An exclusive interview with Dr. Romila Thapar, one of India's most distinguished historians, author of numerous books on early Indian history, and winner of the US Library of Congress Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement. >
Picture a lane in Mohenjo-daro around 2300 BCE, a narrow, mudbrick-lined passages that still trace the lower town today, just as remarkable in their orderliness as the city's famous covered drains. Someone sets down a handful of small objects. >
The booklet Kot Diji published by the Department of Archaeology details the excavations carried out at the site of Kot Diji, located in the Khairpur district of Sindh about 40 km from Mohenjo-daro. >
While visiting Mohenjo-daro in early 2025, I asked one of the best guides to this vast ancient city, Sheikh Javed Ali Sindhi, whether there was a booklet or guide available. He said no, but that he w… >
The recent evidence from Mohenjo-daro of a "Kot Dijian" layer beneath its Indus ruins, including the city wall, dating from 2600 BCE or earlier, brings renewed interest to this precursor culture to the Indus civilization. >
The paper's central argument is straightforward and important: the wheeled bullock cart of the Indus Valley was an indigenous invention, not a technology diffused from Mesopotamia or Central Asia, as earlier colonial-era scholars once assumed. >
