Thatta

Coordinates: 24°44′46.02″N 67°55′27.61″E / 24.7461167°N 67.9243361°E / 24.7461167; 67.9243361

Thatta (Sindhi: ٺٽو‎; Urdu: ٹھٹھہ‎) is a city and capital of Thatta District. It will be capital of the announced Banbhore Division. It is a historic town of 220,000 inhabitants in the Sindh province of Pakistan, near Lake Keenjhar, the largest freshwater lake in the country.

Thatta's major monument, the necropolis at Makli Hill, is listed among the World Heritage Sites. The Shah Jahan Mosque, Thatta is mentioned separately on the tentative list since 1993. Located 100 km (62 mi) east of the provincial capital of Sindh, Karachi, it makes for a practical escape for people from the city seeking to visit the picturesque old town.

History

Thatta may be the site of ancient Patala (Πάταλα in Greek), the main port on the Indus in the time of Alexander the Great. The site of Patala has been subject to much debate. Ahmad Hasan Dani, director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Islamabad, concluded: “There has been a vain attempt to identify the city of Patala. If ‘Patala’ is not taken as a proper name but only refers to a city, it can be corrected to ‘Pattana’, that is, city or port city par excellence, a term applied in a later period to Thatta, which is ideally situated in the way the Greek historians describe”.Herbert Wilhelmy has pointed out that siltation had caused the Indus to change its course many times over the centuries and that in Alexander’s time it bifurcated at the site of Bahmanabad, 75 km to the northeast of Hyderabad, which John Watson McCrindle had considered to occupy the site of ancient Patala.