Bronze-Age Harappan Environment and Cities

This paper discusses various facets of the earliest elements that went into the making of city life on the Indus plains and those in the Kutch region beginning around the third-millennium BCE to raise new questions on their characterization. Against the background of the geographical parameters and the agricultural pastoral economy, the difference between these two regions will be highlighted to re-look at the statement, regularly uttered, that there were 3000 sites of the Harappa culture. The major part of the essay will be on the morphology of Mohenjo-daro as a city and to contrast it with other urban settlements like Dholavira, Kuntasi, Surkotada, Farmana, Shortughai, and others, each with its own particularity. Apart from storage structures, defences, workshops, literacy as found on seals, weights, metallurgy, production centres, finally, the nature of cults peculiar to large urban centres shall be discussed.