Thatta and its hill
Thatta, near the head of the Indus delta, was the capital of lower Sindh from the fourteenth century until the eighteenth, when the river changed course and the city declined. It was a port and a centre of weaving and trade, and its wealth drew attackers: a Portuguese fleet burned the city in 1555, when its rulers had called on them for help and then failed to pay. The low ridge of Makli, just outside it, became its cemetery. Tradition says a Sufi, Shaikh Hamad Jamali, chose the hill as a place for burial, and that the graves of the holy drew those of rulers after them. Hundreds of thousands of graves are estimated to lie on the ridge, from simple headstones to great domed tombs.
The Samma tombs
The earliest monumental tombs belong to the Samma dynasty, a local Sindhi line that ruled lower Sindh from the mid-fourteenth century to about 1520. The finest is the tomb of Jam Nizam al-Din II, who ruled for about half a century and died in 1509. It is a square stone building covered with carved bands and panels of geometric and floral decoration, with balconies and brackets that come directly from the temple architecture of Gujarat. It shows how the masons of the region worked for patrons of every faith, adapting their repertory to Islamic forms.
Arghuns and Tarkhans
In the 1520s the Arghuns, Turkic rulers from Kandahar who had been displaced by Babur, conquered Sindh. They were followed by a related family, the Tarkhans, who ruled until the Mughals annexed Sindh in 1591–92. Their tombs reflect the arrival of Persian and Central Asian forms: square tombs and open pavilions, domes, and decoration in brick and coloured glazed tile. The tomb of Isa Khan Tarkhan the second, who governed Thatta under the Mughals and died in 1651, is a large two-storey stone building with galleries and carved stone that blends the earlier and later traditions.
The Mughal period
After annexation Thatta was the seat of Mughal governors, and they and their families continued to build at Makli. The tomb of the governor Mirza Jani Beg and the tile-covered tombs of the seventeenth century belong to this phase. Thatta's great mosque, the Shah Jahan mosque, built in the 1640s with brilliant tilework, stands in the town below.
Condition
The necropolis was listed by UNESCO in 1981 with the monuments of Thatta. The monuments have suffered from salt, wind, neglect and encroachment, and from flooding, and UNESCO has raised concerns about their state of conservation. Restoration work by Pakistani and international bodies has been carried out on individual tombs.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
See also
- Samma dynasty — The Sammas ruled Sindh from Thatta for nearly two centuries from 1351, a period regarded as the height of Sindhi culture, and left the vast necropolis at Makli.
- Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.