Mohenjo Daro: Living City, Mound of the Dead

Apple  | Audible |  Spotify  |  RSS  | YouTube (captioned)
​​​

(c) Junhi Han/UNESCO

​Mohenjo Daro was a vast metropolis, with elaborate urban infrastructure… and largely mysterious urban organization. It was a center of the Indus Valley civilization. Located in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India, the cities of this civilization covered territory roughly the size of western Europe. Because its language still hasn’t been deciphered by modern scholars, there’s still a lot we don’t know about it. But this hasn’t stopped modern scholars, writers, politicians, and artists from engaging with and fantasizing about it. This episode looks at what history can tell us about the art and culture — and water management — of this ancient civilization.

Podcaster: Lucy

Further Reading

Danielle Alesi, “A Crocodile’s Gaze."

Dennys Frenez, Gregg M. Jamison, Randall W. Law, Massimo Vidale, and Richard H. Meadow, eds. Walking with the Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia: Jonathan Mark Kenoyer Felicitation Volume, Archaeopress, (2018).

Jonathan M. Kenoyer, “Indus and Mesopotamian Trade Networks: New Insights from Shell and Carnelian Artifacts,” in: Intercultural Relations Between South and Southwest Asia. Studies in Commemoration of E.C.L. During Caspers (1934-1996), eds. Eric Olijdam and Richard H. Spoor, 19-28, British Archaeological Reports Limited, (2008).

———-. “Trade and Technology of the Indus Valley: New Insights from Harappa, Pakistan,” World Archaeology 29 (1997): 262-280

Harappa Archaeological Research Project. 

Saira Iqbal, “Energy Efficiency in Architecture Design in Mohenjo Daro,” in: Cities’ Vocabularies: The Influences and Formations, ed. Nabil Mohareb et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021), 203-208

Nayanjot Lahiri, Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered, Chicago University Press, (2013).

R.N. Mehta, “Indigenous Perceptions of the Past,” Man and Environment 20:1 (1995): 1-5.

Mohenjo Daro Title Song, via YouTube.

Asko Parpola, “Religion Reflected in the Iconic Signs of the Indus Script: Insight into Long-Forgotten Pictographic Messages,” Visible Religion 6 (1988): 114-135.

N. Kameswara Rao, “Aspects of Prehistoric Astronomy in India,” Bull. Astr. Soc. India 33 (2005): 499-511.

Satyajit Ray, The Unicorn Expedition and Other Stories, Penguin Books, (2004).

Adrija Roychowdhury, 'Mohenjo Daro: Ashutosh Gowariker, why are your characters calling their city ‘mound of the dead’?'.
​
UNESCO site for Mohenjo Daro.

Benjamin Valentine, George D. Kamenov, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Vasant Shinde, Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, Erik Otarola-Castillo, and John Krigbaum. "Evidence for Patterns of Selective Urban Migration in the Greater Indus Valley (2600-1900 BC): A Lead and Strontium Isotope Mortuary Analysis." PLoS One 10, no. 4 (04, 2015)

“Why a Bollywood Film Has Been Accused of Distorting History,” BBC, (September 2016).

Rita P. Wright, The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society, Cambridge University Press,  (2010).

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)