Man and great river

Man and great river

Throughout history men have experienced the need to explore, to sail the seas, to build great empires, to expand their civilizations – as the indus did nearly 5,000 years ago.

From the Indus, civilization spread eastward far
over the plains, and westward to trade with the
Sumerian cities of Ur and Akkad.

In 1856 two brothers, John and William Brunton, both railway engineers, were laying out the East Indian Railway from Karachi to Lahore. John was a very experienced engineer, having been in charge of some of the heaviest works on the London and Birmingham Railway, and hearing of a ruined city called Brahminabad near to the line of the Railway, he plundered it ruthlessly for ballast. His brother William did the same with a shapeless heap of huge dusty mounds near the village of Harappa – and today, writes Stuart Piggott, ‘the trains run over a hundred miles of line laid on a secure foundation of third – millennium brickbats’.

In fact William Brunton was plundering one of the two centres of what Sir Mortimer Wheelers calls the’vastest political experiment before the advent of the Roman Empire’. It was not until 1922 that systematic excavation was begun of what we  now call the Indus civilization, but since then more and more sites have been discovered until more than 60 are now known, covering half a million square miles of the Indus plain and the neighbouring regions of Pakistan and India.