Lothal

The ground here is flat and pale, and the wind comes across it with nothing to stop it. Under your feet, the soil crumbles into a fine grey dust. Ahead of you, low walls of fired brick rise only a little above the earth. They are the colour of dry clay, worn smooth at the edges. There is very little sound. Perhaps a bird, perhaps a distant tractor. And yet this quiet field was once a working town of the Indus Valley Civilisation, more than four thousand years ago.

You are standing at Lothal, in the Ahmedabad district of Gujarat, in western India. The Indus Valley Civilisation, often called the Harappan civilisation, was one of the earliest urban cultures in the world. It flourished across a huge area of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. Its people built planned cities with straight streets, brick houses and drains. Lothal was one of their southern outposts. It sat close to the sea, and that position shaped everything about it.

The name itself is a small surprise. In Gujarati, Lothal is usually translated as the mound of the dead. Before anyone dug here, the place was simply a raised mound in the fields. Local people knew it, but nobody knew what lay inside. The name came long before the archaeology. Today it sounds strangely fitting, because the town really did lie buried for thousands of years.

The site was identified in 1954 by the archaeologist S. R. Rao, working with the Archaeological Survey of India. Excavations followed through the second half of the 1950s. What his team found was not a palace or a great temple. It was something more practical, and in some ways more unusual. They found a town organised around trade, craft and water. Most of the walls you see today come from that excavation.

Look now for the largest feature on the site. It is a long rectangular basin, lined with fired brick, on the eastern side of the town. Rao interpreted it as a dockyard, connected by a channel to a nearby river and from there to the sea. If he was right, it is among the oldest known docks in the world. Boats could have entered at high tide and been loaded beside the town. It is a remarkable idea to hold in your mind as you walk along its edge.

Here is the honest part of the story. Not every scholar agrees that the basin was a dock. Some researchers have argued that it was a reservoir for storing fresh water instead. The debate is still open. What nobody disputes is the skill of the builders. The brickwork is careful and even. The basin was clearly planned, not dug at random. Whatever its purpose, it shows a community that understood water very well.

Beside the basin stood a raised area, which archaeologists call the acropolis. Here they found the remains of a large warehouse. Inside were clay sealings, small lumps of clay pressed with seals. Traders used them to mark and close bundles of goods. Each seal carried a sign or an animal. So these little pieces of clay are like ancient shipping labels. They tell us that goods arrived here, were checked, and moved on.

The lower town spread out below, with houses, workshops and streets. Walk through it slowly and look at the drains. Many Harappan towns had covered drains running beside the streets, and Lothal was no exception. Waste water left the houses through brick channels. Few places in the ancient world managed this so early. It is easy to walk past these narrow lines of brick. They are some of the most impressive things here.

Lothal was also a town of craftspeople. One of the best-known finds is a bead-making workshop. Workers shaped beads from carnelian, a red-orange stone found in Gujarat. They heated the stone to deepen its colour, then drilled and polished it. Beads like these travelled far beyond India. Workers here also used shell and copper. Imagine the small sounds of grinding and drilling filling these lanes.

The trade reached across the sea. Among the objects found here is a seal of a type associated with the Persian Gulf. It suggests contact with merchants from the region around present-day Bahrain. So this quiet field was once connected to a much wider world. Ships, goods and perhaps people moved between these shores. A bead made here might have ended its journey in a distant land.

Life at Lothal was not always easy. The town sat on low ground near rivers, and floods seem to have struck it more than once. Archaeologists found signs of damage and rebuilding. People raised platforms and repaired walls to protect their homes. Over time, the town declined. The reasons were probably a mix of floods, shifting rivers and changing trade. Slowly, the mound grew over what remained.

Before you leave, visit the site museum run by the Archaeological Survey of India. It holds many objects found here, including beads, pottery, seals and tools. Seeing them up close makes the ruins outside easier to imagine. The pottery is often painted in dark lines on red clay. Nearby, a large National Maritime Heritage Complex is being developed. It is a sign of how much Lothal still means to India's story of the sea.

Now stand still for a moment and look back across the brick walls. The sea is not visible from here today, but it was once much closer. Notice how the land falls gently towards the basin. Listen to the wind moving across the open ground. Somewhere under this dust are the footprints of traders and bead makers. As you walk back to the road, look down. The pale soil under your shoes is the same soil they walked on.