The city, laid out in a rectilinear grid and built of baked bricks, featured a complex water management system, including sophisticated drainage and covered sewer system, as well as baths in nearly every house. Mohenjo-Daro, which covered 300 hectares (about 750 acres) and had a peak population of about 40,000 people, was one of the world’s largest and most advanced cities at the time. The name Mohenjo-Daro means ‘Mound of the Dead Men’. In total, more than 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Indus River and its tributaries.Įxcavated ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, with the Great Bath in the foreground and the granary mound in the background. These cities include Harappa, Ganeriwala, and Mohenjo-Daro in modern-day Pakistan and Dholavira, Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi, Rupar, and Lothal in modern-day India. Mohenjo-Daro, located west of the Indus River in the Larkana District, was one of the most advanced cities of the time, with advanced engineering and urban planning.īy 2600 BCE, small Early Harappan communities had developed into large urban centers. Mohenjo-Daro is thought to have been built in the 26th century BCE it was not only the largest city of the Indus Valley Civilization but also one of the world’s earliest major urban centers. The discovery of ancient Harappan cities shifted the timeline back another 1500 years, placing the Indus Valley Civilization in an entirely different environmental context. Prior to the discovery of these Harappan cities, scholars believed that Indian civilization began in the Ganges valley around 1250 BCE, when Aryan immigrants from Persia and Central Asia settled there. These two cities were the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. However, little was known about this ancient culture until the 1920s, when modern archaeologists excavated two long-buried cities. Remains of this vast civilization of South Asia are scattered over an area considerably larger than those covered by either ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. The Indus River Valley (or Harappan) civilization (3300-1300 BCE) lasted 2,000 years and spanned northeast Afghanistan to Pakistan and northwest India.

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