Phase 2: The City That Evaporated
“They Didn’t Die. They Disappeared.” Streets that were built to last — yet emptied overnight. The Indus Valley — Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Dholavira, Lothal — appears in our records as a miracle of urban order that arrived too early and left too cleanly. Staggering grids, standardized bricks, covered drains, and public baths: the city planning shows a civic intelligence that reads like a modern municipal manual dropped into antiquity. Yet when archaeologists peeled back the layers of occupation, there were no battle lines, no mass graves stacked like evidence, no ash fields of war or famine. Houses were not smashed; they were abandoned. Storage facilities remained filled. Tools lay where hands last used them. It was not collapse as we expect collapse to be. It was absence that looked deliberate, surgical — a removal rather than a falling. URBAN PLANNING DECADES AHEAD Walk the lanes of Mohenjo-Daro and y...