The Cities That Forgot Their Own Names
For 3,700 years the earth kept their secret. Then a flint scraper in a farmer's field cracked open one of history's greatest urban mysteries.
In 1919, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India named R. D. Banerji walked across a low mound in Sindh, expecting to find the remains of a Buddhist stupa dated to somewhere between 150 and 500 CE. Instead, he picked up a flint scraper — a tool far older than anything a Buddhist monastery should have produced. That small stone object convinced him he was standing on something far more ancient. He was right. Beneath his feet lay Mohenjo-daro, 'Mound of the Dead Men,' one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, built around 2500 BCE.
No one today knows what its people called it. One scholar, Iravatham Mahadevan, has speculated from a surviving seal that its ancient name may have been Kukkuṭārma, 'the city of the cockerel' — hinting that cockfighting may have carried ritual or religious weight there, and that the city may even have been a point from which domesticated chickens spread to Africa, Western Asia, Europe, and eventually the Americas. The name we use now, Mohenjo-daro, is simply what later Sindhi speakers called the mound: a monument to death rather than to the life that once filled it.
The city rose on a Pleistocene ridge in the Indus floodplain, about 28 kilometres from present-day Larkana. It belonged to a vast civilisation, also called the Harappan Civilisation after another major city, Harappa, which had developed from earlier Indus cultures around 3000 BCE. At its peak this world stretched from the Iranian border in the west to Gujarat in the south and an outpost in Bactria to the north, anchored by great urban centers — Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Lothal, Kalibangan, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi. Among them all, Mohenjo-daro stood out for the sophistication of its engineering.
With an estimated population of at least 40,000 across some 300 hectares, the city was laid out on a startlingly disciplined grid, its rectilinear buildings built largely of fired, mortared brick. It was divided into a raised Citadel — a mud-brick mound about 12 metres high — and a sprawling Lower City. The Citadel held public baths, a great residential structure sized for roughly 5,000 people, and two large assembly halls. A central marketplace surrounded a large public well, while individual households drew from smaller wells of their own.
What truly set Mohenjo-daro apart was its plumbing. Wastewater from homes was channeled into covered drains running beneath the major streets — a sanitation system with few parallels anywhere in the ancient world. Some houses had private bathing rooms, and one building even contained an underground furnace, a hypocaust, likely used for heating bathwater. Most homes opened onto inner courtyards rather than directly onto the street, and some rose two stories high.
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