Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.122

c7.122

Amongst the favourable factors confronting him was, of course, the great river-system itself, flanked by wide expanses of fertile alluvium which was renewed by the annual flood. Its broad jungles and intermittent marshes were indeed infested with elephant, tiger, buffalo, rhinoceros and crocodile, familiar to us from their exquisite representations on the Indus seals. But the rivers themselves were full of fish that are still the livelihood of whole floating villages and were both netted and hooked by the Indus people,⁵⁴ in whose script they became one of the most recurrent symbols. Those same rivers were arterial routes to the sea and the Persian Gulf on the one hand and to the timber-producing Himālayas on the other. Along them, and along the trackways which would shortly flank and feed them, metals and gemstones foreign to their alluvium could be brought by long-range traffic. And by the same token intellectual interchange, a currency in ideas, now became feasible with unprecedented ease and scope. In contrast to the upland valley with its scanty soil, uncertain water-supply, and close horizon, the prospect was a spacious one indeed.