Discover Mohenjo-daro

For nearly 4,000 years, the Mound of the Dead kept its secrets beneath the Sindh floodplain. Local farmers knew the raised earth contained ancient bricks, which they recycled for construction and railway ballast throughout the 19th century, unknowingly dismantling one of humanity’s earliest cities. Then in 1922, archaeologist R.D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India recognized what he had initially thought was a Buddhist stupa as something far older: the remains of a civilization contemporaneous with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, dating to approximately 2500 BCE. What emerged from systematic excavations directed by John Marshall and later by Ernest Mackay stunned the archaeological world with urban planning that would not be matched for millennia.

The Indus Valley Civilization, also called the Harappan Civilization after its first excavated site, stretched across what is now Pakistan and northwest India, covering nearly 1.3 million square kilometers at its peak—larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. Mohenjo-daro and its twin capital Harappa, 680 kilometers to the north, were its greatest cities, each home to an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people. Unlike Egypt with its pharaohs or Mesopotamia with its warrior-kings, the Indus civilization left no evidence of monumental royal tombs, palaces, or temples. No one has deciphered their 400-symbol script. We do not know what they called themselves or their cities. Even the name Mohenjo-daro is modern Sindhi, meaning ‘Mound of the Dead Men.’ The original name remains one of countless unsolved mysteries.