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<< Our Photo Pages >> Mohenjo-daro - Ancient Village or Settlement in Pakistan

Submitted by bat400 on Thursday, 02 May 2013  Page Views: 12681

Site WatchSite Name: Mohenjo-daro Alternative Name: موئن جو دڙو, Mound of the Dead
Country: Pakistan
NOTE: This site is 0.722 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Ancient Village or Settlement

Latitude: 27.329200N  Longitude: 68.138800E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
2 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4

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I have visited· I would like to visit

dagadd visited on 19th Mar 2013 - their rating: Cond: 2 Amb: 5 Access: 4 A magnificent site, with an excellent guest house on site. I was able to tour it in the afternoon, go for a gentle jog as the sun rose next morning, then have another wander around after breakfast. Magnificent! It's a huge site, the main site of the Indus Valley Civilisation, from about 2600BC to 1500BC. It hasn't been fully excavated - maybe it never will be - but what has been fully excavated has plenty if information boards and good pathways. The city was abandoned in about 1500BC and then 'lost', as the Indus changed its course and most of the city became covered in sand and silt. Rediscovered in 1922, with some excavation taking place then, with another significant amount of excavation taking place in the 1950's by Professor Dani and Sir Mortimer Wheeler. The huge Stupa is the tallest item, with the Great Bath - thought to have been used for spiritual purposes - and its main drainage channel, the street pattern, the royal quarters, all very easy to see.

myf have visited here

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by bat400 : Photo for news story. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro, identified as "File Photo" for the Karachi Metropolitan. Appears as: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/16/call-for-reburial-of-ill-preserved-moenjodaro-part.html. Site in Pakistan (Vote or comment on this photo)
Ancient City in Sindh.
Built around 2600 BC and situated on a ridge, Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest city-settlements of the Indus Valley Civilization. It was contemporary to the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete, and is a prime example of ancient urban planning.

It is thought to have had a top population of 35,000. The city was built on a planned grid and features hydraulic engineering to channel waste water to covered drains. What is thought to be a large public bath - 2m long, 7m wide and 2.4m deep - was lined with bitumen for waterproofing.

Rediscovered in 1922, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The last major excavation was in the 1960's. Unfortunately, the city's fired and mud brick, once exposed, has been subject to continual erosion. Work today is limited to salvage archaeology and stabilization.

The location given is general for the site and is not specific to any single feature.

Note: Episodes of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, Armchair Voyage, Buried Treasure and a selection of other vintage TV programmes have been made available from the BBC archives. See comment on this page.
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Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : More artefacts from Mohenjo-daro, including toys. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : Artefacts from Mohenjo-daro in the Lahore Museum. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : Site in Pakistan A wander around the site at sunrise is a wonderful experience. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : Site in Pakistan Much of the city remains unexcavated. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : Site in Pakistan The ancient city had many water wells.

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : The Great Bath's drain

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : Mohenjo-daro's Great Bath

Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro submitted by dagadd : A general view of the site at Moenjodaro, looking towards the magnificent stupa.

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 278.3km E 99° Jaisalmer area* Sculptured Stone
 279.6km E 99° Jaisalmer Hero Stones* Standing Stones
 297.2km SSW 202° National Museum of Pakistan Museum
 330.2km SW 233° Hinglaj Cave or Rock Shelter
 394.4km S 170° Maha Kalika temple* Ancient Village or Settlement
 394.7km S 171° Lakhpat fort ,Kutch* Ancient Village or Settlement
 395.4km S 171° Lakhpat Sati Stones* Sculptured Stone
 395.5km S 170° Lakhpat Standing stones* Standing Stone (Menhir)
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 402.2km S 169° Siot caves, Lakhpat taluka* Ancient Temple
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 441.3km S 173° Ramvada temple ruins* Ancient Temple
 442.7km SSE 150° Khadir* Standing Stone (Menhir)
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Rare Ancient DNA Provides Window Into a 5,000-Year-Old South Asian Civilization by Andy B on Tuesday, 05 October 2021
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The Indus Valley Civilization flourished alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt, but the early society remains shrouded in mystery.

During the last few millennia B.C., beginning roughly 5,000 years ago, great civilizations prospered across Eurasia and North Africa. The ancient societies of Mesopotamia and Sumer in the Middle East were among the first to introduce written history; the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt established complex religious and social structures; and the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties ruled over ever advancing communities and technologies in China. But another, little understood civilization prevailed along the basins of the Indus River, stretching across much of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the northwestern regions of India.

This Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), also called the Harappan civilization after an archaeological site in Pakistan, has remained veiled in mystery largely due to the fact that scholars have yet to make sense of the Harappan language, comprised of fragmented symbols, drawings and other writings. Archaeological evidence gives researchers some sense of the daily lives of the Harappan people, but scientists have struggled to piece together evidence from ancient DNA in the IVC due to the deterioration of genetic material in the hot and humid region—until now.

More at
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-ancient-dna-south-asia-reveals-complexities-little-known-civilization-180973053/
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Buried Treasure: Mohenjo-daro and other programmes with Sir Mortimer Wheeler by Andy B on Thursday, 02 May 2013
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First transmitted in 1957, Sir Mortimer Wheeler describes the results of his excavations of the 4,000 year-old, red brick Indus Valley civilization city of Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan.

Duration: 29 minutes. Originally shown in 1957

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p017tlhn

This programme is part of Archaeology at the BBC - a collection of 20 archaeology programmes from the 1950s to the 1970s that has recently been made available. They include the legendary panel game Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? featuring Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Glyn Daniel. The programmes are available permanently to people with UK IP addresses.
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Mohenjo Daro: Could this ancient city be lost forever? by bat400 on Monday, 02 July 2012
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It is awe-inspiring to walk through a home built 4,500 years ago.

Especially one still very much recognisable as a house today, with front and back entrances, interconnecting rooms, neat fired brick walls - even a basic toilet and sewage outlet. Astonishingly, given its age, the home in question was also built on two storeys.

But it is even more impressive to walk outside into a real Bronze Age street, and see all of the other homes lining it. And to walk the length of it, seeing the precise lanes running off it before reaching a grand, ancient marketplace.

This is the marvel of Mohenjo Daro, one of the earliest cities in the world.

In its day, about 2600 BC, its complex planning, incredible architecture, and complex water and sewage systems made it one of the most advanced urban settings anywhere. It was a city thought to have housed up to 35,000 inhabitants of the great Indus civilisation.

While I was overwhelmed by the scale and wonderment of it all, my eminent guide to the site was almost in tears of despair.

"Every time I come here, I feel worse than the previous time," says Dr Asma Ibrahim, one of Pakistan's most accomplished archaeologists. "I haven't been back for two or three years," she says. "The losses since then are so immense and it breaks my heart."

In the lower town of Mohenjo Daro, where the middle and working classes once lived, the walls are crumbling from the base upwards. This is new damage.

The salt content of the ground water is eating away at the bricks that, before excavation, had survived thousands of years.

As we move to the upper town where the elite of the Indus civilization would have lived, and where some of the signature sites like the large public bath lie, it appears even worse.

"It is definitely a complicated site to protect, given the problems of salinity, humidity and rainfall," says Dr Ibrahim. "But most of the attempts at conservation by the authorities have been so bad and so amateur they have only accelerated the damage."

One method used has been to cover all the brickwork across the vast site with mud slurry, in the hope the mud will absorb the salt and moisture. But where the mud has dried and crumbled, it has taken with it fragments of ancient brick, and the decay goes on underneath.

"We have to do something soon, because if things carry on like this, the site will not last more than 20 years," says Dr Ibrahim.

The government of Pakistan was in charge of Mohenjo Daro for decades, but recently responsibility was handed over to the provincial authorities in Sindh. They have now set up a technical committee to rescue the site.

It is a sign of the desperation of those who love Mohenjo Daro, and who are pained to see a city that once rivalled sites of its contemporary civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, losing its glory in this undignified way.

Thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link. For more, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18491900.
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Reburial of ill-preserved part of Mohenjo Daro Site by bat400 on Sunday, 13 November 2011
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Experts at a conference on Saturday said that a major portion of the Moenjodaro ruins, a world heritage site, be reburied to preserve it for future generations, while a portion of it be better preserved for education and tourism.

Speaking at the national conference on Moenjodaro, organised jointly by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation and the Sindh culture department, they said the Moenjodaro site, which showcases the over 5,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilisation, had been in a better state during the 1930s than it was now.

Visiting Unesco expert Micheal Jansen, who has been working on Moenjodaro for the past many years, said many of the walls and other structures of the site were in an advanced stage of deterioration and that improper methods had been adopted to preserve the ruins.

Comparing Indus Valley civilisation with those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, he said there were no big temples, palaces and huge pyramid-like structures in the Indus civilisation ruins as they showcased how the common people lived over 5,000 years back as their cities had both drinking water and drainage. He said Moenjodaro was probably the biggest and best planned metropolis of its time.

Former Sindh antiquities secretary Kaleem Lashari said the rising water table was one of the persistent problems threatening the site.

He said that since efforts made by the government and international experts to properly preserve the site had proved inadequate, only a small portion of the site be preserved for educational and tourism purposes, and the rest of it be buried to be re-excavated by future generations, which might be equipped with better preservation technologies and other means.

Former Sindh culture secretary Hameed Akhund said that with the devolution the archeological sites had been handed over to the provinces. But while the culture department was the custodian of the sites, they were maintained by the antiquities department. And the dual control would further ruin the sites, which had suffered much during the past six decades. He said mostly international experts had been doing preservation-related experiments with Meonjodaro and as a result they had battered the site.

Prof Safdar Khan from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said the bricks and other construction material used in Moenjodaro had suffered greatly owing to the rising level of dampness, subsoil water as well as salts.

He said that till proper technology and procedure were found, it was better to leave the site alone rather than using a wrong technology and destroy what was left of it.

Vice Chancellor of Shah Abdul Latif University in Khairpur Dr Nilofer Shaikh said the preservation of the 50 kilometres of running walls of Moenjodaro was a challenge for the experts.

She said a management body with Bronze Age experts be set up and located at the site and not in a big city.

Sindh Assembly speaker Nisar Khuhro said many of the protected sites had been encroached upon and stressed enactment of strict laws and their better implementation.

Sindh culture minister Sassui Palijo said that efforts would be made to remove encroachments from all protected sites.

MNA Nafisa Shah said the preservation of the site had suffered owing to inconsistency in planning and implementation, and suggested that some permanent institutional arrangements be put in place so that policies and plans not only be made but implemented also.

Read more at: http://www.dawn.com.
Thanks to coldrum for the link.
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Play was important -- even 4,000 years ago by bat400 on Friday, 01 April 2011
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Play was a central element of people's lives as far back as 4,000 years ago. This has been revealed by an archaeology thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, which investigates the social significance of the phenomenon of play and games in the Bronze Age Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan.

It is not uncommon for archaeologists excavating old settlements to come across play and game-related finds, but within established archaeology these types of finds have often been disregarded.

"They have been regarded, for example, as signs of harmless pastimes and thus considered less important for research, or have been reinterpreted based on ritual aspects or as symbols of social status," explains author of the thesis Elke Rogersdotter.

She has studied play-related artefacts found at excavations in the ruins of the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan. The remains constitute the largest urban settlement from the Bronze Age in the Indus Valley, a cultural complex of the same era as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The settlement is difficult to interpret; for example, archaeologists have not found any remains of temples or palaces. It has therefore been tough to offer an opinion on how the settlement was managed or how any elite class marked itself out.

Elke Rogersdotter's study shows some surprising results. Almost every tenth find from the ruined city is play-related. They include, for instance, different forms of dice and gaming pieces. In addition, the examined finds have not been scattered all over. Repetitive patterns have been discerned in the spatial distribution, which may indicate specific locations where games were played.

"The marked quantity of play-related finds and the structured distribution shows that playing was already an important part of people's everyday lives more than 4,000 years ago," says Elke.



For more, see eurekalert.org. Thanks to coldrum for the link.
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