For decades, Mohenjo-Daro was considered the great metropolis of the 7 Rivers civilization — the largest city, the most sophisticated, the one whose name is best known. But the archaeological excavations underway since 2014 at Rakhigarhi, in Haryana, northern India, are rewriting this hierarchy.
Rakhigarhi is larger than Mohenjo-Daro. Larger than Harappa. It is probably the largest city of the entire 7 Rivers civilization — and one of the largest cities of the ancient world.
And what it reveals goes far beyond the simple question of size.
Rakhigarhi: the forgotten city of the Ghaggar
Rakhigarhi is located on the banks of the Ghaggar — the river that flows in the place of the ancient Sarasvatī, the great sacred river that the Rig Veda sings as “best of rivers.” In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I note that on this river were located the largest cities of the eastern part of the civilization: Rakhigarhi, Banawali, Kalibangan, Ganweriwala.
The site has been known to archaeologists since the 1960s, when A. Ghosh and his Archaeological Survey of India team first surveyed it. But it was only from 2014, under the direction of Vasant Shinde of Deccan College University in Pune, that systematic and intensive excavations began revealing the true extent of this site.
The result: Rakhigarhi covers an estimated area of between 350 and 450 hectares — placing it well above Mohenjo-Daro (approximately 250 hectares) and Harappa (approximately 150 hectares). It is a metropolis, in every sense of the word.
What the excavations revealed
The excavations at Rakhigarhi have confirmed everything we know about the 7 Rivers civilization — and added new elements.
The urban organization is what one would expect: north-south avenues, east-west streets, bricks with standardized proportions (1×2×4), wastewater drainage systems, wells at every crossroads. The same intelligent and meticulous planning as in all the great cities of this civilization.
The artefacts confirm the prosperity of the site: jewellery in gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian and shell. Pottery of remarkable quality. Steatite seals bearing the still-undeciphered script. Weights and measures conforming to the standardization that characterizes the entire civilization.
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I note that Rakhigarhi has a longer history than most other sites. Before the city proper was built, the first dwellings were cylindrical holes dug in the ground with a roof placed over them — the most primitive forms of habitation documented in this region. This continuity from primitive habitat to planned city on the same site illustrates the evolution of the civilization over several millennia.
The DNA of the skeletons: a scientific revolution
In 2018, an international team of researchers — led by Vasant Shinde and including notably David Reich of Harvard — published a revolutionary genetic study based on the analysis of DNA from skeletons discovered at Rakhigarhi.
The results immediately fed the debate on the origin of the 7 Rivers civilization and the question of the Aryan invasion.
What the study showed: the individuals buried at Rakhigarhi — who lived around 2500 BCE, at the time of the mature urban phase of the civilization — show no traces of ancestry from the Eurasian steppes. Their genetic profile is that of local populations, without significant contribution from external steppe populations.
In The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I document this: analyses on mitochondrial DNA — maternal DNA — show deep genetic continuity in Indian populations, going back tens of thousands of years. Maternal lineages have not undergone significant migration.
The genetic data from Rakhigarhi fits this continuity: the people who lived in the largest city of the 7 Rivers civilization were descendants of very ancient local populations, not invaders from outside.
What Rakhigarhi says about the Sarasvatī
The location of Rakhigarhi on the banks of the Ghaggar — the ancient Sarasvatī — is itself a confirmation of what Michel Danino demonstrated in The Lost River: the Sarasvatī was indeed the great river axis of the eastern part of the civilization.
The largest cities — Rakhigarhi, Ganweriwala, Kalibangan, Banawali — were on her banks, not on those of the Indus. It is the Sarasvatī that was the “best of rivers” of the Rig Veda — and it is her drying up, around 1900 BCE, that triggered the slow migration of populations eastward and southward.
When the Sarasvatī disappeared, the cities on her banks — including Rakhigarhi — were progressively abandoned. Not destroyed. Progressively left, as water became insufficient to sustain dense urban populations.
This is a fundamental point: in The Civilization of the 7 Rivers, I note that the ruins of the great cities — Mohenjo-Daro, Rakhigarhi, Harappa — were evacuated around 1900 BCE. Not burned, not conquered. Evacuated. The population did not disappear. It migrated.
What Rakhigarhi does not have
As everywhere in the 7 Rivers civilization, what is absent at Rakhigarhi is as revealing as what is present.
No palace. No monumental temple. No statues of sovereigns. No lavish royal tombs. The burials found are simple — a few personal jewels, a few utilitarian objects. The equality in death we documented in other cities is confirmed at Rakhigarhi.
And no war weapons, no skeletons bearing traces of violence, no levels of destruction by fire. The structural peace of this civilization is confirmed even in its largest city.
What the size of Rakhigarhi changes
The discovery that Rakhigarhi is the largest city of the entire 7 Rivers civilization changes several things in our understanding of this civilization.
It shifts the geographical centre of gravity: the civilization was not only organized around the Indus and Mohenjo-Daro in present-day Pakistan. Its largest urban centre was on the Sarasvatī, in what is now the Indian state of Haryana. It was more eastern, more rooted in the Gangetic plain, than previously thought.
It confirms the importance of the Sarasvatī: a city of 350 to 450 hectares does not develop on the banks of a modest river. The Sarasvatī of Rakhigarhi’s time was a powerful river, capable of supporting an urban population of several tens of thousands of inhabitants.
And it says something about the decentralized nature of this civilization: in a centralized civilization with an empire and a capital, the “largest city” is necessarily the capital — the seat of power. Here, the largest city is one among many — Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, Dholavira, Ganweriwala are all great cities, organized similarly, without any one imposing its domination over the others.
This is the signature of a truly cooperative civilization — not one dominated by a single centre.
