Place · Harappan port · India
Lothal
/lot̪ʰəl/
Also known as Lothal, Lothal dock, Lothal — Harappan port & dock
The port city at Lothal in Bhavnagar district, Gujarat, excavated by S.R. Rao from 1954. The 220 x 37-metre brick-lined basin in its northeast is usually read as a tidal dock — the earliest known in the world — connected to the Gulf of Khambhat by a channel. The city flourished 2400-1900 BCE and worked as the Harappan outlet for maritime trade with the Persian Gulf: Persian Gulf stamp seals and bitumen cakes have been found in the warehouses, and the bead-and-shell workshops produced carnelian beads traded as far as Ur. Lothal's trapezoidal plan and the archeological museum make it the most visited Harappan site in India.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.522, 72.249
Connections (5)
- Trade routeMohenjo-daro
Standardised weights, seals and the same brick proportions link the Indus cities to the Gujarat ports, and Lothal's bead factory and Persian Gulf seals show where the goods were going. Carnelian beads made on this coast turn up in the royal graves at Ur. Whatever the political arrangement was, it moved a single system of measurement and manufacture across a territory larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined.
- Trade routeUr
The royal graves at Ur, excavated by Woolley in the 1920s, held long carnelian beads etched with white alkaline patterns — a technique known only from the Indus, and from workshops like the bead factory at Lothal. Harappan cubical weights and Indus seals have been found in the same city. Akkadian texts name Meluhha among the lands reached by sea, and one Mesopotamian seal belonged to a man described as an interpreter of Meluhhan, which implies a resident Indus community rather than occasional contact.
- Site adjacencyKhambhat / Cambay
Lothal and Cambay are on the same gulf four thousand years apart, and both were beaten by the same thing: the largest tidal range in India, a bore that runs up the estuary, and silt from the Sabarmati and Mahi. The Harappan dock is now well inland. Nothing about the Gulf of Khambhat has ever made it a good place to keep a harbour, and it has had major ports continuously.
- Maritime routeDilmun / Qalʿat al-Bahrain
Persian Gulf seals at Lothal and Harappan weights and seals at Qal'at al-Bahrain are the two halves of one sea route. Dilmun was where cargo changed hands, and its weight standards follow the Harappan system in some levels and the Mesopotamian in others. This is the earliest documented long-distance maritime trade involving the subcontinent, and it predates the monsoon crossing by two thousand years.
- Alternative toDholavira
Lothal and Dholavira were proposed together as Harappan sites. Dholavira was inscribed in 2021 for its water system and its stone urban plan; Lothal is still waiting, partly because its central claim — that the brick basin is a tidal dock — has been contested since it was published. A disputed interpretation is harder to inscribe than an uncontested one, whatever the site is worth.
On these journeys
Sources
Lothal — ASI excavation reports
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