Mohenjo-daro, new dating pushes back the birth of the Indus city

A new radiocarbon dating of the walls of Mohenjo-daro, the ancient city of the Indus Valley located in present-day Pakistan, indicates that the earliest occupation of the site dates back to 2700 BC. The data, released by the Directorate General of Antiquities and Archaeology of Pakistan, pushes back the chronology previously attributed to one of the best-known sites of the Indus civilization.

The dating places Mohenjo-daro among the first great cities in the world, in a group that, according to the source, rivals the metropolises of Egypt and Mesopotamia for antiquity and urban complexity. This is a significant chronological repositioning for a civilization, that of the Indus Valley, whose temporal extent has been the subject of study for decades.

At its peak, according to the same source, Mohenjo-daro was home to about 40,000 people. The city mysteriously collapsed around 1700 BC, with the causes of that decline not indicated in the available excerpts: the dossier provides no hypotheses on the reasons for the abandonment, limiting itself to recording the chronological data of the collapse.

It should be noted that the information on the new dating currently comes from a single source, that of the Pakistani archaeological body that conducted or supervised the radiocarbon analysis; no independent confirmations from other scientific institutions appear at present in the available excerpts.

The chronological leap to 2700 BC, if confirmed by further studies, would redefine Mohenjo-daro’s position in the chronology of the first urban civilizations, pushing back the beginning of its history compared to current estimates. What remains, at present, is the fact of a city that for over a thousand years — from its founding to its collapse around 1700 BC — was home to up to 40,000 inhabitants in one of the most populous urban areas of its time.