Place · pre-Harappan settlement · Pakistan
Kot Diji
The type-site in Khairpur district, Sindh, Pakistan, that gives its name to the pre-urban Kot Diji horizon (c.3300-2600 BCE) out of which the mature Harappan cities emerged. F.A. Khan excavated the mound in 1955-57, documenting the pre-Harappan fortified village with its citadel of defensive wall, lower town of common houses, and the burnt destruction layer at c.2600 BCE that may mark the transition to the mature Harappan phase. Kot Diji pottery — buff ware with painted horned deity, pipal-leaf and fish-scale motifs — is the diagnostic ceramic of this horizon, found at Harappa, Rehman Dheri and dozens of other pre-mature-Harappan sites.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.340, 68.710
Connections (4)
- PrecursorMehrgarh
Mehrgarh on the Kachi plain has a sequence running from the seventh millennium BCE — wheat and barley farming, herded goats, cotton, and teeth drilled with bow-drills in what is the earliest dentistry known anywhere. That sequence runs up into the Kot Dijian horizon of the fourth and early third millennia, which is the pre-urban phase out of which the mature Harappan cities emerged. Nothing else in South Asia gives so long an unbroken village record.
- PrecursorMohenjo-daro
Kot Diji gives its name to the pre-urban horizon that underlies the mature Harappan phase, and Kot Dijian levels are found beneath Mohenjo-daro and at sites across Sindh and Cholistan. Several show burning at the transition, which was once read as conquest and is now generally read as ordinary rebuilding. The urban phase did not arrive from outside; it grew out of these villages over several centuries.
- Site adjacencyKot Diji Fort
One limestone ridge in Khairpur carries both. At its foot is the mound of Kot Diji, whose pre-Harappan levels F. A. Khan excavated in the 1950s and whose distinctive pottery gave the Kot Dijian phase its name across Sindh and the Punjab. On its crest Mir Sohrab Khan Talpur built his fort in the 1790s, fifty bastions stepping up the spine of the rock. The Talpur garrison's parade ground therefore sits directly above the horizon that dates everything beneath it, and the two occupations are separated by roughly forty-eight centuries on the same outcrop.
- In the same set asAmri
The two sites that between them define Sindh before the Harappan cities. Amri, on the right bank in Dadu district, gives its name to the Amri phase and its painted buff ware; Kot Diji, up the river in Khairpur, gives its name to the Kot Dijian. Casal's sequence at Amri and F. A. Khan's at Kot Diji were excavated within about thirty years of each other and are still the two columns any fourth-millennium find in the lower Indus is dated against. Both show their own phase overlain directly by Mature Harappan.
On these journeys
Sources
Kot Diji excavation reports
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