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The Harappan civilisation: discovery, extent, sites and town planning

Prehistory and the Harappan civilisation · Part 2 / 3 · Fact-checked on 8 November 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

How the Harappan cities were found and announced; the Early, Mature and Late phases; the frontier sites and spread of the civilisation; citadel, lower town, grid streets, standard bricks and drains; Mohenjo-daro and the Great Bath; Harappa and its granaries; Lothal and Dholavira in Gujarat; and Kalibangan, Banawali, Rakhigarhi, Ropar and Chanhudaro.

The Harappan civilisation produced the first cities of the Indian subcontinent. It flourished in the Bronze Age, when copper and its alloy bronze were the main metals, and at its height it stood beside Mesopotamia and Egypt as one of the great early civilisations, covering a larger area than either. It is named after Harappa, the first of its cities to be excavated, following the archaeologists' habit of naming a culture after the site where it was first identified. The older name, Indus Valley civilisation, is still used, but many of its sites lie well away from the Indus, especially along the dry bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra in Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan. This part covers how the civilisation was found, how it is dated, how far it spread, how its towns were laid out, and what the main sites show; part 3 turns to its economy, beliefs, script and decline.

The ruins were noticed long before anyone knew how old they were. Charles Masson described the mounds of Harappa in an account of his travels published in 1842, and Alexander Cunningham, the first head of the Archaeological Survey, visited the site and published a Harappan seal in 1875 without realising what it was. Meanwhile railway builders in the 1850s carted away Harappa's ancient bricks for ballast, damaging the upper levels. Systematic digging came in the 1920s. Daya Ram Sahni excavated Harappa in 1921, and R. D. Banerji began work at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh in 1922. Seeing that the two sites, some 600 kilometres apart, shared the same seals, bricks and pottery, John Marshall, the Director General of the Survey, announced the discovery of a new civilisation in 1924.

Thanks largely to radiocarbon dating, the civilisation is now usually divided into three phases. In the Early Harappan phase, roughly 3200 to 2600 BCE, regional farming cultures across the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra plains built walled settlements, used potter's wheels and copper, and began to share styles; Kot Diji and Amri in Sindh and the earlier levels of Kalibangan in Rajasthan belong here. The Mature Harappan phase, about 2600 to 1900 BCE, is the age of the big planned cities, standard bricks and weights, seals and writing, spread over the whole region. The Late Harappan phase, from about 1900 BCE, saw cities shrink or be abandoned while smaller regional cultures carried on in villages. The phases matter because they show that the cities did not appear suddenly or come from outside: they grew out of centuries of local village life of the kind seen at Mehrgarh. When a question says 'Harappan civilisation' without qualification, it usually means the Mature phase.

The Mature Harappan culture covered a vast area, from the edge of the Himalaya to the Gulf of Khambhat and from Balochistan to the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab. In the north, Manda stands on the Chenab near Jammu, and Shortugai, far beyond the mountains in north-eastern Afghanistan, was a trading outpost. In the west, Sutkagen Dor lies near the Makran coast of Balochistan, close to the Iranian border. In the east, Alamgirpur is on the Hindon, a tributary of the Yamuna, in Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh. In the south, Daimabad on the Pravara in Maharashtra marks the farthest reach, though its Harappan phase is a late one. Well over a thousand Harappan sites are now known. Since 1947 most new discoveries have been made in India, and today far more sites lie in India than in Pakistan, with a dense cluster along the Ghaggar-Hakra in Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan and another in Gujarat.

What sets these cities apart is their town planning. The larger towns were usually built in two parts: a smaller, higher mound to the west, the citadel, raised on a platform of mud brick and holding the bigger public buildings, and a larger lower town to the east where most people lived. Main streets ran roughly north–south and east–west and met at right angles, dividing the lower town into blocks. Builders used baked and sun-dried bricks made to the same proportions, with thickness, width and length in the ratio 1:2:4, at sites hundreds of kilometres apart. Covered brick drains ran along the streets, fed by smaller drains from the houses, with openings at intervals so they could be cleaned. Houses were built around a courtyard, many had their own well and a paved bathing area, and doors usually opened onto side lanes rather than the main street. Such uniformity across a huge area points to shared rules and some form of authority that enforced them.

Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus in the Larkana district of Sindh, is the largest and best preserved of the cities; its name means 'mound of the dead' in Sindhi. On its citadel stands the Great Bath, a rectangular tank about 12 metres long, 7 metres wide and 2.4 metres deep, reached by flights of steps at the north and south ends. To stop leaks, the builders packed the bricks tightly in a gypsum mortar and sealed the outer side with bitumen, and a ring of rooms and a corridor enclosed the tank. Most scholars think it was used for ritual bathing. Near it lies a massive building on a brick platform that Wheeler called the great granary, though many archaeologists now prefer to see it as a large hall or warehouse, and in the southern part of the citadel there is a pillared hall that may have been used for meetings. Famous finds from Mohenjo-daro include the bronze figure known as the 'dancing girl' and the stone bust called the 'priest-king'. The ruins were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980.

Harappa lies on an old course of the Ravi in Sahiwal district of Pakistani Punjab. Brick robbing damaged its upper levels badly, so it is less complete than Mohenjo-daro, but it shows the same plan of a western citadel mound and lower town. To the north of the citadel, near the old river bank, excavators found two rows of brick-built units on a raised platform, six units in each row, which they identified as granaries; close by were circular brick platforms, probably for threshing grain, and rows of small houses that may have been workers' quarters. Harappa also has a cemetery of the Mature phase and a later one, known as Cemetery H, which belongs to the Late Harappan culture that followed. Because Harappa has been dug over a century, with layers from the early village to the late phase, it is one of the best places to follow the whole story of the civilisation in one spot.

Gujarat has some of the most distinctive sites. Lothal, near the Gulf of Khambhat in Ahmedabad district, was excavated by S. R. Rao from 1955. On its eastern side lies a large brick-lined basin joined by a channel to a river, which Rao identified as a dockyard for boats; some scholars think it was a reservoir, but the dockyard reading is the one usually taught. Lothal also had a bead-making workshop and a warehouse on a high platform. Dholavira, on Khadir Bet island in the Great Rann of Kutch, was excavated by R. S. Bisht of the Archaeological Survey from 1990. Unlike most cities it has three parts, a citadel, a middle town and a lower town, and it is built largely of stone. Its people cut large reservoirs and built channels and dams to catch the water of two seasonal streams, and near its north gate lay an inscription of ten large Harappan signs, often called the signboard. 'Dholavira: a Harappan City' became India's first Harappan World Heritage site in 2021. Surkotada in Kutch and Rangpur in Saurashtra are other Gujarat sites.

Further north lie the sites of Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Sindh. Kalibangan, on the dry bed of the Ghaggar in Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan, was excavated by B. B. Lal and B. K. Thapar in the 1960s; its name means 'black bangles', after the bangle pieces strewn over its mounds. Its Early Harappan level has a ploughed field marked by furrows crossing one another, and in the Mature phase a row of fire altars stood on the citadel; here the lower town too had its own wall. Banawali in Fatehabad district of Haryana yielded a terracotta model of a plough. Rakhigarhi in Hisar district of Haryana is among the largest Harappan sites in India. Ropar on the Sutlej in Punjab was the first Harappan site excavated after Independence, in the 1950s. In Sindh, Chanhudaro, south of Mohenjo-daro, had no citadel at all and was a busy centre for making beads and seals, while Kot Diji is known for its fortified Early Harappan settlement.

Taken together, the sites show both a common pattern and real local variety. Across hundreds of kilometres people used bricks of the same proportions, laid out streets in a grid, built covered drains and often separated a raised citadel from a lower town, which is why the Harappan world is described as one civilisation and not a set of unrelated towns. Yet each place adapted the pattern to its setting: Dholavira was built in stone with three parts and elaborate water storage for a dry island, Lothal was a craft and trading centre beside the sea, Chanhudaro had no citadel, and Kalibangan walled its lower town as well as its citadel. How these cities fed themselves, what they made and traded, what they believed, what their script was like and why the cities faded away are the subject of part 3.

Exam traps

• Harappa was excavated first (Daya Ram Sahni, 1921) and Mohenjo-daro second (R. D. Banerji, 1922); John Marshall announced the civilisation in 1924 but excavated neither first.
• The Mature Harappan phase is about 2600–1900 BCE; the ploughed field at Kalibangan belongs to the Early Harappan level, not the Mature phase.
• The plough model is from Banawali; the ploughed field is from Kalibangan. Do not swap them.
• The Great Bath is on the citadel of Mohenjo-daro, not in the lower town, and not at Harappa.
• Chanhudaro is the city without a citadel; Dholavira is the city in three parts and built largely of stone.
• Dholavira is on Khadir Bet in the Rann of Kutch, not in Saurashtra; it became a World Heritage site in 2021, while Mohenjo-daro (in Pakistan) was inscribed in 1980.
• Frontier sites: Manda (north, Chenab), Shortugai (Afghanistan), Sutkagen Dor (west, Balochistan), Alamgirpur (east, Uttar Pradesh), Daimabad (south, Maharashtra).
• Ropar is in Punjab (on the Sutlej); Banawali and Rakhigarhi are in Haryana; Kalibangan is in Rajasthan.

Recap

• Harappan civilisation: first cities of the subcontinent, Bronze Age, named after Harappa; many sites along the Ghaggar-Hakra, not only the Indus.
• Discovery: Masson (1842) and Cunningham (seal, 1875); Sahni at Harappa (1921), Banerji at Mohenjo-daro (1922); Marshall's announcement (1924).
• Phases: Early (c. 3200–2600 BCE), Mature (c. 2600–1900 BCE), Late (from c. 1900 BCE); the cities grew out of local village cultures.
• Extent: Manda and Shortugai (north), Sutkagen Dor (west), Alamgirpur (east), Daimabad (south); more sites now in India than in Pakistan.
• Town planning: western citadel and eastern lower town, grid streets, standard bricks (1:2:4), covered drains, courtyard houses with wells.
• Mohenjo-daro: Great Bath on the citadel, large hall or 'granary', pillared hall, 'dancing girl', 'priest-king'; World Heritage site 1980.
• Harappa: granaries in two rows of six, working platforms, Cemetery H (Late Harappan). Lothal: dockyard and bead workshop.
• Dholavira: three parts, stone, reservoirs, signboard, World Heritage site 2021. Kalibangan: ploughed field, fire altars. Banawali: plough model. Chanhudaro: no citadel.

Practice questions

Sources

• Archaeological Survey of India: Annual Reports (1920s), Memoirs, Indian Archaeology – A Review (excavation reports on Kalibangan, Lothal, Ropar, Banawali, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi) and the ASI's site notes — https://asi.nic.in
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro (inscribed 1980); Dholavira: a Harappan City (inscribed 2021), nomination files and committee decisions — https://whc.unesco.org