Makli Necropolis

Across a low, dry plateau on the edge of the Indus delta, hundreds of thousands of tombs spread over some 10 square kilometres: carved sandstone cenotaphs, brick mausoleums glazed in blue and turquoise, domed pavilions on slender columns, and stone enclosures carved so densely with rosettes, calligraphy and geometric bands that from a distance they look like temples. Makli, outside the old Sindhi capital of Thatta, is one of the largest burial grounds on earth, with an estimated half a million to a million graves built over about four centuries, and since 1981 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a record of Sindhi civilisation between the 14th and 18th centuries.

Tradition credits the start of the necropolis to the Sufi saint and scholar Sheikh Hamad Jamali, who founded a khanqah on the hill and was buried there; the 14th-century Samma ruler Jam Tamachi, his devotee, asked to lie near him, and royalty, saints and scholars followed. A local story says the name Makli means "little Mecca", after a pilgrim who declared the hill his Mecca, though historians have proposed other origins. The Samma tombs gather in the north of the site. The finest is that of Jam Nizamuddin II, completed in 1510: a square sandstone block 11.4 metres a side, never given its dome, wrapped in fourteen carved bands that mix Quranic verses with motifs drawn from Hindu and Gujarati temple building, and fronted by a carved jharoka balcony. Nearby, the tomb of his general Darya Khan, who died in 1521, resembles a small Rajasthani fort.

The southern part of the plateau belongs to the later Arghun, Tarkhan and Mughal periods, from which the most ambitious monuments date, mostly between about 1570 and 1640. The tomb of Jan Beg Tarkhan, who died in 1600, is an octagon of brick under a dome sheathed in blue and turquoise tiles. The two-storey stone mausoleum of Isa Khan Tarkhan II, who died in 1651, rises with balconies and cupolas; legend holds that he had the masons' hands cut off so they could never build its equal. Across the site the stonework blends Islamic, Hindu, Persian, Mughal and Gujarati sources, with lotus flowers carved under domes and, unusually for Muslim graves, reliefs of horsemen, weapons and animals.

Getting there

The necropolis lies on the Makli plateau about 3 km from the centre of Thatta in Sindh, roughly 98 km east of Karachi along the N-5 National Highway. The nearest airport is Jinnah International Airport (KHI) in Karachi, about 76 km away.