Place · Harappan city · Pakistan
Harappa
/ɦəɽəˈpaː/
The city in Sahiwal district, Punjab, Pakistan — the first Harappan site excavated (by Daya Ram Sahni in 1921) and the one that gave the civilization its name. The city flourished c.2600-1900 BCE on the Ravi river and declined gradually; its Cemetery H horizon of c.1900-1300 BCE records the post-urban phase in which the mature Harappan writing, standard weights and iconography were replaced by regional styles. The site was heavily damaged in the 1850s by railway contractors who used the ancient brick for ballast on the Lahore-Multan line. ASI protected what remained from 1909.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 30.630, 72.864
Connections (5)
- Contemporary capital withMohenjo-daro
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are the two largest excavated cities of the civilisation, about six hundred kilometres apart on the same river system, and they share a street grid, a brick module, a drainage standard and a weight system — which is the real surprise of the Indus world. Two cities that far apart building to identical specifications implies something about administration that the absence of readable writing makes impossible to describe.
- Succession in timeMohenjo-daro
Both cities were excavated in the 1920s — Banerji at Mohenjo-daro and Sahni at Harappa — and Marshall's announcement in 1924 is the moment the Bronze Age of the subcontinent was discovered at all. Before that, Indian history began with the Vedas or with Alexander. Harappa had already been half quarried away for railway ballast by then, which is why Mohenjo-daro is the better preserved of the two.
- AnalogueRakhigarhi
Harappa was excavated first and gave the civilisation its name, having first been quarried to ballast a railway; Rakhigarhi may be larger and has a village on top of it. The difference in how much is known about each is a matter of what was dug when and by whom, not of what each place was, and that is true of this whole subject.
- River adjacencyParushnī / Irāvatī / Ravi
Harappa stands on the Ravi, and the city is the reason the whole civilisation carries its name — it was dug first, in the 1920s, before anyone knew how much else there was. The Paruṣṇī of the Rigveda is the same water, described a thousand years later by people who left no cities: the clearest case in the basin of one river carrying two utterly different kinds of evidence.
- Trade routeUr
IVC seals and Harappan-standard weights have been found at Ur in Mesopotamia; the texts of the Ur III period name Meluhha (identified with the Indus Valley) as the source of carnelian, lapis, teak and ivory supplied to Sumerian temples through the Persian Gulf trade.
On these journeys
Sources
Harappa excavation reports, ASI
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