I am Breton — born in Saint-Brieuc, on the seashore. I grew up around sailors. And when I first saw the descriptions and reconstructions of Lothal’s “port,” something immediately struck me as wrong. A port in the middle of the land? With no view of the sea? I put the question to people who know about these things.
Their answers changed the way I read this site.
Lothal: the city at the crossroads
Lothal is one of the best-excavated sites of the 7 Rivers civilisation. It lies in the state of Gujarat, in the region that was probably the most commercially active in the entire civilisation — the one that exported by sea toward the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and Mesopotamia.
The city is built of fired bricks, with a drainage system, residential quarters, craft zones — everything found in the great cities of the civilisation. But what makes Lothal singular is this immense rectangular structure, still clearly visible today, which archaeologists long called a “port” or a “boat basin.”
A port in the middle of the land?
When I described this structure to Breton sailors — renowned for their knowledge of the sea, ports, and coastlines — their reaction was unanimous: it makes no sense. A sea port always faces the sea, or is directly accessible from it. You do not build one in the middle of the land. It would be absurd from a practical standpoint.
Their hypotheses? Either a fish trap — a structure that retains water to facilitate fishing — or, the hypothesis that struck them as most credible, a shipyard. The place where you build boats, not the place where they dock.
I have held this sailors’ intuition for years. And not long ago — after my translation was already complete — Indian archaeologists confirmed this reading: the Lothal structure is very probably a shipyard. Not a commercial port, not a mooring basin. A place of construction.
What this changes
The distinction is not trivial. A shipyard implies an organised maritime industry. Shipwrights, specialised tools, transported materials, plans — or at least technical traditions passed from master to apprentice. Sophisticated division of labour.
And the texts confirm that the 7 Rivers civilisation did export by sea. Sumerian cuneiform tablets mention Meluhha — the name Mesopotamians gave to this civilisation — with references to regular commercial exchanges. 7 Rivers-style steatite seals have been found in Bahrain and Mesopotamia. The maritime route existed. You need ships to travel it. And to build ships, you need a shipyard.
And the real port, then?
All rivers flow to the sea. The Sarasvatī and the Indus are no exception. The 7 Rivers civilisation had seaports — but they were not inland.
My hypothesis, shared by some archaeologists, is that the great port of the Sarasvatī lay at Bet Dwarka, in Gujarat — today under the sea. Divers have discovered what looks like a loading quay beneath the water at that location. Unfortunately, this underwater site has not yet been seriously studied. We will learn more in the years ahead, I hope.
In the meantime, Lothal remains the most visible testimony to the maritime capacity of this civilisation. Not as a port of call — but as a cradle of shipbuilding. Something Breton engineers would probably have recognised at a glance.
4,500 years ahead
What fascinates me about Lothal is less the technical achievement itself than the logic underlying it. This civilisation understood, 4,500 years ago, that a major commercial power needs maritime infrastructure. It organised the production of vessels, structured sea trade, and maintained commercial networks across thousands of kilometres.
Without an army. Without an empire. Without a pharaoh or absolute king. Just a collective organisation in the service of commerce and exchange.
Perhaps that is the real mystery of Loth The city that exported its surpluses by caravan and by sea → Dholavira: the City That Tamed the Rain
The city that exported its surpluses by caravan and by sea → Dholavira: the City That Tamed the Rain
Rakhigarhi, the largest site on the Sarasvatī → Rakhigarhi: the Largest Site, and the Most Overlooked
The contemporary text that mentions neither palaces nor war → What the Rig Veda Does Not Contain
