Thatta

Thatta lies on the Indus delta, where river traffic from Sindh met the sea routes of the Arabian Sea. Its looms made cloth and silk and its workshops made leather goods, and nearby Makli Hill grew into a vast burial ground of carved stone and glazed tile for rulers, saints and officials.

In 1351 the Samma dynasty seized the city and made it their capital. That year Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq of Delhi died on campaign against Thatta, and his successor Firuz Shah failed to subdue it in 1361 and 1365. Makli's necropolis rose to prominence under the Sammas, and the tomb of Jam Nizamuddin II, who ruled around 1500, is among its finest. When the Tarkhan ruler Isa asked the Portuguese for help in 1555, the 700 soldiers who arrived plundered the town and its treasury. The Mughals took over in 1592, and Thatta became the capital of a Mughal province. After a storm nearly destroyed the town in 1637, Shah Jahan gave it a great mosque in 1647, completed in 1659. English and Dutch merchants opened factories in the town, buying cloth from some 2,000 looms. Then the silting of the Indus ended the port, and by the early nineteenth century its population had fallen from about 200,000 to about 20,000.