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Helmand civilisation

Also known as Shahr-i Sokhta culture

The Helmand civilisation is the name given to the Bronze Age culture of the Helmand basin in Iranian Sistan and southern Afghanistan, around 3300 to 2350 BCE, known from the cities of Shahr-i Sokhta and Mundigak, a trading neighbour of the Indus civilisation.

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The basin

The Helmand river flows from the mountains of central Afghanistan to the inland delta and lakes of Sistan, on the border of Iran and Afghanistan. In the fourth and third millennia BCE its waters supported a chain of settlements that controlled routes between the Iranian plateau, Central Asia and the Indus valley. The Italian archaeologist Maurizio Tosi, who excavated Shahr-i Sokhta from 1967, and others have argued that these sites formed a distinct civilisation, which the term Helmand civilisation describes.

Shahr-i Sokhta

Shahr-i Sokhta, "the burnt city", in Iranian Sistan, grew into one of the largest settlements of its time on the Iranian plateau, covering perhaps 150 hectares at its height around 2500 BCE. It had residential quarters, craft areas and a large cemetery with many thousands of graves. Its workshops processed lapis lazuli from the mountains of Badakhshan and other stones, and its finds include textiles, baskets, wooden combs and pottery. Among the most often cited are a painted goblet showing a goat leaping to eat from a tree in successive images, sometimes called the earliest animation, and a woman buried with an artificial eyeball, made of a light paste and covered with gold, around 2900–2800 BCE.

The city's name comes from the traces of fire found by the excavators. It was abandoned by around 2100 BCE, probably as the river shifted and the environment deteriorated.

Mundigak

Mundigak, north-west of Kandahar, was excavated by the French archaeologist Jean-Marie Casal in the 1950s. It developed from a village into a town with a massive building on a mound, interpreted as a palace, and a structure with a colonnade interpreted as a temple, surrounded by a wall with bastions. Its pottery and figurines show connections with Baluchistan and with Shahr-i Sokhta.

Objects of Indus type, including a seal and pottery, have been found at Shahr-i Sokhta, and its stone-working traditions overlapped with those of the Indus cities. The Helmand sites lay on routes by which lapis lazuli, tin and other materials could move between Central Asia, the Indus and Mesopotamia. Some scholars suggest the region was the land called Aratta in Sumerian epic poetry, a source of precious stones, though that identification is speculative.

Further reading

  • Possehl, Gregory L. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. AltaMira Press, 2002
  • Wright, Rita P. The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society. Cambridge University Press, 2010
  • Chakrabarti, Dilip K. The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology. Oxford University Press, 2006

See also

  • Indus Valley Civilization — The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), also called the Harappan Civilization, was a Bronze Age urban culture that flourished across the Indus river system and beyond between roughly 2600 and 1900 BCE, one of the world's three earliest urban civilizations alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia.
  • Indus trade with Mesopotamia — The Indus civilization traded with Mesopotamia by sea and land, and is generally identified with the Meluhha named in Mesopotamian cuneiform records as a source of carnelian, ivory and timber.
  • Mehrgarh — Mehrgarh is a Neolithic settlement in Balochistan, ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), occupied from about the seventh millennium BCE, which documents the transition to farming in South Asia and precedes the Indus cities by thousands of years.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.