East of the Citadel, the Lower City is where the residents of Moenjodaro lived and worked. The excavated streets reveal a planned grid — broad main streets and narrower lanes — lined with fired-brick houses. Many walls still stand to head height. The most striking feature is the drainage system: covered brick drains beneath every street, connected to household drains from each building. This was a city with functioning sanitation in 2500 BC.
Walk the main excavated street and you begin to read the city. Here a doorway, there a well — over 700 public and private wells have been found at the site, more per capita than almost any ancient city. The scale of the place (the inhabited area covered at least 250 hectares) is hard to absorb, and only a fraction has been excavated. UNESCO stopped further digging in the 1980s when it became clear that exposure to the elements was damaging what had been uncovered.