The Ancient Civilization of Pakistan - - History of Discovery at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro (Part-I)

History of Discovery at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro

Between 1856 and 1872, Sir Alexander Cunningham (1814-1893), director of the Archaeological Survey of India, performed some small excavations at the Harappan site while looking for settlements visited by Chinese pilgrims in the Buddhist period. (4-5) He had no idea about the age or importance of the Harappa ruins. Entrepreneurial humans (brick robbers) reused the site’s heavy adobe brick to build houses and other structures, such as 100 miles of track ballast for the Karachi-Lahore railroad under construction in 1865.

In 1914, Sir John Marshall (1876-1958), also a director of the Archaeological Survey of India, surveyed Harappa, identifying a high citadel 50 feet above the lower Harappa city, a great waterproofed tank or bath, and a granary. Seven years later in 1921, he initiated Harappa’s systematic excavation, finding six levels of occupation belonging to a complex contained within a three-mile circumference.

Sir Marshall also worked on the Mohenjo-Daro site (“Mound of the Dead”, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 1980), (6) the largest of all the 1,500 known cities and hamlets of the Indus Valley civilization. (1) Mohenjo-Daro is located 350 miles south of Harappa in the Indus River flood plain of southern Pakistan’s Sindh province.

R.D. Banerji, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, first discovered Mohenjo-Daro in 1921-1922 while studying an overlying Buddhist stupa--a simple mound of mud or clay to cover supposed relics of the Buddha. (7) Sir Marshall wrote about Mr. Banerji’s discovery of Mohenjo-Daro in his 1931 book entitled Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization:

The site had long been known to district officials in Sindh, and had been visited more than once by local archaeological officers, but it was not until 1922, when Mr. R.D. Banerji started to dig there, that the prehistoric character of its remains was revealed. This is not greatly to be wondered at; for the only structures then visible were the Buddhist Stupa and Monastery at the north-west corner of the site, and these were built exclusively of brick taken from the older ruins, so that it was not unnatural to infer that the rest of the site was referable to approximately the same age as the Buddhist monuments, viz, to the early centuries of the Christian era. Indeed, when Mr. Banerji himself set about his excavations here, he had no idea of finding anything prehistoric. His primary object was to lay bare the Buddhist remains, and it was while engaged on this task that he came by chance on several seals inscribed with legends in an undecipherable script which had long been known to us from the ruins of Harappa in the Panjab [sic].

As it happened, the excavation of Harappa itself had at my instance been taken up in the year previous by Rai Bahaur Daya Ram Sahni, and enough had already been brought to light to demonstrate conclusively that its remains, including the inscribed seals, were referable to the Chalcolithic Age [Copper Stone Age, 4500-3300 BC]. (8) Thus, Mr. Banerji’s find came at a singularly opportune moment, when we were specially eager to locate other sites of the same early age as Harappa. Mr. Banerji himself was quick to appreciate the value of his discovery, and lost no time in following it up…With the hot season rapidly approaching, Mr. Banerji’s digging was necessarily very restricted, and it is no wonder, therefore, that his achievements have been put in the shade by the much bigger operations that have since been carried out. This does not, however, lessen the credit due to him. His task at Mohenjo-daro [sic] was far from being as simple as it may now appear. Apart from the discoveries at Harappa, which he had not personally seen, nothing whatever was then known of the Indus civilization. (9)

Sir Marshall published an illustration in Illustrated London News in 1924 of one of the seals (impressions on clay) discovered at Mohenjo-Daro, which University of Chicago archaeologist Ernest MacKay read with great interest, realizing immediately that the seal in the photo was identical to a seal he had discovered under the foundation of a temple at Kish in Mesopotamia. Dr. MacKay’s exciting discovery was the first hint of the antiquity of the ruins at Mohenjo-Daro. Ernest MacKay, K.N. Dikshit, and numerous other directors excavated bountiful Mohenjo-Daro through the 1930s.(90)

Mohenjo-Daro Ruins: A Challenge For Archaeologists - - Old Civilization in Pakistan (Part-3)

A well-planned street grid and an elaborate drainage system hint that the occupants of the ancient Indus civilization city of Mohenjo Daro were skilled urban planners with a reverence for the control of water. But just who occupied the ancient city in modern-day Pakistan during the third millennium B.C. remains a puzzle.

"It's pretty faceless," says Indus expert Gregory Possehl of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The city lacks ostentatious palaces, temples, or monuments. There's no obvious central seat of government or evidence of a king or queen. Modesty, order, and cleanliness were apparently preferred. Pottery and tools of copper and stone were standardized. Seals and weights suggest a system of tightly controlled trade.

The city's wealth and stature is evident in artifacts such as ivory, lapis, carnelian, and gold beads, as well as the baked-brick city structures themselves.

A watertight pool called the Great Bath, perched on top of a mound of dirt and held in place with walls of baked brick, is the closest structure Mohenjo Daro has to a temple. Possehl, a National Geographic grantee, says it suggests an ideology based on cleanliness

Wells were found throughout the city, and nearly every house contained a bathing area and drainage system.

City of Mounds

Archaeologists first visited Mohenjo Daro in 1911. Several excavations occurred in the 1920s through 1931. Small probes took place in the 1930s, and subsequent digs occurred in 1950 and 1964.

The ancient city sits on elevated ground in the modern-day Larkana district of Sindh province in Pakistan.

During its heyday from about 2500 to 1900 B.C. the city was among the most important to the Indus civilization, Possehl says. It spread out over about 250 acres (100 hectares) on a series of mounds, and the Great Bath and an associated large building occupied the tallest mound.


According to University of Wisconsin, Madison, archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, also a National Geographic grantee, the mounds grew organically over the centuries as people kept building platforms and walls for their houses.

"Gradually you have a high promontory on which people are living," he says.

With no evidence of kings or queens, Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state, perhaps by elected officials or elites from each of the mounds.

Prized Artifacts

A miniature bronze statuette of a nude female, known as the dancing girl, was celebrated by archaeologists when it was discovered in 1926, Kenoyer notes.

Of greater interest to him, though, are a few stone sculptures of seated male figures, such as the intricately carved and colored Priest King, so called even though there is no evidence he was a priest or king.

The sculptures were all found broken, Kenoyer says. "Whoever came in at the very end of the Indus period clearly didn't like the people who were representing themselves or their elders," he says.

Just what ended the Indus civilization—and Mohenjo Daro—is also a mystery.

Kenoyer suggests that the Indus River changed course, which would have hampered the local agricultural economy and the city's importance as a center of trade.

But no evidence exists that flooding destroyed the city, and the city wasn't totally abandoned, Kenoyer says. And, Possehl says, a changing river course doesn't explain the collapse of the entire Indus civilization. Throughout the valley, the culture changed, he says.

"It reaches some kind of obvious archaeological fruition about 1900 B.C.," he said. "What drives that, nobody knows."

Lost City Of Mohenjo-Daro - - Old Civilization in Pakistan (Part-2)

The name of Mohenjo-daro is widely recognized as one of the most important early cities of South Asia and the Indus Civilization and yet most publications rarely provide more than a cursory overview of this important site.

There are several different spellings of the site name and in this article we have chosen to use the most common form, Mohenjo-daro (the Mound of Mohen or Mohan), though other spellings are equally valid: Mohanjo-daro (Mound of Mohan =Krishna), Moenjo-daro (Mound of the Dead), Mohenjo-daro, Mohenjodaro or even Mohen-jo-daro. Many publications still state that Mohenjo-daro is located in India (presumably referring to ancient India), but since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the site has been under the protection of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan.

Discovery and Major Excavations

Mohenjo-daro was discovered in 1922 by R. D. Banerji, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, two years after major excavations had begun at Harappa, some 590 km to the north. Large-scale excavations were carried out at the site under the direction of John Marshall, K. N. Dikshit, Ernest Mackay, and numerous other directors through the 1930s.

Although the earlier excavations were not conducted using stratigraphic approaches or with the types of recording techniques employed by modern archaeologists they did produce a remarkable amount of information that is still being studied by scholars today.

The last major excavation project at the site was carried out by the late Dr. G. F. Dales in 1964-65, after which excavations were banned due to the problems of conserving the exposed structures from weathering.

Since 1964-65 only salvage excavation, surface surveys and conservation projects have been allowed at the site. Most of these salvage operations and conservation projects have been conducted by Pakistani archaeologists and conservators.


In the 1980s extensive architectural documentation, combined with detailed surface surveys, surface scraping and probing was done by German and Italian survey teams led by Dr. Michael Jansen (RWTH) and Dr. Maurizio Tosi (IsMEO).

Details of the most recent salvage excavations and conservation are found in obscure journals or reports that are not readily available to the public, but are listed in the Bibliography for those interested in searching them out.

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