Haryana’s Rakhigarhi village in the district of Hisar is considered as one of the oldest sites of archaeology of the great Civilisation of the Indus Valley. Recently, there has been an important and significant discovery of a Harappan Site in the village.
The discovery has been exercised by the ASI, that is the Archaeological Survey of India. The joint director general of the ASI, Sanjay K Manjul, was quoted in a recent tweet by ANI, the popular agency of news. It said that the archaeological site at Rakhigarhi has reportedly seven mounds. The ASI got pieces of evidence that is directly linked to the culture of the Harappan age.
Similar excavations like this have also been performed in the past and this is the third phase of the findings. The village stands as one of the oldest sites in the district of Hisar for archaeology of the Indus civilization.
The excavations also revealed the framework of a drainage system, lanes and multi-tiered houses along with another space that is supposed to be a unit for making jewellery at previous times. The existence of a well-planned city of Harappa is pointed distinctly by these discoveries. The three mounds out of the seven have got gold and copper jewelries, thousands of seals and pots made of clay, toys made from terracotta etc. Besides this, graveyards also have been discovered at the site.
The place Rakhigarhi is located at about 150 kilometres away from the capital of India. Nirmala Sitharaman, the Union Minister of Finance, during her speech for budget, mentioned it as one of the five famous sites of archaeology in the month of February in the year 2020. The other four sites include Adichanallur in the city of Tamil Nadu, Uttarpradesh’s Hastinapur, Dholavira in the city of Gujarat and Assam’s Sivasagar. The minister also announced that there will be museums on-site in the future in these archaeological places.
The additional ASI director general, Dr. Sanjay Manjul also commented that a lot of work had been done previously at Hastinapur, Rakhigarhi and Sonauli in the past twenty years. It is also presumed that the people of Hastinapur are in reality the successors of the inhabitants of Rakhigarhi.
G Kishan Reddy, the Union Minister of Culture, in reply to a question asked in the Rajya Sabha about a month back, said that the mounds numbered seven and six which were found in Rakhigarhi were included in the nineteen special sites. These were to be notified as places having national importance as identified by the ASI.
A remote village in Hisar, Rakhigarhi, was discovered in the year of 1998 by the archaeologists. The teams of ASI found out these cluster of seven different mounds after vigorously continuing an excavation for three years. The second round of excavations started in the year of 2013 and at that time it was said that the site could be the biggest site among all the sites of Harappa. In the year of 2021, the archaeologists’ interest was once again piqued as across 350 hectares, four more mounds were found out. Previously, the largest city of Harappa in the country was thought to be Mohenjodaro. It covers approximately 300 hectares.