Harappa

Damage and discovery

Harappa was known to Europeans before it was understood. Charles Masson recorded ruins there in 1829, and Alexander Cunningham examined the site in the 1850s and 1870s and published a seal he could not place. By then the mounds were being quarried for baked brick to ballast the Lahore-Multan railway, and a substantial part of the ancient city was carried away.

Systematic excavation began under Daya Ram Sahni in 1920, and it was the correspondence between finds at Harappa and at Mohenjo-daro, announced by John Marshall in 1924, that established the existence of a hitherto unknown civilization.

The site

Harappa shows the standard Indus arrangement of a raised western mound and a lower town, with a grid plan, standardised brick, drains and wells. Excavation has identified craft working areas, including for beads, shell and copper, and a large cemetery outside the settlement whose burials have supplied much of what is known of Indus mortuary practice and physical anthropology.

Occupation runs from an early phase well before the urban period through the mature phase and into the post-urban Cemetery H culture, which makes the site unusually valuable for tracing the sequence.

Significance

Because it was excavated early, extensively and continuously — including by a long-running joint project from the 1980s — Harappa has produced a fuller stratigraphic record than any other Indus site. Much of the current chronology of the civilization, and the argument that its decline was gradual and regional rather than sudden and total, rests on work done there.