By Haseeblegal on insta
Indus Valley Civilization renaming debate..
Pakistani response to calls to rebrand the IVC as the "Indian Civilization"
c.3300–1300 BCE
If a korean or chinese student showed up at a pakistani university today most of us would do a double take. But 2,500 years ago that exact flow ran in the opposite direction and it ran toward Indus region.
Taxila - Takshashila in Sanskrit, sat in what is now rawalpindi district, punjab, pakistan.
From roughly the 6th century BCE onward it was the ancient world's premier center of higher learning. Students came from the Gangetic plain, from persia, from central asia, and if you believe later Buddhist traditions, from as far as china. They didn't come because taxila was convenient. They came because there was nowhere else on that level.
>Taxila a great and flourishing city, the greatest indeed of all the cities which lay between the River Indus and the Hydaspes.
Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander (2nd century CE)
When Alexander showed up in 326 BCE the king of taxila handed over the city along with two hundred silver talents and three thousand cattle and thirty elephants.
taxila's curriculum covered ancient scriptures and law and medicine and astronomy and military science along with the eighteen silpas or arts.
Some of the wilder specializations included finding hidden treasure and breaking encrypted messages and also archery and hunting and elephant lore.
The medical track alone built around Ayurvedic medicine and surgery took up to seven years before you graduated It was a whole intellectual ecosystem with dozens of teachers running their own schools and pulling students purely on reputation.
Panini wrote the Ashtadhyayi and formalized Sanskrit grammar in 3,959 rules. Still studied in linguistics departments today earliest known formal grammar of any language.
Chanakya taught at taxila and mentored Chandragupta Maurya and wrote the Arthashastra. One of the first treatises on statecraft and economics ever written.
Jivaka studied medicine at taxila for seven years then became the personal physician of King Bimbisara and the Buddha.
Chandragupta Maurya studied under Chanakya at taxila before building the Mauryan Empire.
When people talk about ancient learning in south asia and only name nalanda they're starting the story halfway through and tend to forget as it is in Pakistan and try to not give any credit to Pakistani history.
It's just 35km northwest of Islamabad and authors like Ahmad Hasan Dani spent years documenting the site and published The Historic City of Taxila through UNESCO in 1986..
And UNESCO describes taxila as illustrating the different stages in the development of a city on the indus that was influenced by persia and greece and central asia and from the 5th century BCE to the 2nd century CE was an important Buddhist centre of learning
The oldest center of higher learning in the ancient world sits was in Indus Pakistan our neighbour's will go to any extent to lebal it republic of India and edit report and erase all of its traces from the internet and that needs to change.
So basically, it's a road map, the typical map people are used to see, but theres a twist, it shows Pakistan's oldest roads and journeys
I plan to feature the following:
Gt Road
The journey of Alexander the Great
The Journey of Timur
The Journey of Babur
The journey of Nadir Shah
Maybe something more modern with Gandhi / Jinnah who used to tour British India for political meetings?
So basically, I'm looking for reliable sources of journey mentioned in the list (except for the GT Road, I already have it)
Maps I find online are a bit shitty, low res or ambiguous. I figured I could ask you guys :)
Also, if you think I'm missing an important historical figure's journey or a road, pleast let me know
Pic 1: This illustration depicts a Mysorean soldier from the army of Tipu Sultan, shown carrying a military rocket that is being used like a flagstaff or standard pole.
Mysorean rockets were an Indian military weapon. The iron-cased rockets were successfully deployed for military use. They were the first successful iron-cased rockets, developed in the late 18th century in the Kingdom of Mysore (part of present-day India) under the rule of King Hyder Ali. The Mysorean army, under King Hyder Ali and his son King Tipu Sultan, used the rockets effectively against the British East India Company during the 1780s and 1790s. Their conflicts with the company exposed the British to this technology further, which was then used to advance European rocketry with the development of the Congreve rocket in 1805.
Further read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysorean\_rockets
These notes were issued by the State Bank of Pakistan when the country was still split across two wings West and East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh).
The denomination and bank name appear in both Urdu and Bengali the two major languages of the united Pakistan.
Bengali speakers made up roughly 55% of the country's population, and after the Language Movement of 1952, Bengali was recognized as a co-official language in 1956. These bilingual notes are a direct legacy of that struggle.
When East Pakistan became Bangladesh following the Liberation War of 1971, the new country immediately began issuing its own currency the Bangladeshi Taka through the newly established Bangladesh Bank.
Pakistani notes were withdrawn from circulation in the east, and Pakistan's State Bank phased out the bilingual design, retaining Urdu and English from that point onward.
The map shows what mesopotamian cuneiform tablets tell us about bronze age trade routes across the arabian sea.
Three names appear repeatedly in sumerian and akkadian texts...
dilmun ( bahrain), magan (oman), and Meluhha (Pakistan)
Meluhha is almost certainly the indus valley civilization. Based in Ancient Pakistan. The identification rests on multiple lines of evidence. the geographic direction described in the texts, the products attributed to meluhha, and the physical indus artifacts excavated across mesopotamia.
Sumerian records describe meluhhan merchants importing carnelian beads, lapis lazuli, ivory, ebony and other exotic hardwoods, peacocks, and possibly cotton.
Products that match precisely what indus archaeologists find at sites like mohenjo-daro, harappa and the coastal port of sutkagan-dor on the makran coast in balochistan.
Long carnelian beads from the indus were so prized in mesopotamia they ended up buried in the royal tombs of ur alongside the elite dead.
A famous cuneiform tablet from the reign of sargon of akkad (c. 2334 to 2279 BCE) boasts that ships from meluhha, magan, and dilmun docked at the quay of his capital.
There's even a tablet recording an akkadian-meluhhan translator.
A professional interpreter for indus traders. meaning the volume of trade was high enough to need a dedicated bilingual specialist.
Meluhhan settlers appear to have lived permanently in mesopotamian cities. A village near lagash was called meluhha. possibly a merchant colony. Indus-style weights, square stamp seals with the unique indus script, and etched carnelian beads have been found at ur, susa, kish, nippur, and beyond.
The indus people were running organized deep-water trade across the arabian sea while sumerian scribes were still refining cuneiform.
Their ships likely sailed from lothal next to Pakistani border (gujarat) coastal ports, hugging the coastline through magan then crossing to mesopotamia. Some routes may have reached as far as the maldives, east africa, and the bay of bengal. though those connections are still being studied.
Willys M38A1Jeeps belonging to the Pakistan Army's 12 Frontier Force; the reconnaissance and support battalion that took part in operations in this sector.
Each R&S Battalion had an authorised inventory of 48 jeeps fitted with 106mm recoiless rifles and HMGs.
Every dot on this map is a confirmed Indus Valley site.
The two largest cities Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are both in Pakistan. Mohenjo-daro sits in Sindh on the right bank of the Indus. Currently being excavated by Asma Ibrahim and Ali Lashari. Harappa sits in Punjab near Sahiwal where sahni first identified it back in 1921.
These aren't minor sites. They're the type sites for the entire civilization.
The whole civilization is named after the Indus River which runs about 2900 kilometers and almost all of that length is inside Pakistan. The first city ever excavated. The first city named. The largest by area. The second-largest. The densest concentration of urban centers. The biggest cluster of major craft production sites.
All of it sitting on Pakistani land.
The Wikipedia entry on the List of IVC Sites has a line that should honestly be quoted in every Pakistani history heritage discussion.
> More than 90% of the inscribed objects and seals discovered from the entire Indus Valley Civilization were found at ancient urban centers along the Indus river in Pakistan mainly in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.
Ninety percent.
Every major seal. Every Priest-King figurine. Every Dancing Girl bronze. Every IVC weight. Every script tablet. Over nine out of ten came out of Pakistani dirt.
ⓘ The size map (second image)
This one is the size-graded version of the same map each settlement is sized by area of urban occupation. The two biggest dots by a wide margin are Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.
The next tier gets more mixed.
Indian sites like Rakhigarhi and Dholavira are legitimate and important and large to some extent. They share the second tier with Pakistani sites like Ganweriwala in Cholistan and Chanhudaro in Sindh when you compare it Mohenjo-daro or harrapa that why there is tier system but the two anchor cities of the civilization. The cities everyone learns about. The cities that define what Harappa means are both in Pakistan.
The civilization didn't even have a capital in the modern sense. It had two anchor poles in Pakistan. by urban density. By city size. By inscribed-seal recovery. By the actual primary-source archaeological volume.
Pakistani territory dominates.
The 90% inscribed seals figure isn't some Pakistani nationalist talking point. It's in the Wikipedia article on IVC sites protect by world heritage from vandalism. It's in Kenoyer's published work aswell.
He excavated these sites following from John Marshall's original survey.
ⓘ The resources map (third image)
This one shows where the Indus Valley civilization got its materials from. Lapis lazuli from Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan traded south through Pakistan.
Tin from Central Asia routed through Pakistan.
Copper from Khetri.
Carnelian from Gujarat near Pakistan border.
Steatite the soapstone used in every IVC seal including the Priest-King came from Pakistani Balochistan.
Shells from the Makran coast which is also Pakistani.
Cotton from Mehrgarh in Pakistani Balochistan. Same site where the world's earliest farming and earliest dental drilling have been found.
The whole economic infrastructure was a Pakistan centered hub and spoke system.
Sea trade ran with Mesopotamia where Sargonid texts call them Meluhha which most scholars believe refers to the Indus civilization of Pakistan.
The economic geography is not really up for debate drop the mic. The center of mass was on Pakistani soil.
Well we wonder some times why we need preach them again and again cuz It matters because school textbooks shape what people believe about civilization origins for life.. Indian textbooks treat the IVC as the foundation of "Republic of India" civilization without any geographic qualification.
Pakistani Textbooks needs to treat it as the foundation of Pakistani civilization to protect the heritage for future generations.
The international scholarly literature increasingly uses "South Asian" framing and that one ends up favoring the Indian narrative most because it lets the geography quietly disappear into thin air.
All these framings have some legitimacy. But not everything is equally true the geographic facts on the ground which the map shows are not neutral.
The two flagship cities are in Pakistan. The Indus River that gives the civilization its name is in Pakistan, mehrgarh the pre-IVC ancestor site that established farming on the subcontinent around 7000 BCE is in Pakistan.
Over 90% of the inscribed seals that document this civilization came out of Pakistan.
And it makes me sick none of this is contested by serious archaeologists.
Get it straight Pakistan is an ancient nation, The modern state is from 1947 yes. But the geography is 9000 years old, Anchored by Mehrgarh from around 7000 BCE and then the Indus Valley Civilization from around 3300 BCE onward, both had their cultural and economic centers on Pakistani territory.
"India" comes from our river.. The Greeks called the river Indos the Persians called the region Hindu. Not modern day India you just took the name by the favour of Mountbatten.
All these names point to the Indus which is in Pakistan, the civilization is named after the river the country south and east of us inherited the name.
Look at the map again.
The dots cluster along the Indus. They cluster in Sindh and Punjab. They cluster in Pakistan.
Whatever this civilization was. And its identity is genuinely contested. Its physical heart was here.
The IVC is shared to some extent subcontinental heritage nobody is arguing it isn't. The argument is that a civilization whose anchor cities and inscribed seals and primary trade hubs and namesake river are all on Pakistani soil is geographically primarily Pakistani heritage.
The split isn't 50-50.
The international literature acknowledges this even when it tries to be diplomatic about it.
Your textbooks should too.