Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.63

c12.63

Turning now to a description of the actual cities and towns of the Harappā people, we must obviously first consider the two capitals, at Harappā and Mohenjo-daro. Both sites have certain striking features in common, visible even on the surface before excavation, and these similarities have been confirmed by the work of archaeologists during the past twenty years. The situation of the two sites is essentially similar, each by the side of a river. Harappā lies beside an old confluence of two branches of the River Ravi, a tributary of the Indus, and although at the present time the main river-channel is 6 miles away, in the circumstances of heavier rainfall, which we have seen are likely to have existed in the third millennium B.C.; the city must have stood on ground liable to be flooded, and it seems probable that the great rampart or ‘bund’ of mud and mud-brick which forms the earliest phase of the citadel defences on the site was designed primarily as an embankment to keep out flood-water.