But that’s not all. Dholavira and the Harappan world in general throw up many more exciting and fantastic facts about what life was like thousands of years ago. Decades of painstaking excavations and research have pulled out a wealth of information. And as any archaeologist working on this era will tell you, the information available in textbooks or for public access, are decades behind actual work on the ground.

We go wide across the Harappan world and deep into sites and reports, to piece together what we know – as of now based on excavations, climate records, tectonic history, the many attempts to decipher the script and scientific research .

A Different World

Dholavira, which was discovered in the 1970s by archaeologist J P Joshi (former Joint Director of the Archaeological Survey of India) had the amazing good fortune to have never been re-occupied after its abandonment at the end of the Bronze Age. Here, you will find evidence of the rise of the city to its prime and the devastating changes that ensured its slide into oblivion.

Around 1900 BCE, tectonic movement in the Yamuna Divide of the Himalayas dried up the Saraswati River. This was because of the rerouting of the Sutlej into the Indus and the Yamuna into the Ganga. The Nara (the lower half of the Saraswati) River, which ran parallel to the Indus, dried up, no longer flowing into the Rann. The mouth of the Indus then slowly moved towards the east, and the Rann, never a very deep sea, was filled with silt. Dholavira, with its cyclopean walls and impeccably organised water management system and town planning, was soon in decline as its access to the sea was cut off. It never recovered.