Thatta
The Sammas, a Rajput-descended Sindhi clan, displaced the Soomras in the middle of the fourteenth century and ruled from Thatta near the Indus mouth. They resisted absorption by the Delhi Sultanate — Firuz Shah Tughlaq campaigned in Sindh twice — and by the Gujarat sultans, and maintained effective independence for most of their tenure.
The reign of Jam Nizamuddin II, from 1461 to 1508, is remembered as the classical period of Sindhi civilisation: a long peace, patronage of learning and building, and the flourishing of the Sindhi language.
Makli
The necropolis on the Makli hill above Thatta covers some ten square kilometres and holds an estimated half-million graves accumulated over four centuries. Its monumental tombs — Samma, Arghun, Tarkhan and Mughal — combine Gujarati and Rajasthani stone-carving traditions with Persian and Timurid forms and glazed tilework, and the whole is among the largest funerary sites in the world.
The tomb of Jam Nizamuddin, in carved yellow sandstone, is the finest of the Samma monuments.
The dynasty fell in 1524 to the Arghuns, a Turkic-Mongol family pushed out of Kandahar by Babur, and Sindh subsequently passed to the Mughals.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Dehejia, Vidya. Early Buddhist Rock Temples. Cornell University Press, 1972
- Fritz, John M. Hampi Vijayanagara. Jaico, 2003
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.