Mohenjo-daro History: Rise and Decline of the City

The history of Mohenjo-daro begins around 2500 BCE, when the city was built on the west bank of the Indus in what is now Sindh, and it was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation. It probably held at least 40,000 people at its height, and it was abandoned gradually between about 1900 and 1700 BCE. It then lay forgotten for roughly 3,700 years, until archaeologists began work there in the 1920s.

The end of the city is still argued over. This guide gives the timeline, the story of the excavations, and where the main explanations for the decline stand today. If you are planning a visit rather than reading about one, our Mohenjo-daro visitor guide covers the site itself.

When was Mohenjo-daro built and who lived there?

The city was built around 2500 BCE, in the middle of what archaeologists call the Mature Harappan phase. That makes it a contemporary of the pyramids of Egypt and the early cities of Mesopotamia, although it was a very different place. Nobody has identified a palace, a royal tomb or a temple there with confidence.

What they left was a plan. The town is divided into a raised western mound, usually called the citadel, and a larger lower town laid out in blocks along straight streets. Houses were built of fired brick, many with their own bathing room and a drain leading to a covered channel in the street. More than 700 wells have been counted across the site.

Nobody knows what the city was called. "Mohenjo-daro" is a Sindhi name usually translated as "mound of the dead", and it belongs to the modern mound, not to the people who lived there. Their language is not known either, because the Indus script has never been read.

Why the city stood where it did is easier to say than who ruled it. It sat on fertile floodplain beside the river, on trade routes that ran towards Balochistan and the Arabian Sea, and among farmland that could support a large population.

Timeline at a glance

1. About 2500 BCE. Mohenjo-daro is built and grows into a planned city.
2. About 2500 to 1900 BCE. The city flourishes. The Great Bath, the grid of streets, the drains and the wells all belong to this period.
3. After about 1900 BCE. Settlement across the wider Indus region begins to shrink and many sites are given up. Mohenjo-daro's late buildings show poorer construction and reuse of earlier bricks.
4. By about 1700 BCE. The city is abandoned.
5. Early 1920s. The Archaeological Survey of India recognises the mound as a prehistoric city.
6. 1924 to the 1930s. Kashinath Dikshit, John Marshall, Ernest Mackay and others excavate large areas.
7. 1945. Mortimer Wheeler and Ahmad Dani work at the site.
8. 1964 to 1965. George Dales leads the last major excavation. After this only salvage work is allowed.
9. 1980. UNESCO inscribes the site as a World Heritage Site, the first in South Asia.

The dates for founding and abandonment are approximate and shift a little from source to source. Treat any single year you see as the middle of a range.

How was Mohenjo-daro discovered?

The mound had been known locally for centuries, and a Buddhist stupa built there long after the city was abandoned sits on top of the citadel. What was not known was what lay beneath it. R. D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India came to the mound around 1919 to 1920 and recognised much older material under the stupa, and the survey began serious digging in 1924 to 1925.

The timing mattered. The neighbouring site of Harappa, in Punjab, had been known since the nineteenth century, but it had been badly damaged by railway builders taking its bricks. When Mohenjo-daro produced the same seals, the same brick sizes and the same kind of pottery, it became clear that these were parts of one civilisation spread over more than a thousand kilometres. In 1924 John Marshall announced the discovery to the world. Our comparison of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa explains how the two sites differ for visitors.

Excavation in these early decades was fast and often crude by modern standards, and the digging itself did damage. The most famous finds, the bronze Dancing Girl and the stone Priest-King, come from this period, and both have their own stories. See the Dancing Girl and the Priest-King for where they are now.

What did the city look like?

The citadel mound holds the buildings that seem to have served the whole community rather than single households. The best known is the Great Bath, a brick-lined tank about 12 metres long, 7 metres wide and 2.4 metres deep, sealed with bitumen. A large hall and a granary-like structure stood nearby, though the labels "granary" and "college of priests" are guesses rather than firm identifications.

The lower town is where most people lived. Streets run roughly north to south and east to west, and the main ones are wide enough for carts. Houses turn their backs on the streets and open onto interior courtyards, and the drains that run beneath the lanes are one of the reasons the site is so often described as an early example of urban sanitation.

What is missing is as interesting as what is there. Excavators have found no palace or royal tomb that can be identified with confidence, and nothing like the monuments to rulers seen in Egypt or Mesopotamia. That absence is one reason scholars still argue about how the city was governed.

What happened to Mohenjo-daro? Theories of decline

This is the question most readers arrive with, and the honest answer is that there is no single agreed one. Four explanations have been argued over the last century.

The invasion theory has been dropped

In the 1940s Mortimer Wheeler suggested that Aryan invaders had destroyed the city, and pointed to skeletons found in the upper levels as evidence of a massacre. In 1964 George Dales went back through the record and found only about 37 sets of human remains from nine years of early digging that could be tied to the Indus period, mostly buried casually and not clearly from the same moment. There was no sign of the fortified last stand you would expect on the citadel. The massacre theory has been rejected by mainstream archaeology, and modern accounts do not repeat it.

Floods and shifts in the river

The Indus has changed its course many times, and layers of silt inside the city show it was flooded more than once. Some scholars have argued that a great flood or a sequence of them drove people out. Others reply that there is no evidence of a single catastrophic flood, and that the city was rebuilt after floods before, so floods alone do not explain why it was finally given up. It also seems that Mohenjo-daro was not abandoned in a day.

A weakening monsoon

Research published in 2012 by Liviu Giosan and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued that the monsoon rains weakened over the Indus region, and that this made both flood-fed and rain-fed farming harder. Settlement in the wider region shrank from about 3,900 years ago. The idea fits the wider pattern of decline across the civilisation, and it is now one of the leading explanations.

A slow unravelling

Most current accounts combine these. A drying climate, a shifting river, disrupted trade and the gradual decline of city institutions could all have pushed people away over generations, with some moving east towards the Ganges plain and some to smaller villages. In this view there was no single "fall" of Mohenjo-daro, only a long decline. The late city shows signs of that: poorer buildings, drains no longer maintained and rooms divided up for other uses.

Be wary of any source that gives you one confident cause. The physical evidence is thin, and the specialists disagree.

Why the site is at risk today

The bricks that survived 4,000 years underground have not had an easy time since being dug up. Groundwater rich in salt rises through the walls and crumbles the brickwork, and heavy rain and past restoration work using unsuitable materials have added to the damage. In 2012 Pakistani archaeologists warned that without better conservation the site could be lost by about 2030, a figure that reflects the seriousness of the problem more than a firm forecast.

In 2014 there was a public controversy over plans to hold the opening of the Sindh Festival at the site, which would have involved construction activity that antiquities law prohibits. The event went ahead despite objections from historians. Since the 1960s only salvage work has been allowed on the ruins, so much of the city is still buried.

Is Mohenjo-daro worth visiting after reading about it?

For anyone with an interest in the subject, yes. The ruins are low, brown and quiet, and the layout of streets, wells and drains is easy to follow on foot from the citadel mound. It rewards people who read a little first. Those who want dramatic architecture will find little, because the buildings survive only as walls a few metres high.

The site museum next door holds seals, pottery and replicas, and the main national collections are in Karachi and Delhi. Our Mohenjo-daro museum guide explains what is in it, and our ticket price guide covers the entry fee.

Check the security advice first

Larkana lies in Sindh north of Nawabshah, and the UK government advises against all but essential travel to that part of the province. Pakistani visitors still go, and Mohenjo-daro is a regular school and family destination, but check current local news and police advice before you set out. Overseas visitors should read their own government's advice at the UK travel advice page, because travelling against it can void insurance.

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