# Lothal and the dock debate
**लोथल और गोदी पर बहस**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/lothal/
- Chapter: [Indus and Veda](https://indianepics.online/chapter/indus-vedic.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 2400 BCE – 1900 BCE (± 100 years)
- Where: Lothal, Ahmedabad district, Gujarat (22.521, 72.249)
- Tags: trade, science

## Summary

A small Harappan town near the Gulf of Khambhat, with a large brick basin its excavator called a dockyard and others read as a reservoir.

खंभात की खाड़ी के पास एक छोटा हड़प्पा नगर, जिसके बड़े ईंट के बेसिन को उत्खननकर्ता ने गोदी कहा और दूसरे विद्वान जलाशय मानते हैं।

## Account

S. R. Rao excavated Lothal from 1955 to 1960. Beside the town lay a brick-lined basin more than 200 m long with an inlet channel and a spillway, which he identified as a tidal dock reached from the Sabarmati and Bhogavo rivers. Around it were a warehouse platform, a workshop making carnelian beads, and a seal of the Persian Gulf type.

The dock is contested. In 1968 Lawrence Leshnik argued that the basin was a freshwater reservoir, and later studies have gone both ways. Either reading shows the Harappan reach into Gujarat and towards the sea; the range shown is Lothal's Harappan phase.

## Sources

- UNESCO Tentative List: Archaeological remains of a Harappa Port-Town, Lothal (2014) — https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5918/
- Rao, S. R., Lothal and the Indus Civilization (1973)
- Leshnik, L. S., 'The Harappan port at Lothal: another view', American Anthropologist 70 (1968)

## Image

Lothal Dockyard. Raveesh Vyas, CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ALothal_Dockyard.jpg

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