Who lived in Mohenjo-daro?

The short answer

Mohenjo-daro was home to the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation, also called the Harappan civilisation, one of the four great centres of the ancient world alongside Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. The city was built around 2500 BCE on the banks of the Indus in what is now Sindh, Pakistan, and at its peak housed perhaps 40,000 people. Most of them appear to have been traders and craftspeople, living in neighbourhoods grouped by trade. By about 1700 BCE the city had been abandoned.

What these people called themselves, or their city, is unknown, because their script has never been deciphered. Ancient DNA suggests they descended from people related to the ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau, mixed with the subcontinent's first hunter-gatherers, an ancestry that still forms most of the genetic make-up of South Asians today. The modern name, Mohenjo-daro, is Sindhi for "Mound of the Dead Men".

Farmers who became city builders

The Indus cities did not appear from nowhere. Their roots lie in Neolithic villages such as Mehrgarh, in Balochistan, settled by 7000 BCE on the older dating (around 5250 BCE on a newer one) and one of the earliest places in South Asia with evidence of farming and herding. Its people grew mostly barley, with a little wheat, and herded cattle. Over thousands of years those village cultures linked up through trade and, by about 2600 BCE, people moved from villages into large planned cities. Only five Indus sites reached true urban scale: Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira, Ganeriwala and Rakhigarhi.

The clearest evidence of who these people were comes from Rakhigarhi, in India. In 2019, scientists published a genome reconstructed from a woman buried in a cemetery there between about 2800 and 2300 BCE. Most of her ancestry was related to ancient hunter-gatherers of the Iranian plateau; the rest came from the indigenous hunter-gatherers of South Asia, a lineage distantly related to today's Andaman islanders. She had none of the steppe ancestry that arrived in South Asia later and is common in northern South Asians today. Her mix of ancestry resembles the largest part of the ancestry of modern South Asians.

A city of wells, drains and workshops

Mohenjo-daro is one of the world's earliest major cities, and its people built it to a plan. Streets ran in a grid, and most buildings were of fired, mortared brick. Houses opened onto inner courtyards and side lanes; some had two storeys, and many had a room set aside for bathing, from which waste water flowed into covered drains along the main streets. More than 700 wells have been found, roughly one for every three houses, a number unheard of in Egypt or Mesopotamia at the time.

The circular brick well appears to be an Indus invention, with no evidence of the design in Mesopotamia or Egypt at the time.

The work that filled these streets is visible in what was left behind. Craftspeople made seals of steatite, faience beads, shell ornaments and bronze figurines cast by the lost-wax method; one district in the north-east of the city seems to have been given over to shell-working. They used standardised weights and finely divided ivory rulers, played with dice and made toys for their children. Their diet included wheat, barley, rice, millet and pulses, grown across two seasons, and the meat of cattle, buffalo, goats, pigs and chickens.

Their goods travelled far. Indus-type objects have been found in Mesopotamia, around the Persian Gulf and on the Oman Peninsula, and scholars have suggested that the land Sumerian texts call Meluhha may have been the Indus region.

A society without palaces

One of the strangest things about the people of Mohenjo-daro is how little they built for any ruler. Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Indus cities have no conclusive evidence of palaces or temples. Some houses were larger than others, but all had access to water and drainage, which suggests wealth was spread relatively evenly.

Someone was clearly in charge of something. The city was raised in a relatively short time, with the water system among the first things planned, and the remarkable consistency of weights, measures and brick sizes across the Indus world points to an authority able to set standards. Whether that was a single state or a set of self-governing city states is still debated.

Archaeologists named the figure the Priest-King, although there is no evidence that priests or kings ruled the city.

On the raised western mound, known as the Citadel, stood the Great Bath, a brick pool 12 metres long, 7 metres wide and 2.4 metres deep, waterproofed with bitumen, which may have been used for religious purification. Nearby buildings have been read as a granary, an assembly hall and a priestly residence, though their real purposes remain uncertain. Many people today know the inhabitants through two small sculptures: the Priest-King bust and the bronze Dancing Girl, 10.5 centimetres high, whose confident pose showed both skill in metalwork and that dance was part of Indus life.

Silent voices and a lost name

The biggest gap is language. Indus symbols survive on seals, pottery and copper tablets, but most inscriptions are extremely short, there is no bilingual text to act as a key, and it has not even been proved that the symbols are full writing. A section of scholars favours a link with the Dravidian languages, now spoken mainly in southern India. The scholar Iravatham Mahadevan even speculated, from one seal, that the city's ancient name may have meant "city of the cockerel".

The ending was once told as a massacre. In 1953 the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler argued that invading Aryans had destroyed the city, citing 37 skeletons found in different parts of it. Scholars soon rejected the idea: the skeletons dated from after the city was abandoned, and a 1994 study showed that marks on the skulls came from erosion, not violence. A slower story is now favoured. The region gradually dried, reducing the water supply and scattering the population eastwards, and at Mohenjo-daro repeated flooding and worn-out land may have played a part.

1. c. 7000 BCE

   Village life begins at Mehrgarh in Balochistan, an early farming site, by the older dating.
2. c. 2500 BCE

   Mohenjo-daro is built on the Indus.
3. c. 1900 BCE

   Signs of decline appear across the Indus cities.
4. c. 1700 BCE

   Mohenjo-daro and most other Indus cities are abandoned.
5. 1919–1920

   R. D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India recognises the site's age.
6. 1980

   Mohenjo-daro becomes the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in South Asia.

The ruins lie about 28 kilometres from the town of Larkana. Large-scale digging stopped after 1965 because exposed walls were weathering away, and the site is now threatened by salty groundwater and poor past restoration.