Mohenjo-daro
A 4,500-year-old Bronze Age metropolis with covered drains and a precise street grid centuries ahead of its time, whose language has never been deciphered and whose abandonment around 1700 BCE is still debated by archaeologists.
Field Guide Entry
Origin Story
Built around 2500 BCE in the Indus Valley, Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest settlements of the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization, with an estimated peak population over 40,000 and remarkably advanced urban planning: a grid of streets, covered drainage running beneath entire neighborhoods, and a large public bathing structure known as the Great Bath. The city was lost beneath the earth for millennia until British and Indian archaeologists rediscovered it in 1919 to 1922.
Evidence & Claims
Thousands of carved seals and small tablets found at the site bear a script, now called Indus script, that remains undeciphered to this day; with no bilingual inscription to anchor a translation and only around 4,000 short, highly repetitive examples, researchers cannot even agree whether it represents a full written language or a more limited symbolic system. Some scholars argue for links to Dravidian languages, but this remains unproven.
Skeptical Explanations
Mortimer Wheeler, who led early excavations, initially proposed the city fell to a violent invasion, possibly by Indo-Aryan migrants. Most archaeologists now favor a more gradual decline: repeated river flooding, deforestation from the enormous fuel demand of brick-firing, and overworked agricultural land likely combined to make the area unsustainable over generations rather than ending the city in any single catastrophic event. Excavation itself was halted by the 1960s after rising groundwater salinity began damaging the exposed brick ruins, leaving large portions of the site still unexcavated today.
Visiting Information
The site and museum are open most days but closed Wednesdays. International visitors should check current visa requirements and travel advisories before planning a trip.
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