Larkana
— — a city the river shaped, twice over.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on the west bank of the Indus, in the rice and date country of upper Sindh. Larkana sits a short drive from Mohenjo-daro, the brick city that was old when Babylon was new. The Bhutto family built their political life here. The streets carry both inheritances quietly, side by side.
Larkana, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Larkana is a city of roughly 490,000 in upper Sindh, on the west bank of the Indus River about 460 kilometres northeast of Karachi. It is the administrative seat of Larkana District and sits in Pakistan's rice and date-palm belt. Twenty-eight kilometres southwest lies Mohenjo-daro, a Bronze Age city of the Indus Valley Civilisation excavated since 1922 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. The Bhutto political family has its ancestral roots at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh on the city's outskirts.
Mohenjo-daro, the great Bronze Age city twenty-eight kilometres outside Larkana, was built almost entirely of standard-sized baked brick, set down to near-uniform dimensions around 2500 BCE. Its grid of streets, sewered drainage, and the so-called Great Bath are the work of a civilisation that left no readable script. Sir John Marshall began systematic excavation in 1922. The brick today reads pale ochre against the Sindh dust, a city built to last that outlasted the meaning of itself.
Mohenjo-daro is open to visitors daily, reached by road from Larkana in under an hour or by a small airstrip a few kilometres from the site. Pakistan Railways serves Larkana on the Karachi to Peshawar main line. The on-site museum holds replicas of the small bronze Dancing Girl figurine and the priest-king bust; both originals were moved decades ago to the National Museum in Karachi. Summer in Sindh is severe; October through March is when the light and temperature both behave.