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His name was Charles Masson except it wasn't. He was James Lewis a private who had deserted the East "India" Company's Bengal Artillery and rebuilt himself as a wandering to stay ahead of the firing squad that waited for deserters.
Near the town of harappa in the punjab, Pakistan close to Sahiwal he came on a vast ruined city broken walls the remains of a brick fortress mounds rising straight out of flat farmland.
Masson like every adventurer of his generation had Alexander the Great on the brain.
So he saw Sangala the fortified city of the Kathaioi that Alexander stormed in 326 BCE
Masson wrote that every condition of Arrian's Sangala was here fulfilled the brick fortress a swampy lake at one corner the mound the defenders ringed with chariots.
In reality those mounds were a city that flourished from roughly 2600 to 1900 BC one of the earliest planned cities anywhere part of a civilization spread across the indus plain and centered in Pakistan It had baked brick houses drains standardized weights...
Masson hunting for the footprints of a Greek King had climbed onto something more than 2000 years older than the man he was chasing and logged it as a footnote to that man..
What happened next is..
Cunningham who was later the head of the Archaeological Survey visited in 1853 and noted the imposing brick walls.
When he came back much of the upper city was simply gone two railway engineers John and William Bruton building the line toward lahore in the 1850s needed hard rubble to bed their track and found a ready made quarry in the ancient bricks millennia old and still better in condition.
Locals had already been pulling bricks from the ruins for their own walls stretches of the railway between lahore and multan by some accounts around 150 km of track were laid on the ground up bones of one of humanity's first cities.
Even the station houses went up in salvaged harappan brick.
Cunningham did publish the first harappan seal in the 1870s and misread its script as Brahmi missing it again.
It took until 1921 nearly a century for the truth to land working under John Marshall
and then did the world understand it was looking at a previously unknown Bronze Age civilization not a Greek ruin or a medieval town etc.
! The map image is ai generated so it could be accurate just to give you an idea.
April 1926 captain (W.O) Bowen stationed at Landikotal in the Khyber Pass got interested in some Buddha heads turning up near the village of Sultan Khel a the land belonged to a zakha khel tribal chief named Abdul Jabbar Khan.
Bowen paid him 25 rupees for the right to dig threw another 15 rupees at some local men to do the actual labor.
when H Hargreaves who was the regional head of the Archaeological Survey came to inspect the trenches were already stripped looted by his own man his report is blunt about what these operations actually were no record kept no list of finds made antiquities are broken for convenience of transport the whole thing reduced to a mere scramble for portable antiquities.
I have linked the 1926 field report in the images.
the details in that report are the kind of thing you don't forget esaily a local man named Rauf Shah was selling stucco heads to tourists passing through the Khyber a lady in Peshawar bought one in the Pass around 27th of April 1926 for two rupees and one sculpture which from the description sounds like it was the best piece on the site simply vanished before Hargreaves arrived he asked Bowen what had happened to it and Bowen couldn't say.
So this was all illegal and everyone knew it. the British Raj had issued a notification in July 1924 number 1385 I have tagged it in the images which comes up over and over in the files specifically prohibiting gandharan sculptures from being moved in or out of the north west frontier province .
the local people's avarice had been excited it was entirely due to the demand from British officers stop the demand and the digging stops the officers were the market.
and Bowen sahab didn't stop there.
in a letter dated the 16th of June 1926 it was mentioned that Bowen had taken six gandharan heads with him to England and there's no evidence those six heads ever came back.
We are not talking about a single actor into something systemic as the political agent kept digging into the trade
he uncovered a regular agency for the sale of Buddhist remains in Peshawar cit for export down country there were dealers in Peshawar and Rawalpindi possibly lahore. two men from Rawalpindi were caught and fined 75 rupees each for trying to ship a box of images out.
in 1929 the authorities at Jamrud intercepted multiple consignments one seizure alone was three boxes containing 62 images and the political agent named the export firm as (R.C. Roop & Co) jewellers and old-coin dealers in Rawalpindi and he added a line that tells you exactly where this material was going he said or have quoted as i have been told that there is a market for these images in Italy where good prices are paid especially for heads that are not damaged.
heads that are not damaged that's why the sculptures kept getting decapitated a clean Buddha head was a sellable unit easier to crate than a full figur and it fetched more in Europe.
now jump forward 87 years.
on the 17th of February 2013 a consignment was seized eventually confiscated by Customs at Sukkur Pakistan as it moved from Islamabad toward Karachi headed out of the country when experts from the Department of Archaeology examined it
they fkin counted 1162 artifacts.
of those 1057 qualified as genuine antiquities under Pakistan's Antiquities Act of 1975 the other 105 were counterfeits fakes mixed in with the real thing.
mixing fakes with genuine pieces is a documented smuggling technique when the smugglers behind the 2013 shipment were challenged they declared the whole lot as decoration pieces commonly made and sold in Taxila cheap modern reproductions nothing to see here Blah blah...
blending real antiquities into a crate of obvious tourist junk muddies the provenance and gives a plausible cover story at the border those 105 fakes were camouflage deliberate cover for the real pieces.
and the contents of that 2013 crate read like a core sample of the entire region's heritage gandharan Buddhas and bodhisattvas in schist stucco bronze and Terracotta you name it dated first to fifth century ad but also painted pottery from Balochistan from the third to second millennium bc and Islamic glazed tiles from the elevated to 11 century four thousand years of human history boxed up together moving down the highway toward a port the irony...
here's what gets me about putting these two stories side by side the 1926 file and the 2013 seizure are separated by nearly a century by the end of empire by a new border cut across the same land the British officers are gone the British Raj notification became the Pakistani Antiquities Act and the route is almost exactly the same material pulled out of the ground in the northwest moved down country toward Rawalpindi or Karachi headed for European markets where an undamaged Buddha head still fetches the best price.
Captain Bowen sahab carried six heads in his luggage and the 2013 smugglers used a truck and 1162 pieces the scale changed. the mechanism didn't we need to put a stop on this.
the PM 1860 stucco survived all of it which is a at display in Peshawar ink on its shoulder one of the lucky ones that didn't make it onto the truck tell the whole story of these smuglling and neglect by authorities.
Share the work or if you find it interesting spread the awareness crosspost etc it.
two words look like cousins and misconceptions or myths around them which confuses many poeple online...
starting with geography because that's where the myth falls apart fastest way gandhara a region centered on the vale of peshawar (purushpura in sanskirt) with arms reaching up the swat valley and over to taxila in khyber pakhtunkhwa and northern punjab of Pakistan.
kandahar is in southern Afghanistan different rivers and ancient Kingdom different everything.
kandahar was never part of gandhara.
The names the popular claim is that kandahar is just gandhara with the edges knocked off and centered in Afghanistan a lie misconception spread by people unaware and our Indian neighbors so let's not go into the propaganda details and focus on the main reason the stronger caseand the one most linguists lean toward runs the other direction the word kandahar comes from Iskandar the Persian rendering of Alexander.
Alexander came through in 330 BCE and did what he did everywhere so iskandar softens to Scandar and scandar to qandahar and you're there
there is another contenders aswell like an old Persian root kand means town or call it fort that shows up in city names all over central Asia
And gandhara itself probably comes from Sanskrit of Gandhara means fragrance saw the difference?
Gandhara which is in Pakistan is where the first images of the Buddha in human form most likely got made calm faces with wavy Apollo hair draped in something that reads a lot like a Roman toga or robe before this, the Buddha showed up as a footprint an empty throne a wheel.
These gandharan workshops decided to give him a body and reached for the visual language they had.
So be more careful with this misconception that kandahar is gandhara you've got to know the story the land is in pakistan and the gandharan inheritance genuinely belongs to it but the people who carved those Buddhas were ancient pakistanis not Indian or Afghan those countries it was gandharans working a crossroads.
If both of them sound same but they're totally different from each other in every way there some online manjan seller who leballing it as how gandhara became kandahar trying appropriate its history it's contributons to art and culture its language and scripts like kharosthi and some even trying because it helped the Hinduism mythology so leballing it helps them with thier soft power agendas like making the ancient classical period of Indus as Indian or Gandharan Kingdoms as Indian as possible just like they do with indo Greek and appropriates the entire classical period and get to name it this your history and you should know and learn your history.
Stick with me this one is gonna be a long one but really interesting one.. about how a 3rd Century Sculpture from Pakistan Was Still Being Copied in Japan a Thousand Years Later. And how Ancient Pakistans Buddhist Art Became the Most Influential Visual Tradition on the Silk Road.
The Death of the Buddha (Parinirvana) Pakistan
In third or fourth century ad a sculptor working in grey schist carved a scene of the Buddha's death at a monastery somewhere in NW Frontier of Pakistan the composition is specific an oversized Buddha lies on his side perfectly calm while a crowd of mourners surrounds him in visible grief the emotional contrast does all the work you feel it immediately even if you know nothing about Buddhist doctrine at all thr Buddha is entering nirvana everyone else is losing him.
Death of the Historical Buddha (Nehan-zu) Japan
look at this painting made in Japan during the Kamakura period the 14th century over a thousand years later and thousands of miles east the style is completely different, silk instead of stone color instead of monochrome b the composition is the same the oversized Buddha on his side the emotionally charged mourners surrounding him the spatial organization of grief around transcendence and let me tell its wast a coincidence according to Kurt Behrendt associate curator of south asian art at the metropolitan museum the Japanese painting is without question based on the Gandharan prototype.
That a visual template created in a small regional center in the northwestern of Pakistan could still be structurally dictating how Japanese artists depicted the Buddha's death more than a millennium later tells you something about how seriously the Buddhist world took gandharan art.
This wasn't just regional sculpture gandhāra became in the eyes of Buddhist communities from central asia to the pacific the most authoritative source of how the Buddha should look.
Here's how that happened.
The region of Gandhāra centered on the Peshawar Basin stretching into the Swat Valley was active as a major Buddhist center from roughly the first through the early sixth centuries its sculptors developed a distinctive style that borrowed from Hellenistic and Roman visual traditions while serving South Asian religious content more importantly they were very good at making complex Buddhist ideas immediately readable.
Narrative scenes like the parinirvana worked because anyone could understand them that kind of clarity of the presentation is what gave Gandharan imagery its extraordinary reach.
One of the most dramatic transmission chains involves a hand gesture at the site of loriyan tangai in Gandhara photographed by Alexander caddy in the 1880s theres a schist Buddha flanked by two bodhisattvas sitting in a specific pose one leg pendant a hand held to the cheek in contemplation this pensive bodhisattva posture shows up on a Chinese gilt bronze from AD 524 a detail visible on the feet of a Northern Wei Buddha Maitreya now in the Met By the mid-seventh century the same posture had traveled to Korea where a gorgeous gilt bronze pensive bodhisattva also at the Met was produced during the Three Kingdoms period from Korea it moved to Japan where pensive bodhisattvas became widespread during the Asuka period around ad 592 to 645..
Here's what makes this chain even stranger.
In the original Gandharan sculptures these pensive figures often hold lotuses and they may represent the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara but by the time the pose reached Korea and Japan it had been reassigned these icons became associated with the future Buddha Maitreya the form survived and identity changed a pose invented in the Ancient Pakistan to depict one bodhisattva was being used at the other end of the continent to depict a completely different one.
But perhaps the most remarkable story involves the legend of the first ever portrait of the Buddha.
According to Buddhist tradition when sakyamuni ascended to heaven for three months to teach the dharma to his mother Maya the king of udyana (Swat Valley) about 20 kilometers north of Gandhara proper commissioned a sandalwood image carved in the Buddha's likeness this became the Swat Valley Buddha and Chinese pilgrims reported seeing copies of it at multiple sites across the subcontinent both Faxian and Xuanzang describe encountering versions of this image.
In AD 983 a Japanese monk named Chonen ( around 938 - 1016) set out from Todai which is Nara on a pilgrimage to China and he wanted to see the legendary Udayāna (Swat Valleys) Buddha with his own eyes in 985 he commissioned a copy in wood and in 987 he brought it back to Japan and installed it in the Seiryoji temple in Kyoto where and this is the part that gets me it is still displayed on the 8th of every month.
The Seiryoji Shaka Buddha, Kyoto, Japan
Copies continued to be made through the Kamakura period at the temples of Saidaiji and toshodai ji, eiko ji.
Think about that chain a legend about a sandalwood portrait carved in the Swat Valley during the Buddha's own lifetime reported by Chinese pilgrims centuries later copied by a Japanese monk in Song Dynasty China installed in a Kyoto temple where it's been on view for over a thousand years.
The sculptural tradition of a valley in northern Pakistan was still generating reverberations in medieval Japan because people believed that Gandhara specifically the Swat Valley was where the authentic image of the Buddha originated.
Gandhara bronze standing Buddha radiant halo, Pakistan
And late Gandharan bronzes cast in the sixth and seventh centuries traveled an even more direct physical route the Swat Valley provided access up the Indus to Gilgit then Ladakh then Western Tibet and eventually Lhasa..
According to Ulrich von documentation of the Potala Palace holdings several Gandharan bronzes remain in the Potala to this day under continuous veneration since they were made roughly fourteen hundred years ago these are the only Gandharan sculptures anywhere on earth that have been in unbroken religious use since their creation.
Famous Sikri Fasting Buddha, Pakistan
Then theres the human story in the 1890s a Thai prince named Prisdang Chumsai grandson of King Rama III was in serious trouble he d fallen out of favor with the royal family after proposing constitutional reforms he d traded a valuable stamp collection for three bone relics from the Piprahwa's stupa hoping to restore his standing by presenting them to King Rama b nstead he was accused of stealing the relics hr fled to Sri Lanka and was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1896.
But somewhere during his time in northern India prisdang appears to have visited the Lahore Museum where he saw the Sikri Fasting Buddha one of the most extraordinary Gandharan sculptures ever carved this piece dating to the second or third century shows Siddhartha during his period of extreme asceticism his body reduced to bones and veins rendered with almost clinical anatomical precision recently post was made on it that artefact is still in the Lahore for everyone to visit and see.
Prisdang obtained a plaster cast of the Sikri Fasting Buddha and brought it to Sri Lanka where he installed it in the Dipaduttama Monastery in Colombo it's still there around the same time fasting Buddha sculptures started appearing in Thai temples the earliest known example at wat Suthot in Bangkok dates to 1905 back and fourth but these Thai fasting Buddhas don't look exactly like the Gandharan original but they're loosely based on the same visual concept the emaciated body the seated meditation posture the visible ribs etc.
Twist in the story according to Robert Browns research the original Gandharan fasting Buddhas were probably linked to the 19 days of the enlightenment cycle not the 6 year fast that preceded it the 17th c Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang saw a fasting Buddha at Bodhgaya as part of a series of shrines marking those 19 days but when Theravadin Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Thailand rediscovered the image in the nineteenth century they reinterpreted it as depicting the six-year fast and that's the interpretation that stuck.
Today at the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya itself a 21 century fasting Buddha stands in a narrative series where it immediately precedes the breaking of the six year fast a modern reinterpretation of a Indus image now defines how that image is understood at Buddhism's holiest site.
A disgraced prince aplaster cast a reinterpretation that rewrote the meaning of an ancient sculpture and all of it traces back to what Gandhqran artists were carving in stone nearly two thousand years ago.
That's the thing about Gandhāran art that most people miss.
It wast just beautiful regional sculpture it was a visual system so effective so legible so trusted that Buddhist communities across an entire continent from Colombo to Lhasa to Kyoto kept coming back to it for over a thousand years.
They copied it reinterpreted it..
Gave it new meanings installed it in new temples and some of those copies are still on view today still under worship still doing exactly what the original sculptors from Gandhara and how our ancestors designed them to do.
Thanks as always for reading you can share the work and no credits are required.
​
It is assumed that sometime around 30 ce an earthquake hit Taxila hard enough to reshape the city buildings cracked walls buckled houses collapsed down to their foundations and when the Indio Parthian king gondophares rebuilt Sirkap afterward his engineers reinforced walls deepened foundations and laid out a sturdier version of the same greek grid the city had followed for two centuries.
But they also did something unusual they found a small round stupa that the quake had apparently ripped from its original position and tossed to a new spot and instead of clearing the rubble they built a protective wall around it and left it exactly where it landed.
Around 200 bce a greek prince from bactria sat across a negotiating table from the seleucid emperor antiochus (III) his name was demetrius he was there representing his father euthydemus I and antiochus was so impressed that he reportedly called him worthy of kingship and offered him one of his own daughters in marriage.
And within a couple of decades demetrius would prove antiochus right conquering a territory stretching from eastern iran deep into Indus ancient pakistan and building a kingdom that had no business existing that far from the Greek mainlands.
The coin that everyone remembers is the silver tetradrachm on the obverse demetrius stares out in profile draped and wearing a diademm but over everything sits the scalp of an elephant the trunk curves up over his forehead the ears flank his temples and the whole thing is rendered with enough anatomical care..
On the reverse side a young naked heracles crowning himself with a wreath club resting on his arm the greek legend reads BASILEOS DEMETRIOU means king demetrius.
that elephant scalp wasn't demetrius's invention though it first appears on gold and silver coins struck by ptolemy I in the name of alexander the Great around 311-305 bce.
Ptolemy who'd been most trusted generals and childhood companions (After Alexander's death Ptolemy seized Egypt, declared himself pharaoh and established the Ptolemaic dynasty) who literally hijacked alexander's corpse on its way to burial in macedonia issued tetradrachms showing alexander wearing the elephant scalp as a deliberate reference to the eastern campaigns.
Battle of Hydaspes which took place in Jhelum, Punjab
where greek troops had faced war elephants at the Hydaspes in 326 bce the elephant scalp replaced heracles's lion skin.
so when demetrius puts that same headdress on his own coins a century and a half later he's claiming alexander's mantle. he's the new conqueror of the Indus.
The city of Sirkap at the site of ancient taxila in Punjab was built by demetrius after he pushed across the hindu kush around 180 bce.
it was laid out on a hippodamian grid plan the same rational street layout the greeks used everywhere with a defensive wall running six thousand meters around the perimeter roughly ten meters high.
Archaeologists under J marshall excavated the site starting in 1912 and found the coins of demetrius alongside stone palettes depicting greek mythological scenes some were purely hellenistic others showed early signs of blending with local artistic traditions things like Indus ankle bracelets appearing on figures of artemis.
The Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius (r.c. 200–180 BC), founder of Sirkap.
greeks and local populations were clearly living close enough long enough to start borrowing from each other.
demetrius debates is really tangled britannica entry lays that some scholars see one demetrius making vast conquests and being killed by the usurper eucratides around 167 BCE while others argue the indus campaigns belong to a younger possibly unrelated demetrius II.
Some say at least three kings named demetrius and uses mint marks and stylistic analysis to sort them out he believes demetrius I received the title king of indio Indus after his victories south of the hindu kush.
later pedigree coins struck by his successor agathocles gave demetrius the posthumous title aniketos the invincible a title that had previously been associated with alexander himself.
then there's the buddhist angle to the debates in the subcontinent text that a king demetrius appears under the name dharmamita friend of the dharma (Buddhism)..
that name probably reflects both a loose phonetic approximation and a genuine local perception of what the greek king stood for there are records of the shunga dynasty which overthrew the mauryans persecuting buddhists and some scholars have suggested the greek invasion was partly motivated by an alliance with the pro-buddhist establishments in the region of Gandhara, Pakistan.
whether demetrius himself was buddhist is almost certainly a no he was born in the greek milieu of bactria and struck coins with olympian gods.
but his conquests opened the door for what became gandharan buddhism the tradition that first depicted the buddha in human form using greek sculptural techniques.
that tetradrachm holds all of it at once a greek king wearing the trophy of a dead macedonian conqueror a city in punjab built on an athenian street plan the land it comes from the pothohar plateau ancient gandhara was doing what it has always done sitting at a crossroads and forcing every empire that passed through to become something it didn't plan on becoming..
I have changed my posting style so do let me know this one takes alot more time as it require more effort if you like it or we should go back to the old one thanks.
Somewhere around 2500 bce give or take a couple centuries and somebody or someone in Harappa sat down shaped a lump of clay into a near perfect cube shallow dots fired it, and used it to do something we still can't fully agree on yet gambling fortune telling? Well in this post we will be discussing that little terracotta cube was pulled out of rubble at Harappa in Punjab, Pakistan during excavations by the Harappa Archaeological Research Project between 1995 and 2001 and it's one of the most quietly radical objects from the entire Indus civilization.
what makes it weird right away is the dice at Mohenjo daro aren't marked the way modern dice are today opposite faces always add up to seven one across from six, two across from five. three across from four.
... But on many Indus dice one sits opposite two and three opposite four...five opposite six.
\[Harappa\](https://www.harappa.com/blog/ancient-indus-dice)
It's completely a different system the convention we treat as universal opposite faces summing to seven wasn't the default here
we might be looking at artefact that served different purposes in different contexts.
J Marshall who directed excavations at Mohenjo daro in the 1920 and 30s. was the first to really catalog these things and he noted they were all made of pottery. usually cubical ranging from about 1.2 inches to 1.5 inches per side. with shallow dot holes averaging a tenth of an inch in diameter the clay was light red and really well baked sometimes coated in a red wash also the edges showed almost no wear meaning they were probably thrown onto a soft surface maybe cloth or could it be dusty ground.
That detail matters it tells something about how the game was played and where not on stone floors or outdoors on packed earth somewhere softer. more intimate It could be be a room mat or private space.
J. Mark who's been excavating at Harappa since 86 and is probably the single most important living scholar on this civilization reads these artifacts through a dual lens he wrote that dice made from bone shell. or terracotta were probably used in games of chance similar to ones still played across Pakistan and Indus region but he also notes that other bone and ivory counters carved in ways that don't correspond to standard dice might or may have been used for predicting the future.
That's where the divination angle in the caption comes from and it's a possibility not just only speculation that gaming boards found at Indus sites don't have a standardized shape and that similar boards in the modern subcontinent are still used for both strategy games and fortune telling.
\[Article linked\](https://www.harappa.com/slide/gameboard)
The line between game and ritual in ancient societies is one that modern people draw much more sharply than ancient people probably did.
Another perspective is that Rigveda composed probably between 1500 and 1200 bce centuries after the Mature Harappan period ended contains an entire hymn about dice gambling.
Hymn 10.34 \[the line 2 and 3 here\](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The\\\_Hymns\\\_of\\\_the\\\_Rigveda/Book\\\_10/Hymn\\\_34)
describing a man destroyed by his addiction to the game the dice in that hymn are carved from the nut of the behara tree it could mean ancient pakistanis People were rolling dice and losing everything or trying to read the future in a throw across at least a millennium and a half probably longer. Whether the Vedic dice tradition descends from the Harappan one or represents a parallel development there no confirmation but to add more in the context.
What we can say is this someone in Harappa Punjab 4500 years ago cared enough about this little cube to make it well.
Well in the words of Marshall was it's exceedingly well made hadrecise edges uniform dots and that's a craft and it's intention whether the intention was entertainment commerce or communion with something larger the object itself is evidence of a society where randomness mattered worth formalizing.
The die sits in a strange place between the ordinary and the sacred and honestly that ambiguity is the most human thing about it.
For anyone interested read marshall's mohenjo daro and the Indus Civilization vol 3 also mcintosh new perspectives page 292 the source of this image for more Harrapa website check the dice catalog and field photography
At roughly 23.5° north latitude you get a specific package of environmental conditions which is strong seasonality predictable monsoons or wet dry cycles and this is the big one large river systems fed by mountain snowmelt or seasonal rains that flood and retreat on a schedule nile tigris euphrates Indus or yellow River these aren't random waterways they're natural irrigation engines they flood deposit silt and they pull back and they leave behind some of the richest agricultural lands on planet earth.
If you're a group of humans trying to figure out how to grow enough grain to feed a non farming population like priests soldiers potters and scribes that's your golden ticket literally..
What these early urban societies share isn't culture or genetics or some diffusionist spark it's a similar set of environmental problems that pushed toward similar solutions you gotta need to manage water and you need to store surplus grain and with this clearly you need some system to track who owes what to whom.
Suddenly you've got irrigation canals and granaries and proto writing and you've invented bureaucracy before you've invented the wheel the latitude band doesn't cause civilization it creates the conditions where a particular kind of intensified agriculture becomes possible and that agriculture is the engine that pulls everything else behind it.
But here's where it gets more interesting than just rivers plus sunshine equals cities thing is the the Indus case actually complicates the neat story Harappan civilization peaking around 2600 to 1900 bce across Sindh Punjab and balochistan in Pakistan plus parts of sits in this band sure but the Indus system worked differently from Egypt or Sumer in ways there's no obvious palace no monumental royal tomb no king list. The urban planning at Moen jo daro and harappa suggests heavy centralized control which means you don't get a standardized brick ratio across 500,000 square kilometers by accident but the kind of control looks nothing like pharaonic Egypt or the Akkadian empire.
The Harappan governance might have been more collective or corporate maybe ruled by merchant elites or councils rather than divine kings we don't know cuz can't read the script that's the honest answer for now.
These civilizations didn't copy each other Sumerians didn't teach the Harappans how to build cities though they traded with them. Mesopotamian texts reference Meluhha almost certainly the indus region of Pakistan as a source of carnelian timber, and exotic animals. The Shang dynasty didn't get the idea of writing from Egypt either these were parallel experiments in the same basic human project of organizing thousands of people into a functioning society the fact that the answers cluster in the same climate band tells us something real about the environmental preconditions for that experiment.
There's a version of this argument that slides into geographic determinism the (Jared Diamond track) where latitude explains everything and human agency disappears which is too clean it doesn't explain why civilization emerged in the indus valley around 2600 bce but not say along the Mekong at the same latitude and the same time it doesn't explain why complex societies collapsed in some of these zones lie in the case Harappans decline after 1900 bcelikely driven by shifting monsoon patterns work on paleochannel mapping suggests of while others persisted.
A post on another sub is claiming Rakhigarhi was the largest Harappan city, that IVC was really centered on this River Sarasvati rather than the Indus and that Dholavira's location in Gujarat somehow shifts the civilization's center of gravity and none of it holds up once you look at what they left out trying to reframe it.
>🄸 350 hectare number is an inflated count of scattered mounds and scholars who really matter disagree with it.
That figure comes from adding up 9 separate archaeological mounds some more than a kilometer from the main cluster.
Gregory Possehl jonathan Mark Raymond Allchin and Rita P... Four 4 of the most cited ivc scholars alive today all estimated Rakhigarhi's actual integrated urban settlement at 80 to 100 hectares!
Possehl specifically identified at least one mound which RGR-6 known locally as Arda as a separate settlement entirely.
>🄸 ASI Director Who Was arrested by CBI..
The inflated number was promoted by Vasant Shinde after discovering two additional mounds in 2014.
What doesn't come UP that Shinde inherited the dig from Amarendra Nath the ASI director who led excavations from 1997 to 2000 and who was convicted by a CBI court in 2015 for fabricating bills and misappropriating ASI funds during the Rakhigarhi excavation itself....
That conviction caused a decade long halt in work at the site take look at this timeline of Rakhigarh ([Outlook India — Rakhigarhi Timeline](https://www.outlookindia.com/national/rakhigarhi-excavations-a-timeline))
>🄸 They tried to Hide that Rakhigarh is 90% Destroyed! And only 5% has been dug of total (40 hectares)
Shinde's own team admitted to the Tribune that roughly 90% of the site's remains have been destroyed by agriculture and construction leaving only 40–50 hectares intact.
Only about 5% of the site has ever been excavated.
So you're claiming "largest city" status for a site where 90% is gone, 5% has been dug and the leading international scholars reject your measurements do some actual field work shit lame PR. ([Tribune India — 90% destroyed](https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/archaeologists-resume-excavation-at-rakhigarhi-472785))
>🄸 The cities that are actually measured excavated and documented sit in Pakistan
Mohenjo-daro in sindh covers 300 hectares of continuous urban ruins
Grid-planned streets - Great Bath standardized baked bricks - covered drainage.
A 2015 core drilling confirmed the site extends beyond even the excavated area.
New 2026 radiocarbon dates from a joint excavation led by Dr. Asma and Ali Lashari, Dr Jonathan now push its founding back to 2700–2600 bce centuries older than previously established link to the archeology magazine and article ([Archaeology Magazine — 2026 re-dating](https://archaeology.org/news/2026/04/06/new-dates-push-back-occupation-of-mohenjo-daro/) | [Dawn — Mohenjo-daro excavation](https://www.dawn.com/news/1985048))
Then there's Lakhan jo Daro near Sukkur in sindh a 300 hectare IVC city that almost never gets mentioned in these debates.
According to Kenoyer it was the second largest Indus Valley settlement it sits on the Indus in Pakistan and most people arguing about site sizes online have never heard of it and most of them are Indian arrogants check the link: ([Wikipedia — Lakhan-jo-daro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhan-Jo-Daro))
Harappa covers 150 hectares in punjab.
Ganweriwala covers 80 hectares in cholistan. Three of the top five largest IVC cities, arguably four with Lakhan-jo-daro are in Pakistan...
They're measured documented, and in Mohenjo-daro's case a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980 that's how big it is give it a thought.
>🄸 Every iconic artifact the world associates with IVC came from Pakistan
The Dancing Girl bronze lost-wax casting 2500 bce found at Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan Not India Ganges sarawasti bs then we have the mighty Priest-King steatite trefoil cloak the face of the civilization found at Mohenjo-daro The 420 Seal which you call pashupati was found at Mohenjo-daroThe
After Independence from British, Pakistan requested the return of the 12,000+ artifacts excavated from its territory.
India refused.
Eventually the objects were split sometimes absurdly necklaces had their beads divided into two piles.
>🄸 The Sarasvati label they framed in the post nothing more then a geological scrutiny...
Two peer-reviewed studies (Clift et al from 2012) in Geology and Giosan et al from 2012) in PNAS examined this using U-Pb zircon dating and sediment analysis.
Both concluded the Ghaggar Hakra was a monsoon-fed seasonal watercourse for at least 10,000 years with no connection to Himalayan glaciers.
There's no evidence of the wide incised valleys you d expect from a glacier fed Himalayan river anywhere along its course
Rig Vedas describes the Sarasvati as a mighty glacier fed river flowing from the mountains to the sea and the Ghaggar Hakra doesn't match that description during any period relevant to IVC.
Link to those articles to do your research ([Clift et al. 2012, *Geology*](https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/40/3/211/130795/) | [Giosan et al. 2012, *PNAS*](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1112743109))
>🄸 Rename IVC as Sarasvati River push you see online..
The push to rename IVC as Sarasvati River Civilisation came from the Haryana state government's Sarasvati Heritage Development Board political body chaired by the Chief Minister not from the archaeological community.
And the downstream course of the Ghaggar-Hakra the Hakra itself runs through cholistan in Pakistan where Dr Rafique documented 414 archaeological sites in his 1974–77 survey.
Even the river they're trying to rename runs through Pakistan.
Here's the renaming related link ([Deccan Herald — Renaming IVC](https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Frenaming-indus-valley-civilisation-correcting-1993614))
>🄸 Site counts don't mean what the post implies the data actually proves the opposite to what theyre doing...
Giosan's PNAS data shows what the raw count hides.
During the late Harappan decline eastern Ghaggar-Hakra sites jumped from 218 to 853 but total settled area barely changed going from 2,943 to 2,985 hectares. Average site size collapsed.
People weren't building cities there they were scattering into tiny rural camps as the monsoon weakened and the river dried up. Dispersal the not urbanization which you do be expecting link here. ([Giosan et al. 2012, PNAS](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1112743109) | [ScienceDaily — Climate and Harappan collapse](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120528154943.htm))
>🄸 The Dholavira detail they slipped in its not really interesting but let's give it some attention...
The post mentions Dholavira is in Gujarat and It doesn't mention that Dholavira covers just 47 hectares smaller than Rakhigarhi even by the conservative 80-hectare estimate.
It sits on an island in the Rann of Kutch about as peripheral as you can get and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021 a 41 years after Mohenjo-daro got the same status in 1980.
Dholavira matters but using it as evidence that IVC was centered in India while leaving out its actual size is cherry-picking and it was worth mentioning.
>🄸Where this civilization actually begins and where it built its greatest cities...?
The story starts at Mehrgarh in balochistan 7000 bce South Asia's oldest known farming settlement.
As Ahmad Hasan Dani made it too simple for you: Discoveries at Mehrgarh changed the entire concept of the Indus civilization.
There we have the whole sequence right from the beginning of settled village life.
From Mehrgarh to Harappa to Mohenjo this civilization was born in Pakistan Not republic of India it built its biggest cities in what's Pakistan and drew its name from a river that flows through Pakistan.
You can count dots on a map all day and thought it really gonna be helpful to spread the disinformation and if you want to know where this civilization built its cities fired and buried its dead and where it's heir are answer hasn't changed and the you steal our post all day long day we make tons of them it's doesn't effect us much and we aren't going anywhere and always remember Indus isn't on the table and we are not going to allow you dictate us we are the guardians of this heritage peace out.
