifted from one area to another over time. No temple has been identified, and no cemetery has been found.
Life in a city of brick
The streets cross at right angles, with narrow alleys running off into quieter neighbourhoods. Many houses had two storeys, with thick walls and high ceilings to keep the rooms cool in summer. Almost every house had a bathing area with a watertight floor and a drain that carried the dirty water out to a larger drain in the street.
Water came from private wells, rebuilt again and again over many generations as the ground level rose. One of them, in the DK-G area, now stands like a chimney, because the excavators removed all the earth around it. Craftsmen worked in every part of the city, making copper objects, beads, shell and ivory carvings and pottery, while seals were made only in a few restricted workshops.
What was found here
Some of the best-known objects of the Indus Valley Civilisation come from Mohenjo-daro. The bearded steatite figure nicknamed the “Priest-King”, 17.5 cm high, was found in the DK area; the bronze “Dancing Girl”, 10.5 cm high, was excavated by Ernest Mackay in the HR area in 1926; and the HR area also produced a large unicorn seal with a line of eight signs. Both nicknames are modern guesses: what the figures stood for, nobody knows.
Why the digging stopped
The last major excavation was led by George Dales in 1964-65. After that, new excavation was banned, because the buildings already uncovered were proving so hard to conserve. Since then only salvage digs, surface surveys and conservation work have been allowed, and about two thirds of the city remain unexcavated.
The main enemy is salt. Groundwater from the Indus rises into the walls by capillary action, the same force that draws oil up a lamp wick, and when it evaporates at the surface it leaves salt behind. As the salt crystallises inside the pores of the brick it pushes the grains apart, and the walls crumble from the bottom up. Floods from the river and heavy rain add to the damage.
From 1974 to 1997 UNESCO ran one of its most extensive international campaigns to save the site, and Mohenjo-daro became a World Heritage Site in 1980. Since 2010 its care has been the responsibility of the culture department of the Sindh government. In August 2022 exceptional rainfall critically damaged several parts of the site, and the repairs since then have included underpinning walls, covering their tops with mud and restoring the surface drains. Experts from UNESCO and ICOMOS, the international council of monuments and sites, inspected the work in March 2024, and the World Heritage Committee has called for a new phase of international cooperation.
Where to see it
The ruins are in Larkana District, Sindh, with a museum on the site. The Priest-King and the unicorn seal are in the National Museum in Karachi, and the Dancing Girl is in the National Museum in New Delhi.
Sources
- J. M. Kenoyer, “Mohenjo-daro: An Ancient Indus Valley Metropolis” (site chronology, citadel and lower town, location and planning), harappa.com.
- J. M. Kenoyer, “Around the Indus in 90 Slides”, slide records (Mohenjo-daro, Great Bath, Street, Well, Bath Area, Priest King, Unicorn Seal), harappa.com.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro” (138); news, “UNESCO sends emergency missions to Moenjodaro and Makli, Pakistan” (24 October 2022) and “UNESCO and ICOMOS visit the World Heritage property of Moenjodaro, Pakistan” (15 March 2024).
- National Virtual Library of India, museum record “Dancing Girl”, National Museum, New Delhi.
