One of the world's first cities — the Indus Valley Civilisation's great urban experiment, 4,500 years silent
Mohenjo-daro ('Mound of the Dead' in Sindhi) sits on the right bank of the Indus River in Larkana District, Sindh Province. Built around 2600 BCE and abandoned by 1900 BCE, it was one of the largest cities of the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation — a planned urban settlement of 40,000+ people with standardised brick sizes, straight streets on a grid, a sophisticated drainage and sewer system more advanced than contemporary Mesopotamia, and public architecture including the Great Bath. Rediscovered in the 1920s, it has yielded thousands of carved steatite seals with an undeciphered script, bro…
Mohenjo-daro was established around 2600 BCE at the peak of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which at its height extended across 1.25 million km² — larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. The city's inhabitants traded with Mesopotamia, Oman, and Central Asia, as evidenced by the seals found in Ur and Dilmun. The abandonment around 1900 BCE remains unexplained — climate change, river diversion, and epidemic disease have all been proposed. The site was unknown to the outside world until 1922, when R.D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India first excavated it.