Mohenjo-daro
— — streets a city plotted before the wheel.
Not only on a wall.
“The Mound of the Dead Men. A planned city on the Indus, 4,500 years old, with brick streets laid in a grid and a public bath at its centre. Rediscovered in 1922, half-buried in the silt of Sindh. The script carved into its seals has never been deciphered. Whoever lived there left no temples, no kings, no army. Only the city itself, quiet under the sun.
Mohenjo-daro, 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.
Mohenjo-daro lies on the right bank of the Indus River in Sindh province, Pakistan, about thirty kilometres south of Larkana. It is one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, built around 2500 BCE and abandoned roughly a thousand years later. The site covers some 250 hectares, with a raised citadel to the west and a lower town of brick courtyard houses to the east. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1980 for its scale and the early sophistication of its urban planning.
The brick is the story. Mohenjo-daro was built almost entirely of standardised baked brick, in the same proportions used across hundreds of kilometres of Indus settlements. The Great Bath at the centre of the citadel is a sealed brick tank, twelve metres long and seven wide, lined with bitumen to hold water. A covered drainage system runs beneath the streets, connecting house latrines to soak pits. Nothing comparable in scale or finish would appear in the region for nearly two thousand years after the city was left.
No palaces have been identified at Mohenjo-daro, no royal tombs, no clearly identifiable temples. The seals carry a script that has resisted decipherment despite more than a century of attempts and over 4,000 known inscriptions. The city was abandoned around 1500 BCE, possibly as the Indus shifted course or the regional climate dried. The mound stood unrecognised for more than three millennia until the Indian archaeologist R. D. Banerji surveyed the site in 1922 and saw the older brick beneath a Buddhist stupa above.