With modern technology, scientific explorers have been able to gain significant insights. Looking at one early civilization, the Indus Valley Civilization, offers insights about early urban life. It was one of the earliest urban civilizations in the world, roughly contemporaneous with the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. It was located in what is now Pakistan and northwest India, along the flood plain of the Indus River. Although the Harappans had a written language, the Indus Script remains undeciphered.
Most of what is known about their culture and civilization comes from the ruins of their two largest cities: Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Both cities cover less than 2. Mohenjo-daro had an estimated population of around 40,, and Harappa was probably similar in population size. The Harappan cities did not have palaces or temples, and there is no evidence they were ruled by hereditary monarchs like kings and queens.
Elected officials or other elites may have acted as rulers. The cities, located about kilometers miles from one another, were similar in layout. Each city was laid out in a grid-like pattern, with important buildings placed on a north-south axis. Each city had a citadel mound complex with public buildings, as well as a lower town for personal residences. The citadel mound complex at Mohenjo-daro was about twice as long as it was wide.
A wall and brick towers served as fortifications against floods and, possibly, invasion. The citadel complex included the Great Bath, as well as a granary—to store grain—housing, and assembly buildings.
The Great Bath, which was made watertight through sophisticated construction techniques, was apparently used for ritual bathing.
One significant feature of Harappan cities was their sophisticated water supply and waste removal systems. In Mohenjo-daro, approximately wells supplied water to both public and private facilities.
Most houses in the lower town had private bathrooms and many also had wells. The bathrooms were typically built against the outside wall of a house. Because of this architectural arrangement, baths and toilets could discharge waste into the municipal sewage network.
The network included sewers built underneath the streets. Sewers had removable covers, which allowed workers to clean them with ease. Cesspits enabled the disposal of waste that had to traverse long distances. Harappan houses, which were usually constructed from bricks, ranged in size from single-room structures to larger, multistory houses. In addition to personal residences, the lower town housed workshops for artisans, such as dyers and potters.
In some cases, workshops were part of residential areas, but in others they were located in separate working districts. Harappan bricks were sun-dried and burned. A standardized brick was used across several cities, suggesting some degree of centralized governance. Wheat, barley, and rice were staples of the Harappan diet.
The Harappans also grew and ate a variety of vegetables and fruits. Cattle, chickens, and other animals, including some wild animals, provided meat. Seafood was also consumed. So a spectre of history haunts our elite which insist to see our past shaped by our current faith alone. This can only be done by erasing from our textbooks and collective memory the indelible marks that point to what we inherited from our Dravidian, Hindu and Buddhist forebears. Denying history means denying our very existence which is an outcome of a long evolutionary process driven by dynamics of intermingling strands of diverse experiences.
And diversity is what defines society in any region of subcontinent. Whatever they do to have a sanitised image of themselves, they are destined to fail in their unnatural project.
Muslim extremists in Pakistan will never be able to cleanse themselves of their Dravidian and Hindu genes. Similarly, Hindu fanatics will never be successful in ejecting what the Dravidian, Buddhist and Muslim needles injected in their flesh and psyche.
The movement to achieve monolithic national unity in Pakistan, led by mainly by the Punjabi and Mohajir elites, on the one hand denies our glorious heritage and on the other refuses to come to terms with the contemporary diversity and plurality of different regions.
Mohajirs after having been uprooted from their ancestral land, find themselves threatened by a culturally alien majority with a dreadful prospect of losing their linguistic and cultural identity.
Hence they cling to what in their opinion is the uniting link between different peoples of Pakistan; the faith in the mould of an ideology. The Punjabi elite, the so-called representative of majority of the country, suffer from a different malaise; the lust of power.
In order to achieve dominant position in the power structure they have given up their language and cultural identity in the name of chimerical national unity.
And the means to evolve national unity is faith of course. This is the point where the interests of the Mohajir and Punjabi elites converge. The smaller nationalities of the country especially the Baloch and Sindhis have long sensed the dangers such a canard poses.
They have been successful in both political and cultural sense to protect their rights. They have a strong presence in the echelons of power and at the same time have proudly promoted their linguistic and cultural identity.
The ruins of these cities show that the civilization was technologically advanced with the knowledge of efficient municipal government and urban planning. The towns had a proper wastewater management system that was much better than those in many places in India and Pakistan today. The people of the towns had trade networks and had domesticated animals.
And yet, this advanced civilization disappeared by BC. Based on the excavation, people in Harappa had an evolved system of written communication. However, the system has still not been deciphered and the civilization is not fully understood. Several seals were found at both the sites with pictographic inscription which is thought to be a form of script or writing but despite using modern cryptographic analysis and the efforts of experts from all around the world the signs remain a mystery.
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