Photo: Aakashaliraza · CC BY-SA 4.0The largest city of the Sindhu valley, laid out in a grid of baked-brick streets with covered drains and a great bath on its citadel.
The Great Bath is a brick tank about 12 m by 7 m and 2.4 m deep, made watertight with gypsum mortar and a layer of bitumen, with steps at both ends. Houses had bathrooms and wells. The finds include the steatite bust called the Priest-King, the bronze Dancing Girl, and hundreds of seals, among them the Pashupati seal.
It showed in 1924 that Bharat had cities as old as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and that ritual bathing stood at the centre of city life.
ExcavationHundreds of sandstone shelters where people lived and painted for thousands of years, the oldest gallery of human art in Bharat.
ExcavationEleven molar crowns from nine adults with neat holes drilled into them, the earliest evidence of dentistry on living people anywhere.
ExcavationA Sarasvati-valley settlement whose levels run from Hakra ware pit-dwellings up to a mature Harappan town, and whose earliest dates are argued over.
ExcavationThe oldest ploughed field yet excavated anywhere, with its furrows still visible in a grid.
ExcavationA Harappan city in a dry land that lived by catching every drop: dams on two seasonal streams fed a chain of reservoirs cut into the rock around the town.
ExcavationThe first city of the civilisation to be dug, which gave its name to the whole culture.
ExcavationRows of small clay-lined fire pits on raised brick platforms, with a well and bathing floors beside them.
ExcavationA small steatite seal of a figure seated in a yogic posture, wearing a horned headdress and surrounded by animals, whom many see as Pashupati, Lord of creatures.
