Zoomed Vinay Special · First-person editorial
India's 4,000-Year-Old "Dockyard" at Lothal Was First Printed With a Question Mark. Here Is What the Bricks Actually Prove
In 1959 the Archaeological Survey of India's own yearly review called Lothal's giant brick basin "a dockyard (?)". I read the excavator's two-volume report, the government reviews that announced the find, the summary of the 1968 paper that suggested it could have been an irrigation tank, and the newer satellite studies. What the basin is, what each side can prove, and why "the world's first dockyard" claims more than the record holds.
The point of view
Let me take you to a salt-flat in Gujarat on 1 December 1960. The Director of Ports of Gujarat State is standing beside a brick basin about as long as two football pitches, and he has been asked one question: could ships have come in here, 4,000 years ago? The man who dug it, S.R. Rao, was sure. A year earlier, his own department had printed the word "dockyard" with a question mark after it. Eight years later an archaeologist writing in an American journal argued it could have been an irrigation tank. I opened the reports. So, dock or tank? And was it really the world's first?
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Source Library
S.R. Rao, Lothal: A Harappan Port Town (1955–62), vol. I, Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India No. 78 (New Delhi: ASI, 1979), pp. 12–14, 18–22, 39–43, 113–114, 123–134
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S.R. Rao, Lothal: A Harappan Port Town (1955–62), vol. II, MASI 78 (New Delhi: ASI, 1985), pp. 565, 577–579, 621–624 (V.K. Chari, report on the molluscan shells), 688–690
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A. Ghosh (ed.), Indian Archaeology 1957–58: A Review (Department of Archaeology, Government of India), p. 12
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A. Ghosh (ed.), Indian Archaeology 1958–59: A Review (Department of Archaeology, Government of India, 1959), p. 2 (ch. I, "General") and pp. 13–14
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John Marshall (ed.), Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, vol. I (London: Probsthain, 1931), pp. 24–25, 131
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Archaeological Survey of India / Government of India, Nomination Dossier: Dholavira: A Harappan City (UNESCO World Heritage Centre document 181028), pp. 112–113, 117, 120,…
whc.unesco.org
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UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Dholavira: a Harappan City" (property 1645), (read via Internet Archive snapshot of 22 Oct 2026)
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Pierre Tallet, "Ayn Sukhna and Wadi el-Jarf: Two newly discovered pharaonic harbours on the Suez Gulf", British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 18 (2012), pp.…
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N.K. Panikkar and T.M. Srinivasan, "The Concept of Tides in Ancient India", Indian Journal of History of Science 6.1 (1971), pp. 36–50 (used: pp. 36–37, 46–48)
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Lawrence S. Leshnik, "The Harappan 'Port' at Lothal: Another View" (with a note by K.H. Junghans), American Anthropologist 70.5 (1968), pp. 911–922,…
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A.S. Khadkikar, C. Rajshekhar and K.P.N. Kumaran, "Palaeogeography around the Harappan port of Lothal, Gujarat, western India", Antiquity 78 (2004), pp. 896–903 (abstract, p.…
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Ekta Gupta, V.N. Prabhakar and Vikrant Jain, "Sabarmati and its connection with the Harappan port Lothal and the Nal corridor", Journal of Archaeological Science 170 (2024),…
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Shereen Ratnagar, "Lothal in the History of the Indian Ocean", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2024), doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.581 (abstract read…
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