Mohenjodaro – India’s Vanishing City (ca. 2600-1700 BC)
Built around 2600 BC, the city of Mohenjodaro was home to people of the Indus Valley Civilization until around 1700 BC, when it was mysteriously abandoned. Mohenjodaro, the Harappan people, and their entire civilization vanished without a trace until an archaeologist stumbled across the city’s remains in 1920.
During its height, Mohenjodaro was the most advanced city in South Asia; its planning and engineering were unsurpassed, and the city itself may have housed around 35,000 people. City planning was impeccable: the streets were laid out in a grid pattern, and workers managed to create uniformly-sized mudbricks to build the houses.
One of the most impressive areas at Mohenjodaro was the public bathhouse (shown below), which consisted of a brick-lined pool inside a colonnaded courtyard. The pool was even lined with a layer of tar to prevent water leakage. The city’s water system was highly sophisticated, with a network of wells to provide fresh water to each house, and a sanitation structure that directed waste through different pipes into a drainage system.
Although it did not have city walls, Mohenjodaro was well-fortified through a network of towers to the west of the city, and defensive fortifications to the south. The lack of obvious defenses within the city may suggest that the town was being used as an administrative or political centre, however this is still under debate due to the extensive amount of city that remains unexcavated. Either way, Mohenjodaro clearly possessed a high degree of social organization – a large, central granary was identified with bays for farmers to bring in their crops from the countryside; beneath the granary air ducts had been constructed for air circulation, in order to allow stored grain to stay dry.
Unfortunately, the ancient name of the city remains unknown, as the language of the Indus Valley people has yet to be deciphered; the current name ‘Mohenjodaro’ is Sindhi for ‘Mound of the Dead’. The city was destroyed and rebuilt at least seven times, and on each occasion, the new city was rebuilt directly on top of the old remains. While flooding is thought to have been the cause of its final abandonment, this has yet to be proven with conclusive evidence.
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