Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.6

c12.6

The natural conditions of the area within the bounds of the Harappā Culture in ancient times are of some interest. Today the Punjab is one of the greatest corn-growing areas of Asia, but Sind is a desert reclaimed only by the elaborate irrigation works which utilize the waters of the Indus. The main weight of settlement, as known by field-work up to the present, seems to have been in Sind, west of the Indus, but there are a dozen sites of settlements, some evidently of quite large towns, along the line of the now-dry Ghaggar River in the desert areas of Bahawalpur State. The northern ‘capital’, Harappā, is in the Punjab, about 100 miles south-west of Lahore; the southern city, Mohenjo-daro, is on the Indus in Sind, nearly 200 miles north of Karachi. The very existence of these large cities, and of the bigger towns as well, must presuppose a considerable agricultural population producing an adequate surplus beyond its immediate needs for sale to the towns, and the invariable use of burnt clay bricks throughout the Harappā Culture must imply far greater timber resources for firing the kilns than the present vegetation of tamarisk and scrub would afford. Under the present climatic conditions of Sind the Harappā state as we can infer it from the tangible remains could hardly have been achieved. Yet it was brought into being and survived for centuries in this very region, and we can look only to changing natural conditions for an explanation.