HARAPPA FILMS presents
MESOPOTAMIA IS FAMED AS THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION.
BUT AT THE SAME TIME A VASTER, MORE MYSTERIOUS EMPIRE ROSE IN SOUTH ASIA,
JUST AS THE PYRAMIDS WERE BEING BUILT.
ITS GREATEST CITY LAY HIDDEN UNTIL A CENTURY AGO.
TODAY, ITS LEGACY IS SPLIT BY THE TURBULENT BORDER
BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN.
MOHENJO-DARO: UNSEALING AN ANCIENT INDUS CITY
Excavations on the Stupa Mound: Mohenjodaro.
The ruins of the 4,000-year-old city of Mohenjo-daro
cast a spell over the surrounding area.
Villagers tell stories, true or not, about the site.
One of the most dramatic is about an ancient ruler.
1. THE STORY
There was a king of Mohenjo-daro.
He was very cruel, and he was very powerful,
and he was lusty. SHEIKH JAVID
ALI SINDHI: When there was a wedding,
the king used to sleep with the bride during the first night.
This continued from day to day,
weeks to weeks, months to months,
from years to years.
One day, the daughter of the king's sister was married.
The king started preparing himself for the occasion.
The bride started praying to gods and goddesses of the valley
to come and save her.
When the king entered, he was entering, one feet was into the house,
one was outside the door.
Then due to the prayers of that bride,
all of the city was destroyed.
This story has come due to some exchange of ideas
from Mesopotamia.
The same story is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
MOHENJO-DARO SEAL, ~2300 BCE
How did I get hooked on this ancient city?
I first came here in the early '70s on a school trip with a ninth-grade class
at the American School in Islamabad.
Our host was classmate Shah Nawaz Bhutto, the Prime Minister's son,
whose ancestral lands were just a few miles away.
With me was my first Kodak Instamatic camera.
What I remember most was the empty streets,
which the people living here seemed to have just left.
A FORGOTTEN CIVILIZATION:
NEW DISCOVERIES, AN UNKNOWN INDIA.
Who were those people?
"MODERN" REFINEMENTS IN ANCIENT INDIA:
ARTS AND CRAFTS OF A NEWLY DISCOVERED RACE.
At the time of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China (2500-1900 BCE),
a civilization bigger than all of them combined arose
in the ancient Indus Valley.
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were its first cities.
Mohenjo-daro is by far the most impressive,
the source of half of all undeciphered seals.
The flagship city.
But my first Indus city was Harappa.
As a kid, I visited many times.
My favorite great-uncle Hafiz
and Auntie Samia lived just a few miles away.
The silence of these ruins gripped me too, but they faded away with my childhood.
In 1995, after moving to San Francisco from Pakistan,
I wanted to build a website.
I remembered how much I loved those ruins when I was a kid.
So I chose Harappa.com as the domain name.
I liked the ancient ring of the word Harappa
at the heart of the new.
But it was mostly my personal historical collection,
not ancient Indus stuff, that I put on the site.
I didn't think much more about it.
Within weeks, I got an email from Dr. Richard Meadow
introducing the Harappa Archaeological Research Project.
Did I know about them?
He copied Dr. Mark Kenoyer, co-director.
I said, "Why don't we work together?"
Mark responded with a 90-slide set he wanted me to put up on this new thing,
the internet.
I was young, and I had no idea what I was getting into.
Thousands of pages and 30 years later, harappa.com has become the leading website
on the ancient Indus civilization,
thanks to contributions from major scholars, especially Mark,
the world's leading ancient Indus archaeologist.
My role is that of an informed detective,
sharing an obsession with thousands of people a day.
Just before coming to Mohenjo-daro in 2025 I spoke at a conference in Chennai, India.
It was the 100th anniversary of John Marshall announcing the discovery
of the ancient Indus civilization.
I am not a scholar myself of the ancient Indus Valley.
I'm somebody really interested
in learning about it and been drawn into it
and just trying to understand more about this really enigmatic
but incredibly important civilization to the world.
A century has elapsed, but we still do not know a single word,
name, ruler, not even the religion or language spoken.
Yet deep in South India, many Tamils are convinced
that their culture originated in Mohenjo-daro,
beyond national borders only established in 1947.
Here, the first urban South Asian civilization flourished
some 4,000 years ago.
2. THE CITY
Early morning, I got up as bright as I could and rushed.
DR. ROMILA THAPAR: It was
magnificent. It was absolutely magnificent.
I just stood there and stood there and stood there
and thought how wonderful it must have been
to have lived in this city.
DR. GHULAM MUSTAFA SHAR: We have excavated only 8%
of Mohenjo-daro. Still, 92% is unexcavated.
MOHENJO-DARO, 1925
52 years after I first visited (DK Area),
I was stunned by the size and organization of the city (VS, HR Areas).
In fact, the famous priest-king
was discovered far from the so-called stupa mound.
We have no idea who he was.
"Oh peacock, what a sweet song you are singing?"
One cannot help but wonder how much of the city was found
and then lost again over 4,000 years.
local people, these old laborers,
they say, when we were finding some golden objects or jewelry,
we are taking in our pocket to home,
because at that time, English people were paying only 2 annas.
It was eighth part of the 1 rupee for 1 day,
so we didn't give them the golden jewelry.
We didn't know what these things were,
seals or what. So when we were small
MOHAMMAD ILYAS, EXCAVATION WORKER: kids, we used
to play with them,
kick them as kids with our feet.
TYPICAL SEAL 1 INCH, 2.5 CM SQUARE
"You do not want to go into a city
in the ancient world.
They're so dirty, disease-ridden,
dysentery everywhere." Joe Manning, Yale Archaeologist
Mohenjo-daro was not so dirty.
The city is known today for the finest sanitation system
of the times: covered drains on streets, second-floor bathrooms,
and pipes that flowed into them across town.
The city had hundreds of wells.
The German archeologist Michael Jansen used the term wasserluxus,
or the luxury of water.
The Great Bath is probably the finest aquatic achievement of the Bronze Age.
A.I. GENERATED
Peering inside the giant drain from the Great Bath made me wonder,
who cleaned these drains?
Certainly, there is evidence for social separation.
Like at Harappa, areas of town are walled off from each other,
suggesting a tribe or crafts guild in each.
First Street ran along a whole perimeter of the city.
First Street peopled to show its width, Mohenjodaro.
Some archeologists believe
there were stores and workshops along the way.
There is little doubt that many kinds of people lived here,
from fishmongers to goldsmiths,
from potters and cloth merchants, to dealers in things we cannot yet name.
ACTUAL INDUS SIGNS
Whoever they were, they certainly spoiled their children.
It is not clear if any other Bronze Age city yielded
as many toys per excavated square meter.
Some, like the bird whistle, are still common in villages today.
Only playful people would make bird cages which show birds climbing out.
The evidence is that they played lots of games.
Look at this.
Even I found a die lying on the ground.
Did any of the world's games originate here?
Some say it was a peaceful egalitarian civilization.
I have never bought that story.
There is plenty of evidence for elites, like large homes and extravagant jewelry,
even weapons and conflict.
But signs of militarism, unlike in its neighbors at the same time,
are limited.
Both iconic figures
of the Indus civilization were found in Mohenjo-daro.
The dancing girl may be more famous than the priest-king.
Some question whether the dancing girl
was a dancing girl, but I'm pretty convinced,
given how well her hand-on-hip pose has endured.
DANCING GIRLS
Have you looked at the dancing girl? Is she dancing?
You don't think she is dancing?
Of course not!
DR. SHEREEN RATNAGAR
The Edwardians thought that immoral women
were there to dance to entertain the British troops.
HOME MAKER (NOT DANCER), KUTCH
Mark would agree that the dancing girl is a colonial prejudice.
He prefers pujari, the performance of religious rites
as the possible purpose of the Mohenjo-daro figurine.
TEMPLE DANCER BY DR. KENOYER
We see the past through the colored bits of glass
that catch our eye today.
DANCING GIRL, MOHENJO-DARO
A lesser-known second dancer was also found in Mohenjo-daro.
Maybe these women did more than dance.
In early tribal Indian societies, there are stories of dancers who ruled.
At Independence, one of these two figurines ended up
in India, the other in Pakistan.
PAKISTAN NEW COUNTRY AS INDIA SPLITS
When British India was split into India and Pakistan in August 1947,
The new countries divided up their Indus artifacts.
The finest necklace from Mohenjo-daro was cut into two pieces,
one part today in Islamabad, the other half in Delhi.
In fact, many of the most important objects were shipped to India.
A.I. GENERATED
Hardly was the 4,000-year-old civilization discovered
that it was divided.
3. THE CITADEL
On high ground, overlooking the city,
is the best-known part, the so-called stupa mound.
It has a Buddhist structure from the 2nd or 3rd century ACE.
A big controversy is whether it was a holy site
in Indus times as well.
The original excavator R.D. Banerji discovered thousands of votive-style pots,
just the kinds of things one would deposit at a holy site.
"The entire area of
Site No. 1 was covered with funeral urns." R.D. Banerji, First Excavator, 1922-23
However, the chief British excavator
Sir John Marshall questioned this interpretation, as have others.
In recent times, Dr. Giovanni Verardi agreed with Banerji.
He argued that this was a religious site in Indus times as well,
and suggested that steps once led upwards to a platform,
A.I. GENERATED
much like the ziggurats in Ancient Mesopotamia.
This would have made the entire mound sacred.
Then we come to the Great Bath,
which most archeologists do agree was a ritual space.
We know that Hindu and Sikh temples today often have large water baths next to them.
I think there's a profound connection, but not everyone would agree.
DR. SHEREEN RATNAGAR: I think
it was a royal investiture ritual.
Someone went down the baths ritually in some way and came out again.
There are only a restricted range of steps going down into the water tank,
and they come out again.
It's some heavy ritual.
If this entire area was in fact holy,
it may support the idea that the founders of this city were priests,
just as they were in early Mesopotamian cities.
Among the very few sculptures found
in Indus cities, almost all of them at Mohenjo-daro,
a priestly style dominates.
Hair is knotted in the back with one hand on the knee.
A similar figure was also found in Dholavira.
DHOLAVIRA, INDIA ~2500 BCE
Another Italian archeologist,
Massimo Vidale, points out that similar priestly figures
were present at this time in Iran and Afghanistan.
ZAHEDAN ~2300 BCE
MUNDIGAK ~2100 BCE
MOHENJO-DARO ~2300 BCE
My late friend, Iravatham Mahadevan,
was India's leading expert on the Indus script.
This sign, popularly called the jar sign,
is the most frequent one in the Indus script.
In the Indian tradition,
the ruling classes, the princes and the priests,
they always claimed to have come from a jar.
All the major rishis were jar-born.
AGASTYA TAMIL RISHI
Many Indus signs combine
the priestly jar motif with possible trade symbols.
Did priests control trade?
Religion and commerce were inseparable in later Buddhist,
Jain, and Hindu traditions.
More evidence comes from these mysterious, identically sized rooms.
A similar structure was also found at Harappa.
They are probably storerooms for trade,
though not granaries as was originally fantasized by an English archeologist.
RECREATION BY SIR MORTIMER WHEELER, 1966
In Mohenjo-daro, they are right in the citadel,
next to the Great Bath itself.
This suggests that trade was controlled by a religious elite.
If so, how did they maintain order?
Was it through violence?
One of the most famous narrative seals from Mohenjo-daro shows
what could be the sacrifice of a human head.
But another narrative seal from the city shows what some have called a proto-Shiva,
Pashupati, or Lord of the Beasts figure,
having animals come to him in peaceful submission. They
could have represented different tribes, cities, or merchant guilds.
I cannot imagine a city of this size
not having had a strong ruling class or belief system.
But without further research,
what that was is very much up to our imaginations.
Our imaginations can run riot,
as they already do in the vicinity of Mohenjo-daro.
We don't even know what the word Mohenjo-daro means.
John Marshall said it meant, "Mound of the dead."
IRSHAD ALI SOLANGI:
People used to say this is a graveyard and
one must avoid going there.
They were reluctant to cut and take fuel wood from the site
and come to get it from a graveyard.
Some people used to say that
it is a ruined town, and going
near to it is a sin.
4. THE WRITING
What does Mohenjo-daro mean in your opinion?
Is it mound of the dead or no?
What is your interpretation? No, no, no.
DR. SHAR: Mohan is epithet of Krishna.
Because of Hindu name, people don't like him here.
Also for door, we say also moho.
Moho means in front. We say moho or samoho, in front.
So Mohenjo-daro means a city with a face.
Mohenjo-daro is also a city of signs.
We cannot yet read them.
We do know that they helped weave an international trading network
used by Indus merchants as they traveled to distant Mesopotamia.
MESOPOTAMIAN SEAL WITH INDUS MERCHANTS
IRAVATHAM MAHADEVAN INDUS SCRIPT EXPERT
Every Harappan of any consequence carried a seal on his person, strung it on a cord,
and probably hung it around his neck, and used it to attest his documents,
his sale, or the nobles, their orders.
In this sense, the seals of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are no different
from those found in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian cities.
Seals were impressed on a lump of soft clay,
placed over the knot of a cord,
or directly onto a pot.
The sealing acted as a mark of authority or ownership,
identifying the responsible official, merchant, or institution.
If we could understand the seals,
we would know so much more about these people.
Many scholars think the language was proto-Dravidian,
like those in South India today.
In fact, a Dravidian language is spoken today not far from Mohenjo-daro.
Linguistic archeology suggests that other languages in the larger region
would have contributed to the ancient Indus language.
ANCIENT INDUS LANGUAGE
In fact, many languages were probably spoken,
just like every day in Mohenjo-daro now, where one hears Sindhi, Saraiki, Balochi,
Urdu, English, Punjabi, and Pashto—
a sandwich of origins and traditions.
Not a monoculture,
but a mega-multiculture probably best explains the 700 years
of Indus civilization.
"Of all these antiquities the most valuable are the seals
different from anything
in Indian art."
John Marshall, Director Archaeological Survey of India, 1924
Was a single written language used by a ruling elite?
A key figure on most seals from Mohenjo-daro
was the so-called unicorn with one horn and a body unlike any single animal.
It too remains a mystery.
The unicorn may well have represented
a combination of tribes, crafts, or regional groups.
Most of the time, the unicorn is shown with a unique standard.
The mysterious cult object you find before the unicorn,
it's a filter.
It's made of three parts.
You have an upper cylindrical vessel, a lower hemispherical vessel with holes
like a colander, for example, and the whole thing is stuck on a staff.
The staff shows it was meant to be a standard to be carried in processions.
It was a cult based upon some kind of hallucinogenic drug
crushed and filtered out of plant and drunk ritually.
Mr. Omar Khan, I must tell you that this is no more than a theory.
Narrative seals from Mohenjo-daro must encode important myths.
Many have tigers on them, once abundant in the Indus Valley.
In Dholavira, a large signboard was found
atop an entrance to the fortified city, strengthening my own feeling
that the round circle is some sort of symbol of rule,
if not also an actual spinning wheel like Gandhi used.
We suspect that textiles were a key part of the Indus economy.
TEXTILE IMPRESSION FROM MOHENJO-DARO
A different Buddhist wheel appears on today's Indian flag.
Around 1900 BCE, the civilization seems to have disappeared.
Many statues are defaced or headless,
suggesting political or religious upheaval.
Early archeologists claimed massacres by invading Aryans.
But the limited evidence from Mohenjo-daro has been debunked.
It was more likely a combination of climate change, internal problems,
possibly disease, and the breakdown of trading networks.
No certainty at all, but we do know that the unicorn vanished.
So did writing for the next 1,000 years.
Mohenjo-daro, however, was not abandoned.
It was settled by people of the Jhukar culture
that followed for centuries, and then Buddhist rule.
Just as their civilization was ending,
ancient Indus people brought their seals to the Arabian Gulf.
Many well-funded excavations are underway there today.
I am hopeful that they will find a bilingual inscription with Indus signs
and those of another language.
That would really help us decipher the script.
I think that AI can also help us understand the writing.
Prizes are being offered for decipherment,
but there is no public database of inscriptions to test AI models against.
The best we have is Mahadevan's from the 1970s.
A dedicated German scholar,
Dr. Andreas Fuls, maintains a much bigger database,
but it is not properly resourced.
There are thousands of uncatalogued inscriptions.
The leading living scholar, the brilliant Finnish professor
Asko Parpola, is 84, and has no heirs.
5. THE FUTURE
Urban dust from 4,000 years ago
is what we are breathing as we walk through the site today.
Everyone agrees that the ancient Indus
is the mother urban civilization in South Asia.
But it took a while for Pakistan to embrace this heritage.
The nation's founder never visited any Indus city.
Here is my late friend Dr. Dani, a Sanskrit scholar before partition,
and leading archeologist afterwards.
DR. DANI: Today, as far as Indus civilization is concerned,
it's a part of the cultural and historical heritage of Pakistan.
STATE BANK OF PAKISTAN
In Pakistan today, Indus archeology has become a source of pride.
The Sindh and Punjab governments
are investing more and more in preservation and excavation.
VISUALIZING CARE: MUDBRICK AT MOHENJODARO
Earlier, we didn't see Pakistanis here. Pakistanis didn't
MOHAMMAD ILYAS: come to Mohenjo-daro.
Mostly Japanese came.
And other foreigners.
So we said, "Why don't Pakistanis come?"
They didn't see the value.
Gradually, the number of Pakistanis increased.
Now, there are fewer foreigners and more Pakistanis.
The ironic legacy of partition is that the best-known Indus cities
are in Pakistan, but the resources and broadest interest are in India.
IRSHAD ALI SOLANGI: Many Indians are eager
to visit Mohenjo-daro
and they give me a WhatsApp call
and request that as they cannot get a visa,
I should arrange a video visit of Mohenjo-daro
so I give them a 2-hour video visit of Mohenjo-daro.
Unfortunately,
bits and bytes are increasingly the only things that can easily cross
a border that's so heavily militarized, you can see the floodlights from space.
INDO-PAK BORDER @ WAGAH/ATTARI
Despite the two billion people who claim
direct heritage from the Indus civilization,
research and excavations are woefully underfunded.
There's not a single university department anywhere
devoted to it.
For modern Indians, the question is whether the profound sense
of connection to Mohenjo-daro can translate to a better relationship
with the Pakistanis living there now.
For modern Pakistanis, the issue is how to embrace
an ancient past that reaches across borders
only decades old and does not quite fit a largely Muslim national ideology.
LAHORE, 1948
Perhaps we might best think of the ancient Indus civilization
as a Bronze Age supernova
in the positive sense, scattering its precious elements
throughout South Asia, and much further too
QUEEN'S BURIAL SHROUD MESOPOTAMIA ~2500 BCE
Long Indus carnelian beads were prized in Mesopotamia.
In fact an Indus style of gold, carnelian and lapis was popular
throughout the ancient world. KISH, IRAQ, ~2500 BCE
How far did ancient Indus ideas also travel?
One thing that remains with me
from my first visit to Mohenjo-daro in 1972
was that it feels so ancient,
so tied to tradition, and yet so open and welcoming of others.
SHEIKH JAVID ALI SINDHI TOUR GUIDE - AGED 13
We have so many villages all around.
There, the elderly people, tell this story.
Whenever a person wanted to settle inside Mohenjo-daro,
When he arrived with his family,
SHEIKH SINDHI: the people of Mohenjodaro
each of the house owners used to give him one brick,
that this is a gift for you, one brick.
In this way, he collected so many hundreds
and thousands of bricks from the local people living here.
In this way, he used to build, in excellent way, his house.
Brick sharing is just as important today.
Like new immigrants to a city,
tools like molecular analysis,
DNA testing, and AI are opening whole new sectors of investigation.
Properly resourced,
they could make the coming years incredibly exciting for research.
The box on what ancient Indus civilization was all about
has only just been opened.
It could rewrite the history of the Indian subcontinent
and the wider world beyond.
WRITER/DIRECTION/CAMERA OMAR KHAN
CO-WRITER/EDITOR/MOTION GRAPHICS RICHARD LEVIEN
ILLUSTRATIONS KYLE AARON GOLUB
3D ANIMATIONS/IMAGE ENHANCEMENT RAHUL VERMA
GOOGLE MAPS ANIMATIONS YAHYA JAVED