For Sahni’s description of the excavations at the area of the ‘parallel walls’ see ARASI 1924-25, pp. 76.

The walls were both, stouter and thinner. Sahni mentioned that ‘the upper portion [of the former] is built solidly of burnt bricks, the total extant height of the wall being eight feet; The thinner walls have no clay-core but are constructed throughout with burnt bricks” [ibid].

In his essay on the Prehistoric Civilization of the Indus Valley, which preceded the excavation reports of Mohenjodaro and Harappa in ARASI 1924-25, John Marshall declared that ‘generally speaking the buildings exposed at Harappa and Mohenjodaro and “the antiquities within them” to be similar in character, described this area of the walls as “unlike anything at Mohenjodaro. He stated:

“... there is one large edifice wholly unlike anything at the latter site [Mohenjodaro] (Plate XXV (c)) [sic, XXIV c]. What remains of it consists of two Series of solid brick walls set parallel to each other, with a broad aisle 24 feet in width running down the middle. Up to the present twenty of these walls have been exhumed, viz., fourteen to the east of the central aisle and six to the west all having a uniform length of 52 feet but varying in thickness. The stouter kind are nine feet at the base, and these are placed at regular intervals of 17 feet, so that, had it not been for the thinner walls intervening between them, it might reasonably have been inferred that they belonged to a range of long, narrow halls. As it is, these intervening walls leave sufficient space only for corridors between, the purpose of which cannot as yet he surmised” [p. 62]

- John H. Marshall, ‘The Prehistoric Civilization of the Indus Civilization, ARASI 1924-1925, pp. 60-3.

For Vats’s description of the area in his Excavations at Harappa (1940), see Parallel Walls.

NOTES:
1. Marshall’s usage of the word edifice for the area. Because he subsequently inferred the area as a Great Granary, which can be noted from Vats’s footnote to the introduction of Excavations at Harappa (1940).

2. Photographs Parallel Walls, Parallel Walls, Block of Parallel Walls 2, Block of Parallel Walls 3 and Block of Parallel Walls 4 possibly shows the area block by block. Parallel Walls was published, and is an overall view.

3. Photos Block of Parallel Walls, Block of Parallel Walls and Harappa Walls are of the area of Parallel Walls before deep digging.