Harappa

"In the late 1850s, railway lines were laid through Punjab, particularly between Lahore and Multan, a line running south of the Ravi river, and through Sind. But to stabilize a railway line, you need ballast—a lot of it—and in flat alluvial plains, ballast material is not always easy to come by. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to have an old ruined city at hand, with tons of excellent bricks waiting to be plundered. That is precisely what happened to a group of huge mounds located near a village called Harappa, in the Sahiwal district of Punjab, on the bank of a former bed of the Ravi, twelve kilometres south of the river’s present course. No one could have guessed that this name, ‘Harappa’, was destined to become world-famous—least of all the engineers of the Western Railways, who had eyes only for the cartloads of bricks they could ‘mine’ from this bountiful quarry. The cartloads soon became wagonloads, with a light railway laid for speedier extraction. Alexander Cunningham, who had visited the site in 1853 and again in 1856, returned to it in 1872 as the director of the newly formed Archaeological Survey of India (ASI); in his report, he recorded, with some anguish, that the massive ancient walls he had noted during his initial visits had vanished, having been turned into ballast for no less than 160 km of the new Lahore-Multan line. Who could have manufactured those compact, precisely proportioned baked bricks? Neither Cunningham nor the few of his countrymen who preceded him to Harappa had a clue."

"Harappa presents a more complex picture with four mounds, some of which were surrounded by walls as thick as 14 m at the base, with impressive gateways controlling access to the city. Unfortunately, the site was too badly plundered to give us a fair idea of the overall plan of the fortifications...."