India's Ports Ministry Describes Lothal's Brick Basin as the World's Oldest Known Dock, and a National Maritime Heritage Complex Is Being Built Beside the ASI Excavation of the Harappan Town

India’s Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways describes Lothal, near Saragwala village in Gujarat, in a 10 October 2024 backgrounder as home to “the world’s oldest known artificial dock.” Beside the mound sits a baked-brick basin about 215 metres long and 35 metres wide, with vertical walls and no steps down to the water. S. R. Rao dug the Harappan town for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) from 1955, and the finds include bead workshops, a building he called a warehouse and between 90 and 100 clay sealings. The Union Cabinet approved a National Maritime Heritage Complex beside the site on 9 October 2024, and it is now being built.

Scholars have read the basin two ways since the 1960s. In 1968 the journal American Anthropologist published a paper arguing that it was more likely an irrigation tank for a rural village. Two papers from 2024 use satellite data to reconstruct the old river channels around Lothal, and the Harappa.com review of one says its results strongly support the dock. Shereen Ratnagar, in a revised essay on the site’s seals and basin, concluded that “The question of Lothal’s place in the economy is still open.”

A mound of the dead and years of digging

The Ministry’s backgrounder says the name Lothal joins the Gujarati words “loth” and “thal” and means “the mound of the dead.” The Italian archaeologist Dennys Frenez and colleagues write that the mound was found in 1954, in a village-to-village survey of the Saurashtra peninsula. S. R. Rao then dug it for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

Accounts disagree on how long. Frenez and colleagues and Ratnagar place the digging between 1955 and 1962, and Lawrence Leshnik counts eight campaigns between 1954 and 1962. The Ministry’s backgrounder gives 13 February 1955 to 19 May 1960. About a third of the mound was excavated, and the ASI published Rao’s full report in two volumes, in 1979 and 1985.

What came out of the ground was a small Harappan town. Rao found an upper area raised on mud-brick platforms, a lower town of houses and workshops, brick buildings and an “excellent drainage system,” in Leshnik’s words, like the ones in our piece on Indus city plumbing. The Indian government’s UNESCO Tentative List entry for Lothal puts the settled area at about 7 hectares. Frenez and colleagues, summarising Rao, divide the occupation into Period A, from about 2450 to 1900 BC, and Period B, a Late Harappan phase, from about 1800 to 1600 BC.

What Rao saw in the basin

On the eastern edge of the town, Rao uncovered a trapezoid of baked brick set into the ground. Frenez and colleagues, working from Rao’s 1979 volume, give its sides as 212.4 and 209.3 metres long and 34.7 and 36.7 metres wide. The UNESCO entry says 217 by 26 metres, and Leshnik measured 710 feet, about 216 metres, so published figures vary.

Rao pointed to four features. There was an opening in the north wall, 12.2 metres wide in the 1979 report, later blocked and replaced by a 7 metre gap at the south end of the east wall. A narrow brick channel led off the south wall, which he read as a spill channel fitted with a sluice gate. Perforated stones lay in and around the basin, which he took for anchors. Between the basin and the town stood a platform he read as a wharf. The UNESCO entry adds marine shells and seals possibly from the Persian Gulf to the case.

The reasoning depends on the tide. Ratnagar puts the tidal range of the Gulf of Khambhat at 10 metres between high spring and ebb tides, and Frenez and colleagues say up to 12. In Rao’s reconstruction, as the UNESCO entry summarises it, boats sailed upstream from the Gulf on the high tide, and the inlet and outlet kept enough water in the basin for them to float. Leshnik records that Rao put the vessels at 18 to 20 metres long and 4 to 6 metres wide in the first stage of use, and only flat-bottomed craft in the second.

The sealings and the warehouse

Ratnagar points out that the case for a port rests on more than the basin. Inside the town wall, on a podium, Rao found a building he called a warehouse. Twelve mud-brick blocks survive, each more than 2 metres square and set in three rows, and Ratnagar estimates the original building held 64. It had burned. In the passages lay between 90 and 100 clay sealings, about 70 of them in a single passage. A sealing is a lump of clay pressed with a seal to close a package or a door, and a fire had hardened the clay.

The UNESCO entry reads them as bundles awaiting export. Rao called Lothal a clearing house. Frenez and Tosi, in a 2005 study that Ratnagar summarises, counted more than 90 sealings carrying impressions of 130 different seals. Rao published 114 seals and 91 sealings in all, and nearly all the sealings were stamped with seals from other Harappan sites, Ratnagar reports.

The overseas evidence is a handful of objects. Ratnagar lists one pure copper ingot and one late seal of Persian Gulf type, probably made in Bahrain, picked up on the surface without context. Mesopotamian texts name a land called Meluhha, which Ratnagar glosses as the Indian region, as a source of ship timber, copper, gold dust, lapis lazuli and carnelian. Lothal yielded a few pieces of teak charcoal, eleven etched carnelian beads (the most at any Harappan site, Ratnagar writes) and a good deal of ivory. Frenez and Tosi saw close parallels between a Lothal seal and one from Ras al Jinz in Oman, and Ratnagar calls those parallels “far-fetched.”

She passes on one reviewer’s point that traditional Indian ports sat inland near small river mouths and needed no dockyard. Even so, she writes, “the seals and sealings indicate that the site may have functioned as a port.”

The bead workshops

Nobody in the sources disputes that Lothal made beads. The Ministry lists a bead factory among the finds, and the UNESCO entry says the lower town held a bead-making workshop. Gregory Possehl wrote in 1981 that the town, which he dated to about 2400 to 1700 BC, ran a large bead operation. It worked agate, chalcedony, jasper and rock crystal, and some of the beads went as far as Mesopotamia.

Possehl wrote that the method can be reconstructed in full from the bead-working remains at Lothal and Chanhu-daro. Workers chipped a stone to a rough shape in two stages and ground it smooth. They then drilled it, starting by chipping a small cup into each end to hold a bow-driven stone drill steady. The bead-makers of Khambhat, the modern Cambay, still follow the same sequence, Possehl noted.

Leshnik urged caution on where the beads went. Carnelian beads reached Sumer, he wrote, and could have come from Lothal or just as easily from the Indus valley, where Chanhu-daro was also a bead-working centre.

What the radiocarbon dates say

The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay published radiocarbon dates for Lothal in 1965, on samples submitted by A. Ghosh. The laboratory’s header notes that Lothal “has yielded the most ancient dockyard of the world.” Three charcoal samples from one trench, all from Period A, came back at 3915 plus or minus 130 years before 1950 (Phase I, converted to 1965 BC), 3740 plus or minus 110 (Phase II, a disturbed level, 1790 BC) and 3405 plus or minus 125 (Phase II, waterlogged deposits, 1455 BC). These are plain laboratory ages with no calibration applied. The laboratory also warned that contamination by younger carbon was “not unlikely” in all three, because the charcoal was mixed with soil.

Later summaries rest on the excavators’ phasing as much as on those three dates. Frenez and colleagues give 2450 to 1900 BC for Period A, Possehl gives 2400 to 1700 BC, and the UNESCO entry says 2400 to 1600 BCE. Only the Phase I sample, at 1965 BC, falls inside the first range. A 2022 release from the Ministry calls the dockyard “over 5000 years old” while dating the city itself to 2400 BC.

The museum going up beside it

On 9 October 2024 the Union Cabinet approved the National Maritime Heritage Complex at Lothal. The Ministry’s release said Phase 1A, with six galleries including an Indian Navy and Coast Guard gallery, a replica Lothal township ringed by an open aquatic gallery and a jetty walkway, was more than 60 per cent built and due in 2025. The backgrounder put Phase 1A at Rs 1,238.05 crore, a lighthouse museum planned for Phase 1B at Rs 266.11 crore, and Gujarat’s land allotment at 400 acres. The Ministry’s 2023 release had put the whole project at around Rs 4,500 crore, with fourteen galleries running from Harappan times to the present. That span leaves room for later chapters such as Rajaraja Chola’s fleets and the teak warships of the Bombay Dockyard.

A joint review on 28 December 2024 reported Phase 1A at 65 per cent. At the second Governing Council meeting on 11 September 2026, Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal was told that Phase 1A stood at about 82 per cent. He set a revised completion target of 31 October 2026 and flagged Galleries 4 and 6, the Lothal Town and the aquatic theming as unfinished. The council noted 1,492 artefacts ready for installation, MoUs with 13 countries and an ASI excavation at Lothal that ANI reported as “70 percent” complete.

The dock-or-tank debate

Ratnagar names Umakant P. Shah as probably the first critic of the dock idea, in the Journal of the Oriental Institute Baroda for 1959 to 1960. Leshnik, of the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, made the fuller case in 1968, before Rao’s final report had appeared.

Leshnik began with the east wall’s gap. He judged the sill, which sat only about three feet below the rim of the neighbouring walls, too shallow for even a small fishing boat, and he thought the ragged ends of the gap looked like a breach made by brick robbers. The brick channel, in his reading, had stepped drops and a slope that ran toward the basin, so it carried water in and could not have drained it. The seven perforated stones, the largest about 16 inches across, struck him as barely heavy enough to hold a ship. He suggested they were counterweights on a shaduf, a lever with a bucket used to lift water. He also noted that the modern harbour at Ghogha, which Rao had offered as a parallel, is a quay and not an enclosed basin.

Leshnik questioned the town as well. He counted the objects of foreign type as one Persian Gulf seal, one seal impression, some bun-shaped copper ingots and a few sherds, and described a settlement too small and rural to be a trading port. He did not claim to have proved his own view. “Admittedly, this view also lacks the weight of decisive evidence,” he wrote. If it held up, he added, “in losing a dock, we gain the first real insight into the Harappan agricultural system.”

Leshnik also showed that Rao’s own account had moved. Early reports had ships entering through the east gap; by 1965 Rao described a 55 foot (about 17 metre) gap in the north wall. Ratnagar, reading the 1979 report, writes that the figures in different chapters do not match. She also set the basin against the reservoirs at Dholavira, which have steps and in the eastern reservoir go down 7 to 10 metres. Lothal’s basin has no steps and is no more than 3 metres deep, by her account. She adds that Ur, a Mesopotamian city of the same millennium, had two harbour basins enclosed inside its city wall, while Lothal’s basin lies open to the east of the settlement, unprotected.

Two 2024 papers on the old river channels

The newest work asks where the water was. Ekta Gupta, V. N. Prabhakar and Vikrant Jain published a study in the Journal of Archaeological Science (volume 170, October 2024) that combined old maps, satellite imagery and elevation models to trace palaeochannels, the buried beds of rivers that no longer flow. Harappa.com’s review of the paper quotes it as finding more than 140 segments totalling over 850 kilometres, including a channel running along Lothal. The review reports that the reconstruction places the Sabarmati just west of the town, and that the authors also argue the Gulf once reached about 15 kilometres further inland.

The review reads the paper as an answer to the objection that Lothal had no river or hinterland to supply a dock, and as support for a basin built for trade, not irrigation. Harappa.com notes that the paper sits behind a paywall, and we have read the review, not the full text.

A companion paper by Gupta and Prabhakar in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology (volume 19, pages 327 to 350, July 2024) names three waterways meeting at Lothal. One was a shallow inland route through the Nal corridor to the Little Rann of Kachchh, another was the Sabarmati toward the Aravalli hills, and the third was the sea route through the Gulf of Khambhat toward the Ratanpur-Rajpipla mines. Frenez and colleagues report that Rear Admiral S. C. Bindra, in a 2003 paper, weighed the interpretations and chose an inland tidal dock. They also describe an Indo-Italian Lothal Revisitation Project, run by the University of Bologna with the ASI, that planned geophysical surveys and core drilling to trace the old channels.