Ropar (Rupnagar)
Indian Punjab's own Indus town, on the Sutlej where it leaves the Shivalik hills.
Ropar stands where the Sutlej comes out of the hills onto the plain, on the north-eastern edge of the Indus world. Excavated by Y. D. Sharma between 1953 and 1955, it was the first Harappan site dug in independent India, and showed Harappan pottery, a seal in the Indus script, copper tools and burials.
The mound was lived on again and again after the Harappans, through the Painted Grey Ware age, the Mauryas, Kushans and Guptas, giving one of the longest unbroken sequences in the Punjab. A museum on the site now displays the finds.
More from the Indus
The type site of the civilisation, on an old course of the Ravi: 150 hectares and perhaps 23,500 people at its height.
The largest and best-preserved Indus city, 'the mound of the dead', with the Great Bath and some seven hundred wells.
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.
Where farming began on the edge of the Indus plain, the deep root of the cities.