Planned Cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa Built
- Date
- c. 2600 BCE
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Indus Valley (Pakistan/NW India)
- Era
- Ancient Civilizations
- Significance
Around 2600 BCE the Indus Valley Civilisation entered its Mature Harappan phase, marked by the deliberate construction of large, pre-planned cities, most famously Mohenjo-daro on the lower Indus and Harappa in the Punjab.
Unlike most ancient towns that grew organically from villages, these were laid out in advance on a grid of streets oriented to the cardinal directions, divided into a raised 'citadel' and a lower residential town. Buildings were of standardised kiln-fired and sun-dried mud brick in fixed proportions. The scale was extraordinary for the era: Mohenjo-daro may have housed tens of thousands of people. Over a thousand Mature Harappan sites are known across an area larger than contemporary Mesopotamia or Egypt, sharing a strikingly uniform material culture in pottery, brick sizes and seals. This urban revolution represents one of the world's first cities and the first major urban civilisation of South Asia, distinguished by a degree of standardised civic planning unmatched in the Bronze Age.
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Empires active in c. 2600 BCE
- Egyptian Old Kingdom2686 BCE – 2181 BCE
- Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilization2600 BCE – 1900 BCE
- Elamite Kingdom2700 BCE – 539 BCE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Great Pyramid of Giza built for Khufuc. 2560 BCE
- Mohenjo-daro's Great Bath and Urban Sanitationc. 2600 BCE
- Step Pyramid of Djoser built at Saqqarac. 2670 BCE
- Lothal Dockyard and Dholavira Water Worksc. 2300 BCE
- Sintashta culture and the first spoke-wheeled war chariotsc. 2100–2000 BCE
- Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions: the first alphabetic writingc. 1850 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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