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. Over the last 30 years, I have been fortunate to have the enthusiastic guidance and input of so many people:
- The field’s continuing leader Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (University of Wisconsin Madison) and professor Richard H. Meadow (Harvard) who were my founding contributors;
- A battery of academics including the late Iravatham Mahadevan and Ahmed Hasan Dani who have so enriched the field;
- My virtual team of Jeff Turner, who has coded the site for over a decade, Kyle Aaron Golub whose art work gives it a distinctive feel, editors Ilona Aronovsky and Nadine Zubair, and Vasant Dave, our ever-vigilant community moderator.
Today, what I like to refer to as the *oldest site on the web* has upwards of 2,500 pages, and gets 20,000 visits a day (with some bot visitors) but mostly students and scholars who use it every day.
2026: What's coming?
- A new section on early excavations at Harappa 1925-26, and a tour of the National Museum of India (NMI) collection in Delhi, from contributor Sudeshna Guha at Shiv Nadar University;
- Plans to move to a new Drupal platform version, ensuring site stability for another decade;
- Best of all, I plan to release a complete movie on Mohenjo-daro in the coming year, which contrasts my 2 visits to the actual site, 52 years apart. WIth many visual delights and the music and voices from people in Sindh today.
DONATIONS
Harappa.com has never received any external funding. It has been entirely self-funded and has been donating to the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP) from the beginning. We recently became a registered US non-profit 501-3 (c) corporation, so any contribution is tax deductible in the US. More on how to donate, via Paypal etc. is described at Donations. There are many ways to support Indus research, including a proposed Ancient Indus Center at the University of California, Berkeley or the University of Wisconsin, Madison's ongoing research fund (also linked to on the above page). Please feel free to get in touch with me if you are interested in helping or know people who might be: omar at harappa dot com.
To another year of discovery and sharing the fruits of research!
- Omar Khan
San Francisco, Dec. 2025