PAKISTAN'S HISTORY AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Indus Valley culture

which constituted the environment for Valley Civilization. Baluchistan area were still struggling against a difficult highland themselves at Kot Diji in the Sindh province, one of the most developed urban civilizations of the ancient world which flourished between the years 3300 and 1300 BC in the Indus Valley sites of Moenjodaro and Harappa. Indus Valley Civilization From the earliest times, the Indus River Valley region has been both a transmitter of cultures and a receptacle of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Indus Valley Civilization (known also as Harappan culture) spréad and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent in present-day Pakistan along the Indus River valley in Punjab and Sindh, and was the first major civilization in South Asia.

There are several theories about the origin of Indus valley Civilization. The Indus people might have come from Mesopotamia as they had links with them. It was the time of decline of Mesopotamian Civilization. In the settlements at Indo-Irania borders there was a concept of village society. So they might have come from northwestern borders (Iran). But all these are hypotheses and not established facts. The only fact is that the Indus people had trade relations with the people of both Mesopotamia and Iran.
This civilization, which had a writing system, urban centres, and a diversified social and economic system, was discovered in the 1920s at its two most important sites: Moenjodaro, in Sindh near Sukkur, and Harappa, in Punjab south of Lahore.5 The imposing ruins of the beautifully planned towns present clear evidence of the unity of a people having the same mode of life and using the same kind of tools.6 These people possessed a high standard of art and craftsmanship and a well-developed system of quasi pictographic writing, which despite continuing efforts still remains undecipherable.

A number of other lesser sites stretching from the Himalayan foothills in Indian Punjab to Gujarat east of the Indus River and to Balochistan to the west have also been discovered and studied. How closely these places were connected to Moenjodaro and Harappa is not clearly known, but evidence indicates that there was some link and that the people inhabiting these places were probably related.

Indus Valley Civilization was essentially a city culture sustained by surplus agricultural produce and extensive commerce, which included trade with sumer in southern Mesopotamia.(today's modern Iraq). Copper and bronze were in use, but not iron. Mohenjodaro and Harappa were built on identical plans of well-laid- out streets, elabourate drainage systems, public baths, differentiated residential areas, flat-roofed brick houses and fortified

administrative and religious centers enclosing meeting halls and granaries. Weights and measures were standardized.

                     By far the most exquisite but most intriguing artifacts unearthed to date are the small, square steatite seals engraved with human or animal motifs. Large numbers of the seals have been found at Mohenjodaro, many bearing pictographic inscriptions generally thought to be a kind of script. Despite the efforts of philologists from all parts of the world, however, and despite the use of computers, the script remains undeciphered, and it is unknown if

it is proto-Dravidian or proto-Sanskrit.

                     Nevertheless, extensive research on the Indus Valley sites, which has led to speculations on both the archaeological and the linguistic contributions of the pre-Aryan population to Hinduism's subsequent development, has offered new insights into the cultural heritage of the Dravidian population still dominant in southern cIndia. Artifacts with motifs relating to asceticism and fertility rites suggest that these concepts entered Hinduism from the earlier civilization.

But one thing is clear. The Indus Valley Civilization existed in the western part of the subcontinent, almost exclusively on the banks of the Indus River (present-day Pakistan). Therefore, the assertion that the current-day Pakistanis are inheritors of the Indus Valley Civilization is not an exaggeration. This makes Pakistan the real
inheritor of one of the oldest civilizations of the world.