Place · Sindhi necropolis · Pakistan

Makli Necropolis, Thatta

Function

Burial and funerary

Tradition

Sindh funerary and Sufi traditions

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

24.766, 67.906

Connections (9)

• AnalogueSixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat

  Bagerhat on the Sundarbans fringe and Makli near Thatta are the two great deltaic Muslim funerary and settlement landscapes at opposite ends of the subcontinent, both on the edge of a mangrove or a wasteland, both built in brick and glazed tile because there was no stone, and both organised around a saint's tomb and the population that gathered to it. The Indus and Ganges deltas produced the same institution independently.

• Route adjacencyBharuch (Barygaza)

  Thatta and Bharuch are the two river-mouth ports of the north-western coast, on the Indus and the Narmada, and both served enormous inland hinterlands by boat. The difference is that the Narmada stayed where it was and the Indus did not: Thatta's harbour, Banbhore before it and Aror upriver were each stranded in turn by a river that changes course across a whole province.

• River flowIndus basin

  Thatta was the Mughal port of Sindh, Banbhore the ancient one, Brahmanabad and Aror the medieval inland centres, and the Indus has abandoned all four. Each shift moved the harbour and stranded a city; Karachi, which had no history before the nineteenth century, is the current answer to a problem the province has had for four thousand years.

• River flowBarbarikon / Banbhore

  Banbhore and Thatta are the ancient and the early modern ports of the lower Indus, and the river abandoned both. Sindh's whole urban history is a sequence of harbours stranded by a channel that moves across a province: Aror, Brahmanabad, Banbhore, Thatta, and now Karachi, which was chosen precisely because it sits on a coast rather than on the river.

• Craft tradition ofWazir Khan Mosque, Lahore

  The cut-and-glazed kashi tilework of the Wazir Khan Mosque at Lahore, the Shah Jahan Mosque at Thatta and the Makli tombs is one Sindhi and Multani tradition worked at three scales. It runs cobalt, turquoise, green and white over whole surfaces rather than as inlay panels, and the Aga Khan Trust's restorers at Lahore after 2012 had to re-learn the technique from the buildings themselves.

• Site adjacencyShah Jahan Mosque, Thatta

  The Shah Jahan Mosque and the Makli necropolis are three kilometres apart at Thatta, and between them they are what a Mughal provincial capital on the lower Indus produced: a brick mosque with ninety-three domes, no minarets and acoustics that carry a sermon to any corner, and a ridge of half a million graves accumulated over four centuries. The river then moved and took the trade to Karachi.

• AnalogueChaukhandi tombs

  The Chaukhandi tombs east of Karachi and the Makli necropolis above Thatta are the two great funerary stone fields of Sindh, and the carving on both is a regional idiom rather than a Persian one: stepped stacked slabs, geometric bands, jewellery cut on women's graves and mounted riders with weapons on men's. Almost every Chaukhandi tomb is unnamed and undated.

• Site adjacencyKeenjhar Lake

  Both belong to the Samma dynasty's Thatta. Makli, on the ridge above the old capital, holds the tombs of the Samma sultans, the Arghuns and the Tarkhans across some four hundred years — one of the largest funerary landscapes anywhere. Keenjhar, twenty-odd kilometres north, holds the tomb of Noori, the fisherwoman that Jam Tamāchi of the same dynasty is said to have married against his court's advice. The kings are buried on the hill in carved stone and the fisherwoman out in the lake.

• Site withinThatta

  Makli Necropolis, Thatta sits inside Thatta and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

On these journeys

• Early modern ports & companies
• Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
• The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
• Indian port cities — the coast itself
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush
• Sindh — the Indus and its saints

Sources

Wikipedia, “Makli Necropolis”. The East India Company and VOC factory records; Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India.

• Wikipedia — Makli Necropolis