essay on mohen jo daro
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Mohenjo-daro is widely recognized as one of the most important early cities of South Asia and the Indus Civilization and yet most publications rarely provide more than a cursory overview of this important site.
There are several different spellings of the site name and in this article we have chosen to use the most common form, Mohenjo-daro (the Mound of Mohen or Mohan), though other spellings are equally valid: Mohanjo-daro (Mound of Mohan =Krishna), Moenjo-daro (Mound of the Dead), Mohenjo-daro, Mohenjodaro or even Mohen-jo-daro. Many publications still state that Mohenjo-daro is located in India (presumably referring to ancient India), but since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the site has been under the protection of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan.
Discovery and Major Excavations
Mohenjo-daro was discovered in 1922 by R. D. Banerji, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, two years after major excavations had begun at Harappa, some 590 km to the north. Large-scale excavations were carried out at the site under the direction of John Marshall, K. N. Dikshit, Ernest Mackay, and numerous other directors through the 1930s.
Although the earlier excavations were not conducted using stratigraphic approaches or with the types of recording techniques employed by modern archaeologists they did produce a remarkable amount of information that is still being studied by scholars today (see the Mohenjo-daro Bibliography).
The last major excavation project at the site was carried out by the late Dr. G. F. Dales in 1964-65, after which excavations were banned due to the problems of conserving the exposed structures from weathering.
Since 1964-65 only salvage excavation, surface surveys and conservation projects have been allowed at the site. Most of these salvage operations and conservation projects have been conducted by Pakistani archaeologists and conservators.
In the 1980's extensive architectural documentation, combined with detailed surface surveys, surface scraping and probing was done by German and Italian survey teams led by Dr. Michael Jansen (RWTH) and Dr. Maurizio Tosi (IsMEO).
Mohenjo-daro Mound
The most extensive recent work at the site has focused on attempts at conservation of the standing structures undertaken by UNESCO in collaboration with the Department of Archaeology and Museums, as well as various foreign consultants.
Details of the most recent salvage excavations and conservation are found in obscure journals or reports that are not readily available to the public, but are listed in the Bibliography for those interested in searching them out.
Answer:
John Marshall.
Mohenjo-Daro is located on the bank of the Indus River in present-day Pakistan and is the best-preserved city of the Indus civilization.
Its name means the “Mound of the Dead” because the center of the town is an artificial mound about 50 feet high surrounded with a brick wall and fortified with towers. The mound also had a great bath 39 feet by 23 feet, flanked by a large pillared hall, small rooms, and a granary. A well-laid-out town lay below the citadel with streets running in a grid pattern oriented to the points of the compass. The town was divided into wards according to function, such as areas for shops, workshops, and residences. All buildings were made with baked bricks of uniform size. Besides private wells in the courtyards of two-story individual residences, there were also public wells at street intersections. Covered sewers disposed of waste. There was also a cemetery where graves were neatly oriented in the same direction. There were no palaces or royal cemeteries.
Inscribed seals found at Mohenjo-Daro and other Indus cities show pictographic writing, to date undeciphered. So few characters are inscribed on each seal that they would not give much information even if they were deciphered. Thus despite a high-level material culture, the Indus civilization is still considered prehistoric. The absence of palaces and royal cemeteries and the presence of a ceremonial bath and great hall lead specialists to guess that a college of priests ruled. The abundance of small female figurines indicates a fertility cult. The uniform-sized bricks throughout the Indus Valley and nearby regions lead to speculation that some kind of government supervised the entire area; hence the name Indus Empire is also used to describe this civilization.
In Mohenjo-Daro archaeologists have discovered an advanced metal-using culture (bronze and copper), where people used wheel-made pottery vessels, wove cotton cloths, lived under a well-organized municipal government, and traded among one another and with other cultures. Indus seals have been found in Mesopotamia and lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone used by Indus artisans, is mined in Afghanistan. Conditions in Mohenjo-Daro deteriorated around 1700 b.c.e., shown by hoards of buried jewelry and precious objects, pots and utensils strewn about, evidence of fire, and at least 30 skeletons scattered about indicating that the people were trapped and died or were killed. Whether natural disaster or invaders caused the final disaster, the city was abandoned, hence, posterity’s name Mound of the Dead for its ruins. Mohenjo-Daro is the best preserved of the Indus civilization cities excavated to date.