Lothal: Harappan Dockyard and Port City

1.1 Where is the site?

Lothal is an ancient mound in Saragwala village. It lies in Dholka taluka of Ahmedabad district, Gujarat. A taluka is an administrative block, like a sub-district.

The mound sits on a low plain between two rivers, the Bhogavo and the Sabarmati. Today the Gulf of Khambhat is about 30 km away.

1.2 How was it found?

Archaeologists found Lothal in November 1954. They were surveying villages in Gujarat for Harappan sites. The Harappan culture is also called the Indus Valley Civilisation.

The surface held clues. There were pots, chert blades, beads, terracotta cakes and bricks of Harappan size. Chert is a hard stone used for blades.

1.3 What did the first dig prove?

The Western Circle of the ASI dug the mound under S.R. Rao. It found three phases of Harappan life. The finds included Indus seals with the Indus script and a unicorn motif.

A seal is a small stone stamp. Traders pressed it into clay to mark ownership.

These seals ended the last doubts. The Harappan culture had reached south into Gujarat. Rao’s team kept digging until 1959-60, when the work was brought to a close.

2.1 Why was flooding such a danger?

Lothal stands on flat land between two rivers. The ASI says it must have faced regular sheet floods. A sheet flood is water spreading thinly over a wide area.

The first people there lost their homes to floods. The rivers left a thick layer of silt. This pushed the builders to find a safer way to live.

2.2 What did the builders do about it?

They built huge platforms of mud-brick and put their houses on top. Each time floods came, they raised the platforms higher. They also added a clay rampart about 8 ft high.

A rampart is a thick earth wall. Here it kept out water, not enemies.

The walls were mended again and again. In one case the team found a buttress wall built behind a breach. On the eastern side a veneer of baked brick, 270 ft long, protected the platforms.

A veneer is a covering layer. Baked bricks resist water better than mud-bricks.

Even so, Lothal was never given up after the early floods. The excavators suggest the reason. It was a port town for a rich cotton-growing area.

2.3 How was the town planned?

By its peak the town was divided into six blocks. Each block stood on its own mud-brick platform. Streets 12 to 20 ft wide linked the blocks.

The town’s edge ran a little over 2 miles round.

Houses stood in rows on either side of the streets. Some houses were large, up to 72 by 42 ft. Small shops lined one street. Many houses had a courtyard or a front verandah.

One large house stood on a high platform overlooking the dockyard. The excavators felt it belonged to an important person.

2.4 What about water and waste?

Lothal had an elaborate drainage system. One baked-brick drain was 166 ft long. It joined eight bathrooms in a row of houses.

Soakage jars and cesspools took dirty water, called sullage. At a drain’s mouth was a sluice-gate. A wooden door slid in grooves to control the flow.

The ASI also found a 24-ft deep well. Houses had brick-paved bathing platforms and privies. All this suggests a civic authority that planned and kept the town.

3.1 What did the diggers find?

At the eastern end of the mound, the team found a big brick structure. It was roughly trapezoid in plan, a four-sided shape with two parallel sides. The east and west embankments were each 710 ft long.

The north side measured 124 ft and the south side 116 ft. The embankments stood up to 14 ft high. Marine shells lay inside.

An embankment is a raised bank of earth or brick that holds water in.

3.2 How did it work?

Boats could enter at high tide through an opening in the eastern embankment. A low dwarf-wall near the entrance held back water even at low tide. This kept boats afloat.

Extra water left through a spill-channel in the southern embankment. At its mouth were grooves for a sliding door. Wooden logs placed at set points could hold the water at the level needed.

The next season revealed more. The inlet channel was 23 ft wide, as wide as the gap in the embankment. The outlet channel ran north-east to south-west and joined a silted-up creek.

The town’s main drain also emptied into the outlet channel. So the dock, the drains and the creek formed one connected water system.

3.3 Why was this called a debate?

In 1958-59 the ASI itself wrote “dockyard (?)”, with a question mark. In 1959-60 it reported conclusive proof. Even so, doubts lingered. A port needs water that reaches the sea, and the basin sits far from today’s coast.

A clue came from local memory. Rao notes that country boats anchored half a mile from the mound only about 50 years earlier. Boats could have come up the Sabarmati and Bhogavo rivers.

3.4 What did the 2024 study add?

In 2024 a team at IIT Gandhinagar re-examined the question. They used old maps, satellite images and digital elevation models. A digital elevation model is a map of ground height.

They found a direct link between Lothal and a former course of the Sabarmati. Over 140 old river channels lie in the area. The lower Sabarmati had moved a good deal over time.

The release says the work supports the dockyard idea. It also says more study is needed to date the river’s shift. So the debate is much narrower now, but not closed.

4.1 What made Lothal rich?

Rao stresses its trade. It had a hinterland rich in wheat and cotton. It also had easy access to the sea.

Cloth may have been an export. Beads were probably made in town and sent out, as still happens at Cambay.

Traders used a standard set of weights. Seal impressions on clay marked packages of goods. Clay models show that bullock carts and boats were both in use.

4.2 What crafts were found?

One house had a working platform and a round furnace. Its people seem to have been bead-makers. Another street held a coppersmith’s workshop and two bead factories.

The beads were of gold, steatite, faience, agate, carnelian, shell and terracotta. Some gold and steatite beads were the smallest ever found. A necklace of them shows great skill.

Fishing was also a main occupation. The diggers found many copper fish-hooks and vast numbers of fish bones.

4.3 What did the seals show?

The 1956-57 season found 14 steatite seals, one copper seal and five clay sealings. Most carried the Indus script. One seal showed a bull bending to drink from a vessel. Another showed a bird with a fish in its mouth.

No one has read the Indus script yet.

A hoard of seventy-five clay sealings lay in channels of a block built of twelve cubes. The team first took it for a kiln. A later cut found ash and bones below the first two courses of mud-brick. The ASI began to speak of “altars” instead.

4.4 How did Lothal end?

A major flood in Phase IV wrecked the town, dockyard included. This came at the end of Period I, the mature Harappan stage. The ASI reports five phases in all.

People came back in Period II, a late Harappan stage. Streets were laid haphazardly. New pot types slowly replaced the old Harappan shapes. The goblet, the beaker and the perforated jar disappeared.

Rao sees Lothal as the earliest Harappan settlement in the Saurashtra peninsula. The Harappan culture survived in a weaker form in the 2nd millennium BCE.