27 Facts About Lothal

Lothal was one of the southernmost sites of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation, located in the Bhal region of the modern state of Gujarat.

Excavation work in Lothal commenced on 13 February 1955 and continued till 19 May 1960.

However, this interpretation has been challenged by other archaeologists, who argue Khufu's Red Sea harbour at Wadi al-Jarf is older, dating its construction to between 2580 to 2550 BC and that Lothal was a comparatively small town, and that the "dock" was primarily an irrigation tank.

Lothal was a vital and thriving trade centre in ancient times, with its trade of beads, gems and valuable ornaments reaching the far corners of West Asia and Africa.

Lothal is situated near the village of Saragwala in the Dholka Taluka of Ahmedabad district.

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Lothal site was nominated, in April 2014, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its application is pending on the tentative list of UNESCO.

Lothal stands 670 kilometers from Mohenjo-daro, which is in Sindh.

People in villages neighbouring to Lothal had known of the presence of an ancient town and human remains.

Speculation suggests that owing to the comparatively small dimensions of the main city, Lothal was not a large settlement at all, and its "dock" was perhaps an irrigation tank.

Lothal provides with the largest collection of antiquities in the archaeology of modern India.

Lothal is based upon a mound that was a salt marsh inundated by tide.

Lothal planners engaged themselves to protect the area from consistent floods.

Lothal was a major trade centre, importing en masse raw materials like copper, chert and semi-precious stones from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, and mass distributing to inner villages and towns.

One of the evidence of trade in Lothal is the discovery of typical Persian gulf seals, a circular button seal.

People of Lothal made significant and often unique contributions to human civilisation in the Indus era, in the fields of city planning, art, architecture, science, engineering, pottery, and religion.

Lothal contributes one of three measurement scales that are integrated and linear.

An ivory scale from Lothal has the smallest-known decimal divisions in Indus civilisation.

The Lothal craftsmen took care to ensure durability and accuracy of stone weights by blunting edges before polishing.

Lothal brick-makers used a logical approach in manufacture of bricks, designed with care in regards to thickness of structures.

People of Lothal worshipped a fire god who is speculated to be the horned deity depicted on seals.

Lothal copper is unusually pure, lacking the arsenic typically used by coppersmiths across the rest of the Indus valley.

Lothal was one of the most important centres of production for shell-working, owing to the abundance of chank shell of high quality found in the Gulf of Kutch and near the Kathiawar coast.

Lothal produced a large quantity of gold ornaments—the most attractive item being microbeads of gold in five strands in necklaces, unique for being less than 0.

The Lothal excavation yielded 213 seals, third in volume amongst all Indus sites.

Lothal offers two new types of pottery, a convex bowl with or without stud handle and a small jar with flaring rim, both of which were found in the micaceous Red Ware period and not in contemporary Indus cultures.

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On plan, Lothal stands 285 metres north-to-south and 228 metres east-to-west.

However, with rising prosperity, Lothal's people failed to upkeep their walls and dock facilities, possibly as a result of over-confidence in their systems.