Pakistan hasn’t had a site inscribed since 1997, but they have been trying to submit the Port of Banbhore for a couple of years. It so far has resulted in three incomplete dossiers in 2020-2021-2023. Unfortunately, it is probably the least visually attractive site among Pakistan’s TWHS, but it will surely do good on paper.

The entrance fee is a rather hefty 1,500 rupees (5 USD), a sum that in Pakistan gets you a meal plus a side dish and a drink in a nice restaurant. The visit starts at the museum, which is fairly interesting, but our guided tour was cut short because the local guide took a phone call and was never seen after! The Lahore Museum also has good displays on Banbhore, which in medieval times was noted for its ceramics with sgraffito (photo bottom right).

The site itself needs a fair bit of walking and climbing until you reach the shore of a creek that eventually ends up at the Arabian Sea. Excavation works are still going on by combined Pakistani, Italian and French groups of archeologists. In 2020 they discovered a load of 40kg of remains of elephant tusks buried at the site, which indicates that ivory was a commodity at the time of Banbhore’s blossoming and that ivory carving was executed here on an industrial scale (the tusks came from India).  

Making your way across the site, which now overall is in better condition than when Solivagant visited in 2013, you'll encounter the remains of a bazaar, terracotta vats for dying fabrics, a palace, and the long and intact city walls including a gate at the creek side. The origins of the ancient port go back to the 1st century BCE, but it seems that its heydays were in the Middle Ages (about 700-1200) with trading links to Iraq, Persia and China.

In addition to being a historic trading port, the future nomination will probably brand Banbhore as the place where Islam entered South Asia. You can find here the ruins of the earliest mosque (photo top right), which has lost its walls and where only the floor and the pedestals of the columns remain. It however is disputed whether Banbhore was actually the first site where the Ummayads landed, as there is another good candidate some 12km away in a city that is now underwater. This controversy (when only nominating Banbhore) or lack of archeological data on the underwater site (when nominating both sites in a joint proposal) may be the cause of the incomplete dossiers and the fact that this hasn’t been a straightforward nomination.