Harappan sites of Pakistan

The Indus Valley Civilisation

The Indus Valley Civilisation, also called the Harappan Civilisation after the first of its cities to be excavated, was one of the three earliest urban civilisations of the Old World, alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt. It was also the largest of the three: its sites spread across some 800,000 km², from the Makran coast to the upper Ganges and from northern Afghanistan to Gujarat. The greater part of that area lies in what is now Pakistan.

It grew over three broad stages. In the Early Harappan period (c. 3300–2600 BCE), farming villages in the Indus plain and the Balochistan valleys built walled towns and traded across the region, with regional styles named Hakra, Kot Diji, Amri and Nal. In the Mature Harappan period (c. 2600–1900 BCE), these merged into one urban culture with planned cities, standard weights, a shared script and common styles of pottery, seals and brick. In the Late Harappan period (c. 1900–1300 BCE), the cities emptied and life went on in smaller, more local settlements such as those of the Jhukar and Cemetery H cultures.

Cities and daily life

Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, a World Heritage Site since 1980, is the best preserved Mature Harappan city. It stands on a raised citadel and a lower town laid out in blocks, built of baked brick of uniform proportions, with wells, bathing platforms, covered street drains and the Great Bath. Harappa on the old course of the Ravi was occupied for about two thousand years. Ganweriwala in Cholistan and Lakhueen-jo-daro near Sukkur are of a similar size, but have hardly been excavated.

Harappans grew wheat, barley and cotton, kept cattle, and made carnelian beads, shell bangles, copper tools and stamp seals carved with animals and short inscriptions. Their goods reached Mesopotamia, where texts name a land called Meluhha that is generally taken to be the Indus. The script, known from several thousand short inscriptions, has not been deciphered, so the names of the cities and of their rulers, if they had any, are unknown.

Decline

From about 1900 BCE the large cities were abandoned over a few centuries. The usual explanation is a combination of a weaker monsoon and shifting rivers. The Hakra, which once flowed through Cholistan, dried up, and the dense line of sites along its bed in Bahawalpur district is the clearest sign on this map of a landscape that has since changed. No evidence supports the older idea of a sudden invasion.

Reading the map

Each dot is one recorded site, coloured by the latest Harappan phase its record names: solid terracotta for Mature Harappan, a hollow ring for Early Harappan and the farming villages that led into it, grey for Late Harappan, and a small grey ring where the survey gives only a broad date. The four largest cities are marked with a larger symbol and named. The dashed line traces the dry beds of the Hakra and the Nara. The inset enlarges Cholistan, where the sites are too dense to read at the scale of the whole country. Select a site for its name, phase, district, the survey that recorded it and how precise its position is.