Mohenjo-daro is the ruin of one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, on the west bank of the Indus River in Larkana District, Sindh, Pakistan, about 28 km from the town of Larkana. Built around 2500 BCE, during the civilisation's mature phase of roughly 2600–1900 BCE, it was laid out on a grid of streets with covered brick drains, hundreds of wells and a raised citadel crowned by the Great Bath, a waterproofed pool 12 m long. Estimates of its peak population run from at least 40,000 to around 60,000 people, and the city was abandoned by about 1700 BCE. Its name, given long afterwards, is usually translated from Sindhi as "Mound of the Dead". In 1980 it became the first site in South Asia inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List.
Streets, Drains and 700 Wells: Reading the Lower City
Mohenjo-daro sits on a Pleistocene ridge in the Indus flood plain and covers an estimated 300 hectares, and dry core drilling in 2015 by Pakistan's National Fund for Mohenjo-daro showed the buried city is larger than the area excavated. It divides into two parts: a high western mound that archaeologists call the Citadel, and a much larger Lower City to the east, where most people lived and worked.
The Lower City was laid out to a plan. Main streets run in straight lines and cross at right angles, dividing the town into blocks of rectangular buildings. Most houses were built of fired, mortared brick, sometimes with sun-dried mud brick and timber in the upper parts, and some had two storeys. Doors usually opened onto side lanes rather than main streets, and rooms were grouped around inner courtyards. Some houses, presumably of richer families, had rooms set aside for bathing, and one building had a hypocaust, an underfloor furnace possibly used to heat water.
Water shaped the whole plan. The wells and water system were among the first things built, and excavations so far have found more than 700 wells, roughly one for every three houses, a density with no parallel in contemporary Egypt or Mesopotamia. The round, brick-lined well appears to be an Indus invention; there is no evidence of the design from those other civilisations at the time. Waste water from houses ran into covered drains along the main streets, which probably carried it towards the Indus.
Its builders also measured precisely. A shell ruler found in Ernest Mackay's excavations is incised with lines 6.7 mm apart, and Indus rulers were divided into units of about 34 mm with decimal subdivisions. Bricks found across the region have dimensions that match these units. Harappa, hundreds of kilometres to the north-east in Punjab, shares Mohenjo-daro's layout, and the near-identical plans of Indus cities point to some kind of political or administrative centre, though the extent and workings of that authority remain unclear.
The city's foundations were raised on large brick platforms, probably as protection against floods. Mortimer Wheeler argued that the city may have been flooded and silted over as many as six times and rebuilt on the same spot. Gregory Possehl later proposed that it was not one catastrophic mud flood that ended the city, but repeated smaller floods combined with land worn out by farming, grazing and the demand for brick and pottery.
The Citadel Mound: Great Bath, "Granary" and Stupa
The Citadel is a mud-brick mound about 12 m high. On it stood the city's grandest public buildings, and the names archaeologists gave them in the 1920s to 1950s are still argued over.
The Great Bath
The Great Bath was built in the third millennium BCE, soon after the Citadel mound was raised. The pool measures about 12 m long, 7 m wide and 2.4 m deep. Two wide staircases lead down into it from north and south, ending at a ledge 1.4 m high that runs the full width of the tank. Its floor and walls are of finely fitted bricks set on edge in gypsum plaster, sealed behind with a thick layer of bitumen, and the floor slopes to an outlet in the south-west corner that drained through a corbelled brick channel. Brick colonnades surrounded it on three sides, and a room on the east side holds a well that may have filled it. It has been called the earliest public water tank of the ancient world. Most scholars, including Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, think it served ritual purification rather than everyday washing.
Granary or Great Hall?
Next to the bath is a large building that Wheeler identified in 1950 as a "Great Granary", reading wall divisions in its massive wooden superstructure as storage bays with air ducts to dry grain brought in by cart. Kenoyer pointed out that no evidence of grain has ever been found there and suggested calling it a "Great Hall" of unknown purpose. The Citadel also carried a "Pillared Hall", probably for assemblies, and the so-called "College Hall", a 78-room complex once interpreted as a priestly residence.
The later stupa
The highest point of the mound is not Harappan at all. It is a Buddhist stupa built some two thousand years after the city was abandoned, dated broadly to 150–500 CE. It was this stupa that drew the first archaeologists to the site.
From Banerji's 1919 Visit to the 1965 Excavation Ban
For about 3,700 years after its abandonment the city lay under its own mound, known locally only for the stupa on top. Rakhal Das Banerji (1885–1930) of the Archaeological Survey of India visited in 1919–1920, looking at what he took to be the Buddhist monument, and found a flint scraper that convinced him the site was far older. He returned in the 1922–23 season and in 1923 wrote to the Survey's director-general, John Marshall, proposing the site's great antiquity. Marshall himself later credited Banerji with discovering, if not Mohenjo-daro itself, then at least its age.
Marshall announced the discoveries at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Illustrated London News on 20 September 1924, revealing a previously unknown Bronze Age civilisation with its own script. Large-scale digging followed under Kashinath Dikshit in 1924–25 and Marshall in 1925–26, with Ernest Mackay and others continuing into the 1930s. Marshall dug in uniform horizontal layers rather than following the mound's natural strata, which mixed finds from different periods and lost much of their context. Wheeler, who corrected that approach, dug at the site in 1945, working with his trainee Ahmad Hasan Dani and F. A. Khan. George Dales led the last major excavations in 1964 and 1965. After that, digging was banned because exposed structures were weathering so fast; only salvage work, surface surveys and conservation have been allowed since, along with the non-invasive surveys by German and Italian teams under Michael Jansen and Maurizio Tosi in the 1980s.
The Priest-King and the Dancing Girl
The excavations yielded seals, copper and stone tools, balance weights, gold and jasper jewellery, children's toys and bronze figures cast by the lost-wax method. Two small sculptures became the face of the civilisation. The "Priest-King", found in 1927, is a seated male figure of steatite 17.5 cm tall, with a neatly trimmed beard, a fillet around his head and a cloak decorated with trefoil and circle motifs that still show traces of red. Nothing suggests priests or kings ruled the city; the name is simply what the excavators called him.
The "Dancing Girl", found in 1926, is a bronze statuette just 10.5 cm high of a young woman with bangles up one arm and a hand on her hip. Wheeler called it his favourite statuette. When British India was partitioned in 1947, the roughly 12,000 objects from the site that had been taken to New Delhi were divided equally between India and Pakistan, in some cases by splitting necklaces bead by bead. Pakistan chose the Priest-King, now in the National Museum in Karachi; India kept the Dancing Girl and the Pashupati seal, now in the National Museum in New Delhi.
Salt, Floods and a 2030 Warning
Inscription by UNESCO in 1980 came with an international campaign: an agreement to fund restoration was signed in Paris on 27 May 1980, and several countries contributed. The money did not flow steadily. Conservation stopped in December 1996 when Pakistani and international funding dried up, resumed in April 1997 with UNESCO funds, and a 20-year plan provided US$10 million to protect the standing structures from flooding. In 2011 responsibility for the site was transferred to the government of Sindh.
The biggest threat comes from below. Salinity in the groundwater is eating into the brickwork, so that walls crumble from the ground up, and poorly judged restoration has added to the damage. Many walls have already collapsed, and in 2012 Pakistani archaeologists warned that without better conservation the site could disappear by 2030. In January 2014 the Sindh Festival held its opening ceremony on the ruins despite a case filed in the Sindh High Court and objections from archaeologists, who pointed out that the Antiquities Act forbids even hammering a nail at a protected site.
Climate adds its own strain. Mohenjo-daro has a hot desert climate; it recorded 53.5 °C in May 2010 and −5.4 °C in January 2006. Average rainfall is only about 100 mm a year, mostly in the July–September monsoon, but totals swing wildly: just 10 mm fell in 1987, while 2022, a year of severe flooding in Pakistan, brought a record 1,023.8 mm, about ten times the average, onto walls that had stood exposed since the 1920s.
Mohenjo-daro is one of only five major urban centres of the Indus Civilisation, alongside Harappa, Ganeriwala, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi; our guide to the Indus Valley Civilisation follows the wider culture from its farming roots at Mehrgarh, and the story of the river that fed it, from Tibet to the Arabian Sea, is told in our complete guide to the Indus River.