Mohenjo-daro

A city of maybe 40,000 people built around 2500 BCE on the Indus, laid out on a rectilinear grid with covered drains running under the streets and over seven hundred wells, which is better sanitation than most of the world managed for the next four thousand years. It covered around 250 hectares. Then, near 1700 BCE, it was abandoned, and the arguments run from catastrophic flooding to soil exhaustion. The real hole in the middle of it is the writing: the seals and copper tablets carry the Indus script, thousands of short inscriptions, and after a century of work nobody can read a word. We do not know what these people called themselves. UNESCO listed it in 1980 and Pakistani archaeologists warned in 2012 that without better conservation the site could be gone by 2030. Larkana District, Sindh.