Harappa

A Bronze Age city of 23,500 people, and the railway that ate its bricks

The ruins of one of the great cities of the Indus civilisation, about 24 km west of Sahiwal in the Punjab, named after the modern village beside the old course of the Ravi River; the river now runs 8 km to the north. At its height, in the Mature Harappan phase from 2600 to 1900 BC, the city may have held as many as 23,500 people in clay-brick houses across about 150 hectares, large for its time. Its worst damage came in the modern age: under British rule bricks from the ruins were dug out and used as ballast for the Lahore to Multan railway. The village of Harappa today is a small crossroads town of 15,000 people less than a kilometre from the site, with a railway station left from the Raj. The site went on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage in 2004, and in 2005 a plan to build an amusement park on it was dropped after the builders kept turning up archaeological artefacts as they dug.