Harappa

Harappa, near Sahiwal on an old course of the Ravi, was one of the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, flourishing from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, with perhaps twenty to thirty thousand people at its height. It gave its name to the whole culture, the Harappan.

Like Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, it was laid out with brick walls, gateways, granaries or great halls, streets and drains, and its workshops made beads, seals and pottery traded as far as Mesopotamia. Its seals carry a script that has never been deciphered. Its cemeteries tell of a people who buried their dead with pots and ornaments.

In the nineteenth century much of the ancient brick was carried away by the railway builders to use as ballast on the Lahore–Multan line. Excavations since the 1920s have revealed the city, and the site with its museum is one of the most important in South Asia.