Mohenjo-Daro

In 1922 an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, R. D. Banerji, came to a mound on the Indus in Sindh to look at the Buddhist stupa on top of it. The stupa was already old, dating from around the second century. As his workmen dug around it, though, they hit something that had nothing to do with it: fired brick walls, straighter and better laid than the stupa, running far deeper into the mound. The locals called the place Mohenjo-daro, roughly "mound of the dead" in Sindhi. Within a few years it was clear that the mound hid a city some two thousand years older than the monument on top, belonging to a civilisation nobody had known existed.

A City With No Name For Itself

Mohenjo-daro was built around 2500 BCE. The people who made it are now called the Indus or Harappan civilisation, because we do not know what they called themselves. Their script survives as short inscriptions on seals, a few hundred signs in total, and despite a century of attempts there is no agreed reading of a single word. No king's name, no temple dedication, no account of a war. What survives is the city itself.

The city talks a great deal. Streets cross at right angles, main roads wide, lanes narrow. Houses are fired brick, and most have their own well and their own bathroom. Water from the bathrooms runs through the base of the wall into covered drains under the street, with openings at intervals so someone could clear them. Sewers, four thousand years ago, at a scale no other place on earth matched at the time.

On the higher part of the mound, the area later called the citadel, sits the Great Bath. It is a tank roughly twelve metres by seven, about two and a half metres deep, with steps down at both ends. The bricks were sealed with bitumen; around the pool are small rooms, a colonnade and a dedicated well. What it was for is not settled; ritual bathing is the usual guess. Next to it is a massive structure with thick foundations that the excavators called a granary, although no grain was ever found in it, so that label is uncertain too. Very little here is certain.

Rebuilt On Itself, Then Emptied

The excavations show a city rebuilt repeatedly on the same spot. The Indus flooded, silt filled the streets, and people raised new walls on the stumps of old ones, so the mound grew layer by layer. Then, around 1900 BCE, the city emptied out. There is no burn layer, no sign of destruction. The river shifting course, a drying climate and the collapse of trade networks are the explanations most argued over.

One explanation that used to be in textbooks is no longer among them. Mortimer Wheeler, who directed digs here in the 1940s, looked at a handful of skeletons found in the streets and wrote that invaders had put the city to the sword. Later study showed the skeletons came from different periods and carried no marks of violence. The theory collapsed, slowly.

The city went on changing hands long after it was abandoned. When it was dug it was part of British India; in 1947 it became Pakistan's. Its two most famous finds sit on either side of that line. The bronze "Dancing Girl" is in New Delhi; the steatite "Priest-King" is in Karachi. Two small figures from the same streets, in the museums of two countries.

The City Nobody Is Digging

No new excavation has happened at Mohenjo-daro since the mid-1960s. Pakistan halted digging when it became clear that what was uncovered could not be protected. Most of the city, by most estimates, is still underground, and there the soil is a better guardian than any archaeologist. The thing eating the exposed brick is not rain but salt. Groundwater rises through the walls, evaporates at the surface and leaves crystals behind that crumble the brick from inside. Conservation teams cover walls with mud plaster and have reburied some areas entirely.

One more detail. The Dancing Girl is only about ten centimetres tall, one arm stacked with bangles, head tilted back, a hand on her hip. She was cast by the lost-wax method, a technique that was still new in the world when she was made.

Today

Mohenjo-daro has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1980 and is looked after by the province of Sindh. The threats come in order: salt, a rising water table, and floods. The monsoon floods of 2022 put much of Sindh under water; at the site walls collapsed, drains filled with silt, and the conservation budget was suddenly far too small. A festival stage built on the mound in 2014 brought archaeologists out in protest.

The stupa still stands on top of the mound, the same view Banerji had in 1922. The city beneath it is still mostly unexcavated and still unread. A city whose builders we cannot name asks, every flood season, who is going to look after it now.