News

Will the movie Mohenjo Daro open the floodgates of popular interest in the ancient Indus civilization? What do you think? Twenty-one years into running Harappa.com, the release of Mohenjo Daro is a landmark for interest in the subject (traffic in the last few days has doubled to five thousand people a day). >

A wide-ranging interview with one of our ancient Indus scholars, author and archaeologist Shereen Ratnagar. >

Quite a bit. Release weekend August 12-14 visits to the site went from about 2 thousand to 8 thousand per day. With the latest stats, Facebook demographics and poll question. >

Evidence for a tsunami hitting Dholavira at some point in the past was recently presented by scientists from the Indian National Institute of Oceanography (NIO). >

With best wishes from Harappa.com, on Facebook since 2008. We added 30,000 page followers this year, almost a hundred added, two dozen lost each day. Nadine Zubair joined as Assistant Editor, helping to cover many Indus towns and areas usually not well understood. >

Scanning electron microscope photograph of jute textile feature found on a ceramic at Harappa. Very few fibers remain on artifacts from over 4,000 years ago, and this is the first evidence for jute as early as 2200-1900 BCE at Harappa. By Rita P. Wright, David L. Lentz and Harriet F. Beaulieu, the paper discusses how this evidence was extracted and its implications: New Evidence for Jute >

Mohenjo Daro is unique because it is the first cinematic release featuring this ancient city. In Hollywood and western cinema, there are many dramatisations on ancient Egypt which was contemporary to the Indus Valley Civilisation. In the Indian film industry however, movies do not go earlier than the time of the Buddha or mythological eras. Indeed, the last Hindi language film set in ancient South Asia was probably Asoka back in 2001. >