Lothal - The Port and Business Hub of ancient India

Lothal - The Port and Business Hub of ancient India(cities-RED 4)

Major Population-(Early Natives, Aryans)

Maximum Population-(7500-11000 approx)

• Such is the story of India........the roots go deep, very deep. Once upon a time,having the most flourishing and prospering trade relations with Mesopotamia(present day Iraq), Egypt, Persia(Iran), some say even African countries.....
• Today people who live in Gujarat are termed as born businessmen, noted industrialists who were born and bred in gujarat include Jamshedji Tata(founder of India's first private industry, Tata group, born in Navsari, Gujarat), Dhirubhai Ambani(Reliance industries,born in Idhar, Gujarat)
• It is often quoted "You can take a Gujarati (person who hails from the state of gujarat) out of Gujarat but never business out of a Gujarati"

LETS COME BACK TO LOTHAL

• Lothal is situated near the village of Saragwala in the Dholka Taluka of Ahmedabad district. It is six kilometres (south-east) of the Lothal-Bhurkhi railway station on the Ahmedabad-Bhavnagar railway line.
• The city covers an overall area 950 ft x 750 ft approx during its peak.
• Lothal is supposed to have the earliest dock in the world history. This indicates that India especially Sindh province of pre-indepent India was always indulged in business.

• Lothal is supposed to be the last town on the saraswati river's tributary lavanavati or bhogavo which comes from the north. Lothal was excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India in the year 1954!
• Lothal is a combination of two words Loth and (s)thal which means 'mound of dead'......surprised?!
• Isn't this the SAME as the name of mohenjo daro in sindhi?
• Yes lothal and Mohenjo Daro are the two cities of the same termed 'Hariyupan/Harappan' civilization.
• Again population of Lothal was prominently Hindu.
• But graves of mesopotamian and mediterranian people have been found in lothal-again a ritual which is not experienced in hinduism today i.e. burial.
• It is believed that the aryans came to this city in late 2400s B.C.E and by the time they came the city was destroyed due to floods apparently.
• Similarity again with the said stories of Hariyupa and Mohenjo Daro?
• Yes the aryans came in late 2400-2300 B.C.E and built over the city which was in its prime until it got destroyed in 1800s B.C.E.

• But the city was already far ahead in trade and ceramic expertize.
• The beads and gems of Lothal were in great demand in the west.
• They seem to have worshipped the fire God and also another sea goddess which people according to tradition also worship today.
• A coastal route existed linking sites such as Lothal and Dholavira to Sutkagan Dor on the Makran coast.

Artists perception of ancient Lothal

The present day lothal

                                                    For a quick video of lothal click here

Town Planning and Structure

solid waste Filter

• Lothal engineers engaged themselves to protect the area from consistent floods.
•  The city was divided into a fortress (citadel) and the the city.
• The citadel dominated the city which is a bit similar to hariyupa and supposedly the rulers of the city lived in this fortress unlike mohenjo daro which did not have any such distinguishing structure.
• The fortress had paved baths, underground and surface drains too.

• The city was divided into two parts

1. Market place where the traders used to gather to sell various goods
2. The residential area- The town was divided into blocks of approx 2 metre-high (approx 6 ft) platforms of kiln baked and dried bricks, each consisting of 20–30 houses of thick mud and brick walls.

                                                            The Dockyard!

Lothal during the early days of excavation

• Welcome! You are looking at the supposedly oldest port of the world! 
• The dockyard was located away from the main river to avoid deposition of silt. 
• Modern oceanographers have observed that the Harappans must have possessed great knowledge relating to tides in order to build such a dock on the ever-shifting course of the Sabarmati, as well as exemplary hydrography and maritime engineering. 
• This was the earliest known dock found in the world, equipped to berth and service ships.
•  It is speculated that Lothal engineers studied tidal movements, and their effects on brick-built structures, since the walls are of kiln-burnt bricks. 
• This knowledge also enabled them to select Lothal's location in the first place, as the Gulf of Khambhat has the highest tidal strength and ships can be sluiced through flow tides in the river tributaries or creeks.
• The engineers built a trapezoidal structure, with north-south arms of average 21.8 metres (71.5 ft), and east-west arms of 37 metres (121 ft).
•  Another assessment is that the basin could have served as an irrigation tank, for the estimated original dimensions of the "dock" are not large enough, by modern standards, to house ships and conduct much traffic.
• This is absolutely brilliant! Such technology and perfection 4000 years ago!

present day lothal

• The original height of the embankments was (13.98 ft). (Now it is 10.98 feet).
•  To counter the thrust of water, offsets were provided on the outer wall faces.
•  When the river changed its course in 2000 BCE, a smaller inlet, 7 metres (23 ft) wide was made in the longer arm, connected to the river by a 2 kilometre channel.
• At high tide a flow of 2.1–2.4 metres (6.9–7.9 ft) of water would have allowed ships to enter.
•  The dock also possessed a lock-gate system—a wooden door could be lowered at the mouth of the outlet to retain a minimum column of water in the basin so as to ensure flotation at low tides.
•  Brick-paved passages between blocks served as vents, and a direct ramp led to the dock to facilitate loading. 
• The warehouse was located close to the fortress, to allow tight supervision by ruling authorities.
•  Despite elaborate precautions, the major floods that brought the city's decline destroyed all but twelve blocks, which became the makeshift storehouse.

Business!

• All of you must be wondering about what the whole trade was about that made lothal stand out from the other cities!
• Lothal is again one of those towns of hariyupan civilization which made artifacts of pure copper. These artifacts still exist and have stood the test of time!
• Lothal was the contributor of maximum artifacts of Hariyupan civilization.

copper seal which is also used in indian navy

• There exists a bead factory, which performs a very important economic function, possesses a central courtyard and eleven rooms, a store and a guardhouse even today. 
• There is a cinder dump (a site for dumping industrial wastage), as well as a double-chambered circular kiln, with stoke-holes for fuel supply. 
• The mud plaster of the floors and walls are vitrified owing to intense heat during work. 
• The residues of raw materials such as reed, cow dung, sawdust are found, giving archaeologists hints of how the kiln was operated.

the marketplace

•  A large mud-brick building faces the factory, and its significance is noted by its plan.
•  Four large rooms and a hall, with an overall measurement of 17.1 × 12.8 metres (56 × 42 ft). The hall has a large doorway and a raised floor in the southern corner of the building.
• This gives us an idea of how advanced the people were in planning and had also built fully operating factories!
• There are multiple two-roomed shops and workplaces of coppersmiths and blacksmiths in the marketplace.

Artifacts 

• A unique seal found here is from Bahrain—circular, with image of a dragon flanked by jumping gazelles.
• The discovery of etched carnelian beads and non-etched barrel beads in Kish and Ur (modern Iraq), Jalalabad (Afghanistan) and Susa (Iran) attest to the popularity of the Indus bead industry across West Arabia.

unicorn seal-2500s B.C.E

• The Lothal excavation yielded 213 seals, third largest among all Indus Civilization sites.
•  Seal-cutters preferred short-horned bulls, mountain goats, tigers and composite animals like the elephant-bull for engravings.

SOME INTERESTING FACTS:

• Lothal offers two new types of potter work, a bowl with or without handle, and a small jar with design not found in other Indus Valley cultures.
• Lothal artists introduced a new form of realistic painting.
• Paintings depict animals in their natural surroundings. On one large vessel, the artist depicts birds with fish in their beaks, resting in a tree, while a fox-like animal stands below. This scene bears resemblance to the story of The Fox and the Crow in the Panchatantra.
• On a miniature jar, the story of the thirsty crow and deer is depicted – of how the deer could not drink from the narrow-mouth of the jar, while the crow succeeded by dropping stones in the jar. The features of the animals are clear and graceful.
• A complete set of terra-cotta gamesmen, has been found in Lothal—animal figures, pyramids with ivory handles and castle-like objects (similar to the chess set of Queen Hatshepsut in Egypt)

Defence tools

• Lothal copper is unusually pure, lacking the arsenic typically used by coppersmiths across the rest of the Indus valley. 
• The city imported ingots from probable sources in the Arabian peninsula. 

a chisel head

• Workers mixed tin with copper for the manufacture of arrowheads, fishhooks, chisels, bangles, rings, drills and spearheads, although weapon manufacturing was minor.
• They also employed advanced metallurgy in following the cire perdue technique of casting, and used more than one-piece moulds for casting birds and animals.
•  They also invented new tools such as curved saws and twisted drills unknown to other civilisations at the time.

Another Surprising Fact (Source Wikipedia)!

• A thick ring-like shell object found with four slits each in two margins served as a compass to measure angles on plane surfaces or in the horizon in multiples of 40 degrees, up to 360 degrees. 
• Such shell instruments were probably invented to measure 8–12 whole sections of the horizon and sky, explaining the slits on the lower and upper margins. 
• Archaeologists consider this as evidence that the Lothal experts had achieved something 2,000 years before the Greeks: an 8–12 fold division of horizon and sky, as well as an instrument for measuring angles and perhaps the position of stars, and for navigation.
• Lothal contributes one of three measurement scales that are integrated and linear (others found in Harappa and Mohenjodaro). 
• An ivory scale from Lothal has the smallest-known decimal divisions in Indus civilisation. The distance between graduation lines being 1.70 mm.
•  The sum total of ten graduations from Lothal is approximate to the angula in the Arthashastra (Chanakya's political treatise).
• The Lothal craftsmen took care to ensure durability and accuracy of stone weights by blunting edges before polishing.

DECLINE OF LOTHAL:

• Basic reason for the decline of lothal is supposedly great floods which destroyed the city around 1800 B.C.E and caused a great migration of people from Lothal towards eastern parts of Gujarat along the rivers Narmada and also towards the north-Rajasthan.
• This generation, archaeologists say was very under developed and illiterate for the most part.

SALIENT FEATURES:

• Lothal is supposedly the world's first dock
• Lothal is one of the Indus Valley Civilization's most flourishing cities.
• Along with the usual perfectly coordinated drainage systems and sewer management usually seen in a hariyupan city, Lothal also had a desgnated marketplace in the city where traders used to gather to sell their goods.
• The city also had a fortress at the centre which was the governing body.
• The people used to trade with countries like Bahrain,Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia,Africa and other west arabian countries.
• The dock of lothal was a very indigenously designed dock with perfection and accuracy but constant floods caused the planning body to change the entry points.
• Lothal people ahd developed a compass which was used for navigation according to the postions of stars in the sky as well as with the help of the horizon.It had graduation in its scale upto a precision of 1.70 mm per one graduation!
• Lothal people were experts in crafting and there were special places for blacksmiths and coppersmiths in the city and they were excellent traders.
• Pure Copper artifacs were in great demand in other countries as this quality of copper was available only in Lothal and not even in other hariyupan cities.......also other attacking tools which were maufactured only in Lothal like drills and saws which were carved with precision
• There was a bead factory in Lothal which are still made in the same way as it was 4000 years ago
• The various beads had great demand in west arabian countries.
• Many seals were found indicating the importance of animals and also of the fact that they worshipped the fire god and sea goddesses which is still practised in Gujarat today.