The northwest coast of India, in the state of Gujarat, is home to two of the most famous underwater archaeology claims in the world. One is tied to a great epic, the Mahabharata, and the legendary city of the god Krishna. The other, in the Gulf of Khambhat, was announced in 2001 as a drowned settlement that might be 9,500 years old, older than any city known.

If either claim held up in full, it would matter enormously for questions this site explores: lost civilizations, catastrophism, and whether myths preserve real memories. Here is what has been found, what has been claimed, and how the evidence stands.

The Legend of Dwarka

In the Mahabharata, Krishna and his people, the Yadavas, flee their home city of Mathura and found a new capital on the western coast: Dvaraka, or Dwarka, a fortified city of great wealth and beauty. Krishna rules there for many years. After his death, the epic says, the sea rises and swallows the city.

Other Hindu texts, including the Harivamsha, describe the end differently: as a slower submergence, with days of warning in which the people could leave. The modern town of Dwarka, on the tip of the Kathiawar peninsula, is one of Hinduism’s holiest pilgrimage sites, and its great Dwarkadhish temple stands near the shore.

The search for the drowned city began in earnest with S.R. Rao, one of India’s most distinguished archaeologists and the excavator of the Harappan port of Lothal. After retiring from the Archaeological Survey of India, he helped establish the marine archaeology unit of the National Institute of Oceanography.

Between 1983 and 1990, Rao’s teams explored the seabed off Dwarka and the nearby island of Bet Dwarka. They reported stone walls, what Rao interpreted as bastions and gateways, large dressed blocks, and many stone anchors, some with three holes. On land, beneath the old temple, they found earlier building layers and pottery. Rao also reported a seal carved from conch shell, showing a bull, a unicorn, and a goat, in a style he linked to the Indus Valley tradition.

Rao concluded that he had found the remains of a fortified port city of the late Harappan period, around 1700 to 1500 BC, and that it was the historical basis of Krishna’s Dwarka. His 1999 book, The Lost City of Dvaraka, made the case in full.

The Second Look

Later work has painted a more cautious picture.

In 2004, a team from the same institute, A.S. Gaur, Sundaresh, and Sila Tripati, published a study of the offshore Dwarka structures in the journal Current Science. They found it “difficult to date these structures precisely,” but concluded from the binding material and building style that they “may be of the late medieval period.” They noted a block bearing a Gujarati inscription, and the absence of the pottery that a lived-in city would normally leave. They dated the stone anchors to between the historical period and the 15th century AD, and concluded that Dwarka had been an important port over many centuries, with its harbor repaired and reused.

In 2007, the Archaeological Survey of India carried out excavations near the temple and offshore. Reports described medieval structural remains, including stone blocks with post holes, along with coins, pottery, and bangle fragments.

Critics of Rao’s interpretation also pointed out that a single seal, which could have come from anywhere, cannot identify a city, and that his reading of an inscription on a pottery shard relied on his own decipherment of the Indus script, which most specialists do not accept.

Dwarka: What We Can Say

Dwarka has clearly been a coastal settlement and port for a very long time, and parts of its waterfront are now underwater. The Hindu tradition of a drowned city is attached to a real place where submerged structures exist.

But the strongest evidence currently points to structures and anchors of the historical and medieval periods, not to a city of 1500 BC, and certainly not to anything from the end of the Ice Age. By 1500 BC, global sea level was already close to its present height, so submergence at Dwarka is best explained by local processes: coastal erosion, sinking land, and storms. Those processes are real, and they show how easily coastal settlements disappear, but they are not evidence of a global catastrophe.

Then Which Dwarka Does the Epic Describe?

The medieval date raises an obvious question. The Mahabharata reached roughly its present form between about 400 BC and AD 400, drawing on much older oral traditions. Structures built in the medieval period, many centuries later, cannot be the city the epic describes. The legend and the remains can still both make sense, in one of three ways.

1. A sacred place, rebuilt again and again. Dwarka has been a pilgrimage center and a port for a very long time. Once a place is believed to be Krishna’s city, people keep building there: temples, harbors, and sea walls. The medieval structures may be later layers at a site whose sacred identity came first, rather than the original city itself.

2. Older remains nearby, just not these. The 2004 study dated the offshore structures it examined, not everything in the area. Rao found earlier building layers beneath the temple on land, and the 2004 authors themselves describe nearby Bet Dwarka as a site with protohistoric remains, which researchers place in the second millennium BC. An ancient settlement very likely existed on this coast. What remains unproven is that the submerged walls belong to it, or that it was a great city swallowed by the sea.

3. A legend, not a map. Epics blend memory, religion, and storytelling. The drowning of Dwarka may preserve a general memory of a coastline that lost land to the sea over many generations, or it may be mainly symbolic: in the epic, the city’s fall marks the end of an age. Some traditions even place the original Dwarka elsewhere on the Gujarat coast. Linking a legend to one particular set of ruins is always the weakest step in the argument.

The medieval date therefore does not disprove the legend, but it does undercut the claim that these particular ruins are Krishna’s city. The tradition may well remember something real about this coast. The physical remains of a drowned city from the epic’s era have not yet been found.

The Gulf of Khambhat

The second claim is far bolder.

In 2000 and 2001, India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology, conducting routine pollution surveys in the Gulf of Khambhat (also called the Gulf of Cambay), recorded sonar images of what it described as regular geometric structures on the seabed, about 20 kilometers offshore and 30 to 40 meters deep, spread over several kilometers of seabed. In May 2001, India’s science minister announced the discovery of an ancient settlement, describing dwellings, a granary, a bath, and drainage.

Later dredging brought up wood, pottery fragments, small stone blades and stones described as tools, burned material, bones, and a tooth. A piece of wood was radiocarbon dated by two laboratories to around 7500 to 7200 BC, roughly 9,500 years ago.

Here the depth matters. At 30 to 40 meters below today’s sea level, the site would have been dry land until the sea level rise at the end of the Ice Age drowned it, probably around 9,000 to 8,000 years ago. If a settlement really lies there, it would be exactly the kind of drowned Ice Age community discussed in Drowned Worlds, and one of the oldest large settlements known anywhere.

The Problems With Khambhat

Archaeologists raised serious objections from the start:

  • Nothing was excavated in place. Every object was dredged from the seabed, which mixes material from different depths and ages. A dredged object cannot be tied to the structures seen on sonar.
  • Old wood proves little. Drowned forests are common on submerged land surfaces. Paleoclimate researcher D.P. Agrawal pointed out that wood of that age is exactly what one would expect to find on land drowned by rising seas, settlement or not.
  • Artifacts or natural stones? Several researchers, including Harvard’s Michael Witzel and geologist Paul Heinrich, argued that many of the supposed tools are geofacts, stones shaped by nature rather than people.
  • The gulf is a difficult place. Strong tidal currents, shifting sediments, and earthquakes in the region can move objects and create regular looking patterns in sand and rock.
  • No divers, no excavation. In the years since, the structures have not been confirmed by divers, excavated, or published in full in peer-reviewed archaeological journals.

Our Verdict

Dwarka and Khambhat are often mentioned together, but they are very different cases.

Dwarka is real underwater archaeology at a real historic port, connected to a living religious tradition. It shows that coastal settlements drown and that myths can attach to real places. On current evidence, however, the submerged structures are historical to medieval in date, and Dwarka is not evidence of an Ice Age catastrophe or a lost civilization.

Khambhat is the more important claim and the weaker case. A settlement 30 to 40 meters down would genuinely be a drowned Ice Age community, and would strengthen both the Lost Civilizations and Catastrophism arguments. But two decades after the announcement, the evidence still consists of sonar images and dredged objects, without the excavation that would settle the question.

Our view: Khambhat deserves exactly what it has never received, a proper underwater excavation with divers and modern dating. Until then, it remains one of the most tantalizing open questions in the field, not a confirmed discovery.

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