The Ancient City of Mohenjo-daro

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Mohenjo-daro   image source: harappa.com

The ancient city of Mohenjo-daro is one of the first urban cities in human history. Nestled in southern Pakistan's Indus River Valley, Mohenjo-daro is the largest and best-preserved city of the Indus civilization, the earliest know civilization of the Indian subcontinent. Mohenjo-daro was build around 2,500 BC, about the same time the great pyramids were being build in Egypt. And expand a surface area of nearly 500 acres an incredible size for a city of this time period.

'Great Bath' in the Mohenjo-daro Citadel   image source: harappa.com

Because of Mohenjo-daro's grand scale, archeologists believe it may have served as a seat of power for the Indus civilization. The city was divided into two districts, the Citadel and the Lower Town. The Citadel is home to the city's exceptional monuments including great baths, a 900 square foot tank fed from the Indus River. Mohenjo-daro also had a sophisticated water system. Houses had baths and toilets and the town featured both an elaborate sewage system, fresh water and 700 wells throughout the city. The Roman baths some of history's most famous waterway systems weren't constructed until many hundreds of years after Mohenjo-daro scrape baths. 

Buddhist Stupa, Mohenjo-daro   image source: pinterest.com

Mohenjo-daro has no places of worship or governance such as palaces, royal tombs or temples. This may indicate that the society was not built around state interests like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies at the time. Rather, the class structure of Mohenjo-daro may have been relatively equal. The city's second district the  Lower Town may demonstrate the societies' egalitarian structure. The Lower Town with its intricate water system was home to between 20,000 to 40,000 people. Unlike many urban areas of its time it was laid out in a grid system similar to modern-day city blocks. 

After approximately 600 years, the city collapsed. No one is quite sure why. But the cause could potentially have been a change within the culture or in the path of the river. Without its crucial source of water, the city's resident may have moved away leaving Mohenjo-daro nearly abandoned. In 1911, nearly 4,000 years after the city fell into ruin, archeologists paid their first visit. The ensuing decades of excavations have unearthed countless clues that tel the tale of Mohenjo-daro. But it still holds secrets for us to discover.

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