Harappa
The type site of the civilisation, on an old course of the Ravi: 150 hectares and perhaps 23,500 people at its height.
Harappa lies about twenty-four kilometres west of Sahiwal, near a modern village of the same name, eight kilometres from the Ravi, which once ran beside it. Settlement began here around 3300 BCE in the Ravi phase and grew through the Kot Diji phase into a city of some 150 hectares in the Mature Harappan period, with perhaps 23,500 inhabitants.
The city was made of several walled mounds: the citadel, Mound AB, raised on a brick platform; Mound E and ET of the town; and Mound F to the north, with rows of small two-roomed houses, circular brick working floors and a great building long called the granary, now often thought a hall or warehouse. Gateways controlled traffic in and out, and drains ran under the streets. Outside the walls lay the cemetery of the Mature period, R37, and the later Cemetery H, where the dead were buried in painted jars.
Harappa was damaged by the railway builders of the 1850s who took its bricks for ballast. It was excavated by Daya Ram Sahni from 1921, by M. S. Vats, by Mortimer Wheeler in 1946, and since 1986 by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project. Its museum displays seals, weights, beads, pottery and the famous Harappa torso. In 2005 a plan for an amusement park on the site was abandoned when the builders dug up artefacts.
More from the Indus
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Perhaps the largest Indus city, on the old Drishadvati plain east of the Punjab, whose skeletons gave the first Indus DNA.
The Indus city of the salt desert, with rock-cut reservoirs and a signboard of ten giant signs.
A small port town near the Gulf of Khambhat with a great brick basin, a bead factory and an ivory scale.
The town of 'black bangles' on the dry Ghaggar, with the oldest ploughed field ever excavated and rows of fire altars.
Indian Punjab's own Indus town, on the Sutlej where it leaves the Shivalik hills.
Where farming began on the edge of the Indus plain, the deep root of the cities.