Harappan Sites and Their Findings: Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Lothal and More

Harappan Sites at a Glance: Location, River, Excavator and Findings

Major Harappan Sites and Their Findings: The Master Table

Only five Harappan settlements grew into major cities: Rakhigarhi, Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira and Ganweriwala. The rest were regional centres, agricultural villages, ports and manufacturing centres. Each important site is remembered for a signature find, and that link between a site and its find is what an examination tests most often.

The table below gives every major Harappan site with its present location, the river or water source it stood on, who excavated it and when, and the find for which it is remembered. The sections after it explain each site in turn.

Phases of the Harappan Civilisation and Where Each Site Fits

The Harappan civilisation did not appear all at once. Its urban phase grew out of a long period of farming villages, and it ended in a period of village life again. Knowing the phase helps a student see why a site such as Kot Diji or Bhirrana matters even though it was never a great city.

1. Early Harappan (6000 to 2600 BCE): The formative phase. Settlements were generally small, with distinctive pottery, farming, herding and some crafts. Kot Diji, Amri, Kunal and the lowest levels of Kalibangan, Banawali and Bhirrana belong here. At Bhirrana and Kunal the pre-Harappan phase began between 7000 and 5500 BCE.
2. Mature Harappan (2600 to 1900 BCE): The urban phase. Planned cities with standard bricks, drains, seals, weights and long-distance trade flourished at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi, Ganweriwala, Lothal and Kalibangan.
3. Late Harappan (1900 to 1300 BCE): The decadent phase. Seals, writing, standard weights and long-distance trade disappeared, and settlements became rural. Rangpur in Gujarat, Daimabad in Maharashtra and the doab sites of Alamgirpur and Hulas show this stage, sometimes called the successor cultures.

How Many Harappan Sites Are There and Which Is the Largest

More than 2,000 Harappan sites have been discovered, and Rakhigarhi in Haryana is the biggest Harappan city. Its remains are spread over seven mounds on the Ghaggar plain, and two more mounds were found in 2014.

Sizes varied enormously. Chanhudaro covered less than 7 hectares and Mohenjo-daro about 125 hectares, while Harappa reached about 150 hectares at its height. Dholavira's walled city covers about 47 hectares, and it is counted the sixth largest Harappan site.

NCERT puts Rakhigarhi at 550 hectares and calls it the biggest Harappan city; other accounts give 80 to 100 hectares for its main mounds, or 300 to 350 hectares once the outlying mounds are included. Whichever figure is used, Rakhigarhi is the largest Harappan site in India.

Harappan Sites in Pakistan: Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Chanhudaro, Kot Diji and Ganweriwala

Mohenjo-daro: Great Bath, Citadel, Drains and the Dancing Girl

Mohenjo-daro, "Mound of the Dead" in Sindhi, lies off the west bank of the lower Indus in Larkana district of Sindh. Built about 2500 BCE, it is the best-known Harappan site, and the clearest example of a city that was planned first and built afterwards. R. D. Banerji found seals there like those from Harappa, which first suggested that the two sites belonged to one culture, and excavations began in 1922. The city was abandoned by about 1700 BCE, and in 1980 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• Citadel and Lower Town: A smaller, higher Citadel stood on mud-brick platforms, and a much larger Lower Town lay beside it; each was walled.
• Planning below ground: Laying the platforms alone would have needed about four million person-days of labour, and all building was then confined to the platforms.
• Standard bricks: Bricks, sun-dried or baked, had a fixed ratio, with length four times and breadth twice the height, the same at all Harappan settlements.
• Streets and drains: Streets ran on a rough grid, and every house was connected to covered street drains that could be opened for cleaning.
• Houses and wells: Courtyard houses had their own bathrooms, and the city held about 700 wells.

The Citadel carried the city's public buildings. The Great Bath was a rectangular tank in a courtyard, reached by flights of steps on the north and south, and made watertight with bricks set on edge in gypsum mortar and a lining of bitumen. It measures about 12 metres long, 7 metres wide and 2.4 metres deep. Because almost every house had its own bathroom, the tank was probably meant for a special ritual bath rather than public bathing. Beside it stood a massive warehouse, whose brick base survives while its wooden upper storeys have decayed.

Several famous objects come from Mohenjo-daro. The bronze Dancing Girl, 10.8 cm high, was cast by the lost-wax method; the bearded stone bust known as the "priest-king" wears a shawl with a trefoil pattern; and the Pashupati seal shows a figure seated cross-legged among an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a buffalo.

Harappa: The First Site Discovered on the Ravi

Harappa, near the former course of the Ravi about 24 km west of Sahiwal in Pakistani Punjab, was the first Harappan site to be discovered, and that is why the civilisation carries its name. At its height it covered about 150 hectares.

Its discovery came slowly. Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), reported a Harappan seal in 1875 but could not place it, because he thought Indian history began with the cities of the Ganga valley. By then the site was already badly damaged, and he noted that bricks taken from it were enough to lay "about 100 miles" of the railway line between Lahore and Multan. Daya Ram Sahni began excavating at Harappa in 1921 and found seals in layers far older than the early historic cities. In 1924 John Marshall, the Director-General, announced the discovery of a new civilisation in the Indus valley.

Harappa's cemetery tells the student how archaeologists read social difference. Burials excavated in the mid-1980s included, near the skull of a man, an ornament of three shell rings, a jasper bead and hundreds of micro beads. On the whole, though, the Harappans did not bury precious things with the dead. R. E. M. Wheeler excavated here in 1946, and since 1986 an American team has worked at the site.

Chanhudaro, Kot Diji, Amri and Ganweriwala in Sindh and Cholistan

Chanhudaro, about 130 km south of Mohenjo-daro, was a tiny settlement of less than 7 hectares devoted almost entirely to craft production. Its workers made beads, cut shell, worked metal and made seals and weights. Its fame rests on beads of carnelian, a red stone whose colour was obtained by firing the yellowish raw material; specialised drills for boring beads have been found at Chanhudaro, at Lothal and at Dholavira. N. G. Majumdar first excavated it in 1931.

The other Sindh and Cholistan sites matter for different reasons:

• Kot Diji: On the east bank of the Indus opposite Mohenjo-daro, it is the type site of the Early Harappan Kot Diji culture, with a fortified town older than the Mature cities. F. A. Khan's excavation revealed the formative stage of the civilisation.
• Amri: Near Kot Diji in Sindh, it has early non-Harappan levels and later Harappan phases, so it shows how local cultures grew into the Mature Harappan.
• Ganweriwala: In the Cholistan desert on the dry bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra, it was one of the five great cities, but it was rediscovered only in the 1970s by M. R. Mughal and has not been properly excavated.

Harappan Sites in Gujarat: Dholavira, Lothal, Surkotada, Rangpur and Desalpur

Dholavira: UNESCO World Heritage Harappan City and Its Reservoirs

Dholavira stands on Khadir island in the Great Rann of Kutch, in Bhachau taluka of Kachchh district, on the Tropic of Cancer, between two seasonal streams, the Mansar to the north and the Manhar to the south. A villager, Shambhudan Gadhvi, drew attention to it in the early 1960s; J. P. Joshi of the ASI recorded it in 1967 or 1968, and R. S. Bisht began excavating it in 1990. Its earliest evidence goes back to about 3000 BCE, and the city flourished for nearly 1,500 years, through the early, mature and late Harappan phases.

Dholavira differs from other Harappan cities in three ways:

• Three-part plan: Most Harappan cities had two parts; Dholavira had three, a fortified Castle with its Bailey, a fortified Middle Town and a Lower Town, with a cemetery to the west.
• Stone building: The foundations of most buildings were made of stone, where Harappa and Mohenjo-daro used brick.
• Water harvesting: Water from the two streams was diverted by dams and channels into a series of deep, connected stone reservoirs along the eastern and southern walls; sixteen or more reservoirs of varying size were built, some cut into the rock, and one large rock-cut reservoir measures 33 metres in length.

The city's most unusual find is a signboard of ten large signs of the Indus script, about 3 metres long, found in a side room of the northern gateway. Writing is usually found on small objects such as seals, so a public inscription of this size is exceptional. In 2014 excavation began on a rectangular stepwell 73.4 metres long, 29.3 metres wide and 10 metres deep. Dholavira's position also gave it access to copper, shell, agate-carnelian and steatite, and to trade with Magan (the Oman peninsula) and Mesopotamia.

Lothal: Dockyard, Bead Factory and the Sabarmati Link

Lothal lies in the Bhal region of Ahmedabad district, near the Gulf of Khambhat, and was connected to an old course of the Sabarmati. The ASI discovered it in 1954, and S. R. Rao excavated it from 1955 to 1960. Building began around 2300 BCE, and it is one of the southernmost Harappan cities.

• The dockyard: A huge basin built entirely of burnt bricks and linked by channels to the river. The National Institute of Oceanography found marine microfossils, salt and gypsum crystals in it, which shows that sea water once filled it; some archaeologists still read it as an irrigation tank.
• The bead factory: Lothal lay near carnelian from Bharuch, steatite from south Rajasthan and north Gujarat, and metal from Rajasthan, so beads and gems were made here and traded as far as West Asia.
• The warehouse: On the Citadel, with a ramp down to the basin.
• Fire altars: Like Kalibangan, Lothal had fire altars, which suggest ritual use.
• Planning in a small town: The Citadel was not walled off but built at a height, and while houses were of mud brick, the drains were of burnt brick.

A pot from Lothal carries a design that seems to tell the story of the thirsty crow, and the copper dog and bird of Lothal are among the best Harappan metal figures. Lothal is on India's tentative list for World Heritage, and the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways is building a National Maritime Heritage Complex beside the old site, with work begun in March 2022 at a cost of around Rs 4,500 crore.

Surkotada, Desalpur, Rangpur and Kuntasi in Kutch and Saurashtra

After 1947 most known sites lay in Pakistan, so Indian archaeologists surveyed Kutch and Saurashtra closely and found many smaller Harappan settlements. Four of them appear in examinations.

• Surkotada: A small fortified site of 1.4 hectares in Rapar taluka of Kutch, found by J. P. Joshi in 1964. Its excavators described bones from all levels (about 2100 to 1700 BCE) as horse bones; other specialists hold that horse bones are hard to tell apart from those of the donkey or onager, so the find remains debated.
• Desalpur (Desalpar Gunthli): A modest site of about 130 by 100 metres in Nakhatrana taluka, about 25 km from Bhuj, on the Bamu-Chela stream. It has a massive stone fortification and three seals of steatite, copper and terracotta.
• Rangpur: In Surendranagar district on the Saurashtra peninsula, the type site of the Late Harappan Rangpur culture, where rice and bajra have been found.
• Kuntasi: A walled port of 2 hectares near Morbi, with a jetty, signs of seaborne activity and a manufacturing complex.

Harappan Sites in Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab Along the Ghaggar

Kalibangan: Ploughed Field and Fire Altars on the Ghaggar

Kalibangan lies on the left bank of the Ghaggar in Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan. The Italian scholar Luigi Tessitori first recognised its ruins as very ancient, and B. B. Lal and B. K. Thapar began excavating it in 1960. By about 2900 BCE the settlement had become a planned town, and its excavation report calls it a major provincial capital of the civilisation.

Kalibangan has given the earliest ploughed field ever revealed by excavation, dated to about 2800 BCE and belonging to the Early Harappan levels. The field had two sets of furrows at right angles to each other, which suggests that two different crops were grown together, a practice still followed in the region for mustard and gram. The site is also known for its fire altars, found on the Citadel, in houses of the Lower Town and in a separate structure to the east, which suggest fire worship. An earthquake around 2600 BCE ended the Early Harappan settlement before the Mature town was built.

Rakhigarhi: The Largest Harappan Site in India and Its DNA Study

Rakhigarhi in Haryana, about 150 km north-west of Delhi, lies on the Ghaggar plain in the valley of the old Drishadvati channel. It shows every stage from pre-Harappan to Mature Harappan, and its seven mounds make it the biggest Harappan city. Amrendra Nath began excavations in 1997, and a mud-brick granary of seven chambers of the Mature phase has been found there.

Rakhigarhi is now best known for archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA. From 2013 Vasant Shinde's team extracted DNA from skeletons excavated at the site, in research by Deccan College, Pune, with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, and Harvard Medical College. The study, published in 2019, found that the genome lacked ancestry from steppe pastoralists or Iranian farmers, indicating that the Harappans were indigenous to the region and that their genetic roots go back to 10,000 BCE.

In February 2020 the Union Budget announced that Rakhigarhi would be developed as an iconic archaeological site, and the ASI began removing encroachments from its mounds. A museum built by the state government already stands at the site.

Banawali, Bhirrana, Kunal and Farmana in Haryana

Haryana holds several smaller sites along the dried Sarasvati channel, each with its own point for the examination.

• Banawali: In Fatehabad district on the left bank of the dried Sarasvati, excavated by R. S. Bisht in 1974. It shows three stages, pre-Harappan, Mature Harappan and post-Harappan, a fortified town laid out on a chessboard pattern, and a terracotta model of a plough.
• Bhirrana: Also in Fatehabad district. Its pre-Harappan phase began between 7000 and 5500 BCE, among the earliest dates for the region, and a graffito on pottery resembles the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro.
• Kunal: An Early Harappan site with evidence of early bead production.
• Farmana: A cemetery where the dead were buried with ornaments.

Frontier Harappan Sites: Northernmost, Westernmost, Easternmost and Southernmost

Shortugai, Manda, Sutkagan Dor, Alamgirpur and Daimabad at the Edges

The edges of the Harappan world are asked about as extremes, namely the northernmost, westernmost, easternmost and southernmost sites. Ropar on the Sutlej in Punjab belongs with them as a northern site; it was the first Harappan site excavated after independence, and it shows occupation from Harappan to medieval times.

These outposts show how the Harappans reached their raw materials. They set up Nageshwar and Balakot near the coast for shell, and Shortugai near the best source of lapis lazuli, a blue stone highly valued in their crafts. Lothal sat near carnelian from Bharuch, while copper probably came from the Khetri region of Rajasthan and from Oman, where Harappan jars coated with black clay have been found.

UNESCO World Heritage Status of Harappan Sites

Dholavira, Mohenjo-daro and Lothal on the World Heritage Lists

Two Harappan cities are World Heritage Sites. Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan was inscribed in 1980 as the Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro. Dholavira, listed as "Dholavira: A Harappan City", was inscribed on 27 July 2021 and became India's 40th World Heritage Site.

Dholavira's path to inscription shows how the process works. The site was on UNESCO's tentative list from 2014, India submitted the nomination dossier to the World Heritage Centre in January 2020, and the city was inscribed for its planning, its multi-layered fortifications, its water reservoirs and drainage, and its extensive use of stone. Lothal was placed on the tentative list in 2014, and Harappa in Pakistan in 2004.

Harappan Sites in UPSC Previous Year Questions

What UPSC Has Asked About Harappan Sites and Their Findings

UPSC's objective questions on the sites test two skills, matching a site to its signature find, and recognising which places are Harappan at all. Its Mains questions ask for site evidence, such as Mohenjo-daro's Citadel, drains and Great Bath, Dholavira's reservoirs and three-part plan, and Lothal's dockyard, to show the quality of Harappan planning and architecture.

Sources

• NCERT: Themes in Indian History Part I (Class XII), Bricks, Beads and Bones
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond (Class VI), The Beginnings of Indian Civilisation
• NCERT: Understanding Society: India and Beyond (Class IX), Early Humans and Beginning of Civilisation
• NCERT: An Introduction to Indian Art (Class XI), Arts of the Indus Valley
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond (Class VII), The Gupta Era (Nalanda)
• Press Information Bureau: Dholavira, India's 40th World Heritage Site
• Press Information Bureau: India's World Heritage Properties (2023)
• District Kachchh (Govt of Gujarat): Dholavira
• Press Information Bureau: National Maritime Heritage Complex, Lothal
• Wikipedia: Indus Valley Civilisation
• Wikipedia: Mohenjo-daro
• Wikipedia: Harappa
• Wikipedia: Chanhudaro
• Wikipedia: Kot Diji
• Wikipedia: Ganweriwal
• Wikipedia: Sutkagan Dor
• Wikipedia: Dholavira
• Wikipedia: Lothal
• Wikipedia: Surkotada
• Wikipedia: Desalpar Gunthli
• Wikipedia: Rangpur, Gujarat
• Wikipedia: Kuntasi
• Wikipedia: Kalibangan
• Wikipedia: Rakhigarhi
• Wikipedia: Banawali
• Wikipedia: Bhirrana
• Wikipedia: Rupnagar
• Wikipedia: Manda, Jammu
• Wikipedia: Alamgirpur
• Wikipedia: Shortugai
• Wikipedia: Daimabad
• Wikipedia: Sohgaura copper plate inscription
• Wikipedia: Sarnath
• Wikipedia: Lion Capital of Ashoka
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers