Ancient Indus Civilization Blog

Mohenjo-daro: Unsealing an Ancient Indus City has been selected for two upcoming film fests in India, the 15th Bangalore Shorts Film Fest, where it will be shown on June 21st, 2026. It has also been selected for the 9th South Asian Short Film Festival (SASFF) in Kolkata, where it will be shown on July 8th in the 1 pm slot at NANDAN – The Film Centre. >

A decade after writing about a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York's small Indus collection, I returned to find a number of new objects on display and others removed from view. Unfortunately. the larger issue with the display had not been solved. >

You could walk through the Great Bath, women wore saris, and in Karachi and Bombay, people were listening to the Beatles Yesterday on Radio Ceylon. >

What are the AI platforms doing to websites like Harappa.com which have been around since the dawn of the Internet? Like colonial powers, they happily claim territory through extra-legal procedures (although they are said to be far more intelligent than human beings, they can't understand our terms of service which kindly asks them to not crawl!). >

The 37-minute film explores one of the world's greatest lost civilizations through the eyes the founder of Harappa.com walking the site and exploring what we know — and still don't — about one of the world's greatest lost civilizations. >

The recent evidence from Mohenjo-daro of a "Kot Dijian" layer beneath its Indus ruins, including the city wall, dating from 2600 BCE or earlier, brings renewed interest to this precursor culture to the Indus civilization. >

I founded Harappa.com in November 1995 from my then-home in the Mission district of San Francisco. I wanted to create a destination for students, scholars and general visitors to experience the Indus Valley. >

"But even more revealing for the intensity of contact and commercial exchange between the two alluvial heartlands was the discovery in the Louvre reserves of a well-preserved clay impression stamped by an inscribed Indus seal, which had been brought to the museum by a dealer shortly before World War I, before the Indus Civilization had even been recognized." >

Cuneiform scripts on Sumerian and Akkadian cylinder seals and clay tablets mention Meluhha traders, who are generally assumed to belong to the Indus Valley region. Linguists have looked at the etymology of the Meluhha toponym, focusing on its purported Dravidian linkages. >

We have completed the brand new 104 slide section 1924-25: A Lost City Emerges by Dr. Sudeshna Guha which puts back together a pivotal excavation season at Harappa through photographs and text. >

Tucked into the fascinating book Babylonia, the Gulf Region and the Indus: Archaeological and Textual Evidence for Contact in the Third and Early Second Millennia BC (Mesopotamian Civilizations, 2017) is a tidbit that brings to light what are possibly the only two ancient Meluhan names we know of. >

As we embark on what by November will be our 30th year online, we wish everyone into the ancient Indus Civilization a very Happy New Year! >

"Mehrgarh World's Oldest City" claims the banner in the Lahore Museum gallery, where the wooden display cases seem not to have changed since John Lockwood Kipling was in charge more than a century ago. There are few other places to glimpse some of the finer treasures from this 7000 BCE site in western Balochistan, the oldest larger settlement found in the subcontinent. >

The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro and a postcard of a Dancing Girl by Gobindram Oodeyram of Jaipur from around 1905. In his new engaging and speculative book Ahimsa 100 Reflections on the Harappan Civilization, Devdutt Pattanaik writes of the famous so-called dancing girl figurine found at Mohenjo-daro. >

On a recent visit to Oxford, I used my iPhone 15 to take a closer look at a diverse set of ancient Indus objects, some of them acquired after colonial times, in one of the world's great university museums. >