I counted more than fifty dogs full of fish entrails lying outstretched as if dead on the wet sand of the broad tidal flats. The sea had withdrawn again. It was good to know that Tigris was now afloat, independent of the tides in the bay on the other side. The drag on the ropes during the storm had been so great that the anchor shafts had bent, but the grip had held, probably because the stem had touched the bottom. After this first visit to the village we hurried back to make sure that the two men left alone on board had no problems. On the way across the isthmus we met to our surprise a yoimg heutenant of the Pakistani coast guard, who was camped with his men in four tents at the tip of the dragon's tail. He was pohte from the moment he started his interrogation, but overwhelmingly friendly when he learned that the name of our httle "dhow" was Tigris. He had a radio in his tent and had received a message from the Coast Guard Command in Karachi that **a large ship named Tigris" was cruising in the waters of Makran, and that he should not make any difficulties but provide all assistance needed I He was personally responsible to his superiors in Karachi for the whole Pakistani part of the Makran coast.
We had not known that the Makran coast was out of bounds to foreigners, and we never learned why, as we could not have imagined a friendher reception anywhere. The coast guard heutenant, the schoolmaster, the pohce, and an expert from Karachi who was organizing local fishery, all spoke English and became true friends. The Urdu-speaking population also did their best to show us hospi-tahty, inviting the men into their huts and treating them to gifts of fresh lobster. Some came with eggs and goat's milk.
The confusion concerning the landing of our 'Tjig ship" could not have been cleared during the discussion between the Ormara tent and Karachi headquarters that day. The heutenant went back to his field transmitter to report that Tigris was here. We went back to our own bay, where Norman sat in his cabin comer desperately trying to make contact with any part of the outside world. He at last heard a voice with a garbled message to the eflFect that a ship was on the way from Karachi to Dubai and would stop at Ormara to dehver eight hundred gallons of water to Tigris! Norman did his best to yell into the microphone that we had more water than we needed for another three months, and eight hundred gallons more would sink our ship. But nobody seemed to hear him.
When we told our story to Captain Hansen of Jason, he assured us that he had not brought us any water nor was he bound for Dubai; he had come with orders to salvage Tigris and bring us to Karachi. And he was ready to give us a free tow any time we wanted.
We got together to discuss what to do. After our experience with Slavsk we feared a tow more than any storm. What we had planned was to stay at anchor in west Ormara Bay until the weather had stabilized and then sail to Karachi. We wanted to travel overland from there to see the inland ruins of Mohenjo-Daro. The barometric pressure was still very low and we intended to wait for a wind that would neither wreck us on Ras Ormara nor send us away across the Indian Ocean before we had seen the prehistoric city in the Indus Valley. We could also take the camel road to Pasni and travel inland from the old fort of Sotka-Koh, but this would mean leaving Tigris unguarded for a long time. We would have more time to see the ruins if we accepted Captain Hansen's oflFer to tow us for one day along the coast to the harbor of Karachi, and we agreed. So as the musicians picked up their drums and followed the large crowd back to the village the two vessels in west Ormara Bay weighed anchor. The broad and powerful Jason took the lead and Tigris followed like a toy on a string, and before we rounded Ras Ormara we were already swallowed up by the darkness.
The colorful life of timeless Ormara village was still vivid in our memories a week later when we entered the prehistoric ghost city of Mohenjo-Daro, deep within the Indus Valley. We had left
Tigris tied to a buoy in the busy modem port of Karachi, where the Pakistani harbor authorities had given us a hearty welcome and the Navy Command had offered to guard our vessel in front of the Naval Academy while we went off on our inland excursion. Sani, a young guide from the National Museum, took us by minibus on good roads through various Pakistani towns to the ruins of Mo-henjo-Daro, 350 miles from Karachi.
Mohenjo-Daro means simply "Mound of the Dead," and no one knows what the real name of the city might have been during the thousand years it was fuU of life, from about 2500 to about 1500 B.C. In the beginning of the third century a.d. Buddhists arrived and built a tiny temple on top of the ruins. The site was still nothing but a huge mound of sand and debris in 1922, when archaeologists were attracted to the place and began digging. Until then the mere existence of the underlying civilization was unknown. Scholars had barely begun to suspect that the Indus Valley had housed a very early civilization. The work which was begun after the First World War by R. D. Banerji and other members of Sir John Marshall's expedition was followed up by many others and has so far uncovered 240 acres of an urban settlement some three miles in circumference. Nevertheless, large sections of what was once a metropoHs of the first order are still deeply buried and unexamined. The surrounding plains, once irrigated fields with dates, figs and crops of wheat, barley, cotton, peas, sesame and other garden products, are now barren stretches of sand, scattered with dusty tamarisk bushes. The broad Indus River, once flowing past the city wharves, has since withdrawn. Even the climate has become dry and less favorable. Like the deserted ruins of Ur and Babylon, Mohenjo-Daro now hes far from any water. The ruins of former homes and shops stretch for a mile in the direction of the cahn Indus, which was originally the life-preserving artery of the city and an unpredictable threat at the same time. Excavations have revealed that the city was rebuilt seven times following floods, before it was eventually abandoned for some unknown reason, for we do not know why the whole population suddenly disappeared in about the fifteenth century B.C. Many of the skeletons foimd among the ruins show signs of a violent death in combat. Sir Mortimer Wheeler and other authorities have suspected that although climatic, economic and pohtical deterioration might have weakened this firmly estabhshed civilization, its ultimate extinction was more likely to have been completed by
deliberate large-scale destruction by the Aryan invasion from the north. The fertile plains that supported the Indus Valley civilization for a thousand years were then conquered by Aryans, who arrived, not by sea, but by the high inland mountain passes. These invaders were the Sanskrit-speaking people who subsequently used the non-Sanskrit loan word Mleccha to denote non-Aryans, a term which Bibby tentatively identified with Meluhha and considered a possible name for the original Indus civiUzation.
Whether Mleccha to the Aryans or Meluhha to the Sumerians, the founders of the metropohs known to us as the "Mound of the Dead" have left vestiges that make a profound impression on any visitor. It is a monument of the age-old unity of mankind, a lesson not to underestimate the intellect and capacity of other people in places or in epochs remote from our own. Take away our hundreds of generations of accumulated inheritance, and then compare what is left of our abilities with those of the founders of the Indus civilization. Counting the age of humanity in millions of years, we begin to understand that the human brain was fully developed by 3000 B.C. The citizens of Mohenjo-Daro and their uncivilized contemporaries would have learned to drive a car, turn on a television set and knot a necktie as easily as any African or European today. In reasoning and inventiveness httle has been gained or lost in the buildup of the human species during the last five millennia. With this in mind a visitor to Mohenjo-Daro will be left with the impression that the creators of this city with all it contained had either in record time surpassed all other human generations in inventiveness, or that, like later Aryans, they were inmiigrants bringing with them centuries of cultural inheritance.
There is only one opinion among scholars: the city of Mohenjo-Daro was built according to preconceived plans by expert city architects within a rigidly organized society. The planning of the city was one adhered to, but never surpassed, by subsequent town planners in Central and West Asia for four thousand years. Eve
n at the beginning of our own century few of the lesser towns maintained an equally high cultural standard.
The first impression on approaching the ghost city is httle different from that of a Sumerian town: a central elevation with a temple surrounded below by a labyrinth of streets and ruins. Originally, however, this temple did not belong there; the Buddhists fifteen hundred years ago had unfortunately modified the summit of
the original structure and built their own shrine in the form of a circular mud wall with a niunber of monk's cells on the nearest terraces below. But the original foimdation of the smnmit sanctuary was square and stepped, and the general impression was that of a terraced pyramid hill converted to suit the monks.
As we walked between the brick walls, some of which have survived from tall, two-story buildings, we automatically lowered our voices as if in respect for a sanctuary. There were no large temples, no spectacular palaces, but evidence of a level hving standard, although the largest houses seemed to have been clustered in the central part, up along the terraces toward the elevated shrine now dominated by the Buddhist ruins. The original planners of the city had started with a clear concept of what they wanted, laying out parallel streets from either side of the oblong central elevation. These streets, running north-south and east-west, were straight and broad, some regular avenues up to thirty feet wide, dividing and subdividing the city into rectangular blocks, each 400 yards long and 200 or 300 yards wide. The walls were built of burned brick by skilled masons. Most of the houses have their doors and sparse window openings toward the narrow side lanes, accessible only to pedestrians, as if to avoid the noise and dust from the main streets where, judging by local art, wheeled carts pulled by pairs of oxen, and occasionally by elephants, would pass with building materials and merchandise. What impressed most was the evidence apparent throughout of a high sanitary concept. Although there were no impressive palaces or other structures that indicated the megalomania of a totahtarian emperor, the conmion citizens were provided with a complex system of sewers: the streets were hned with brick-built drains, and at intervals the large brick slabs covering these channels were provided with proper manholes by which the sewage workers were able to remove debris, some of which the excavating archaeologists found piled beside a manhole.
There were also freshwater conduits among the houses, and a big public bath or swimming pool, possibly built for cleansing rituals. It measures 38 feet by 22 feet, is 8 feet deep and it was waterproofed by a double wall of bricks set in asphalt, with another layer of asphalt one inch thick between the walls. Other than the well-designed pool, too deep to stand in when full, there was a pillared hall obviously intended for ceremonies, and another building with extra sohd walls and a cloistered court of unknown pur-
pose. But there has been a wealth of discoveries from within the city to give hfe to all these empty walls. The former residents had left utensils, images and ornaments of enduring materials ranging from basalt and pottery to bronze, gold and precious stones. All that was not perishable has been recovered by careful excavation. Among these discoveries are the inscribed and beautifully decorated seals of the kind that had also found their way to ancient trading partners in Mesopotamia and the gulf islands of Failaka and Bahrain. While we cannot read this script, the miniature illustrations of deities, anthropomorphic beasts and mythical scenes incised on the seals leave us with the impression of an art style as well as a theocracy and cosmology strikingly similar to those of the Su-merians, and to a lesser extent to those of ancient Egypt too. Numerous small pottery figurines and a few excellent bronze statuettes depict normal human beings and everyday life. Small ceramic models show women kneeling to grind flour for bread, while bronze figurines represent others adorned with jewehy and elegantly posed as for a dance. There are pottery models of men with pairs of oxen puUing two-wheeled carts, and bronze miniatures of beautiful chariots. Some of these figurines, hke the ceremonial ceramic bird running on two wheels, are so like those of the two other great civih-zations of the same epoch as to confound the experts.
One can easily imagine the hfe of the people behind the abandoned utensils and waste found among the ruins: the farmer's digging tools and a sample of his figs, grain or cultivated cotton; the fisherman's beautiful bronze fishhooks; the merchant's elegant bronze scales, with precise flint weights, and his variety of dainty seals; the potters masterpieces in ceramic, ranging from vases ornamented with colored motifs to effigy jars shaped hke birds, beasts and men; the painters mortars; the carpenter's cutting tools; the jeweler's necklaces, arm rings and other ornaments wrought in gold or made from precious stones; and not least the metalworker's astonishing products in bronze, from statuettes to hand mirrors, created with expertise by the advanced process of cire-perdue. Even the gambler is represented with dice indistinguishable from our own and game boards with proper pieces to be moved on the squares. In marked contrast, the soldier has left little evidence of his former presence within the city boundaries, indicating an un-warhke, mercantile and agricultural society, counting on the strength of its outer defense positions with forts at strategic places along the coast.
Skeletal remains from the Harappan cemetery have given no answer to the obscure origin of the Indus civihzation. F. A. Khan^ claims that four different physical types were buried together. The majority of the Harappan population, he says, consisted of a "Mediterranean" type of moderate height, with long head, narrow and prominent nose and long face. But there was also a second type, long-headed, too, but more powerfully built and of tall stature. The third type was short-headed and the fourth was typically Mongo-Han.
No matter how many ethnic groups had joined hands to form the Indus civihzation, how could the citizens of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa manage to outdistance aU other peoples of their time so abruptly and so completely? Perhaps this question wiU never be answered by local excavations in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Perhaps these cities were founded by aheady civilized settlers who came from Amri or Kot Diji, two other mounds packed with antique debris towering above the plains nearer the coast in the same Indus Valley. We visited both, but little was left except a compact mass of broken adobe, potsherds, chips, bones and bits of datable charcoal.*
When our guide, Sani, led us between the ancient walls of Mohenjo-Daro, the broad streets were empty and the roofless ruins aroimd us looked naked and cheerless, gaping toward the sky. But in our minds we filled the avenues and side lanes with visions fresh in our memory. If anything, life in Mohenjo-Daro had been still more colorful, still more attractive and advanced than in Ormara. It was easy to imagine the tumultuous movement of crowds in the main streets, while others sat lazily in the shaded side lanes dozing, chatting or playing games. One could almost hear the noises and scent the smeUs of hump-necked cattle, hay and spices that filled the air between sun-baked walls at the height of the day; tanned men and women hurrying by with beasts and burdens; rumbhng carts with palm leaves for thatching or with cotton for the weavers
* From the meager information to be gained from these sparse fragments science begins to hope that these mounds may provide important clues to the real origin of the Indus civilization. Extensive digging has brought to light shattered remains of an older culture of equally remarkable character, roughly datable from 3000 B.C., or sbghdy before, to about 2500 B.C., when Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa were founded. If this is a mere coincidence it is most remarkable. It will give the Indus civilization a formative date coinciding with the foundation of the Sumerian and Egyptian dynasties. It is not surprising that simpler minds are ready to accept the wildest of all theories, that civilization at that time dropped down on our planet from outer space.
and food for the market; fishermen with baskets on their heads; bakers with their warm bread; women with eggs, pastries and tropical fruits; crying babies, singing birds; the chnking from the smithy; bleating beasts and shouting children running through the side lanes while others sat indoors with priests teaching them the script we have never managed to decipher.
We had to multiply our impressions of Ormara a hundredfold to re-create the life of Mohenjo-Daro with its vaster dimensions, broader streets and higher standards. Ormara had never been designed. Each httle hut had been put up at the convenience of the fisherman who had built it for his own family. That village, like most others, had been created by natural growth over centuries and had led to no major invention. No sewage system. As we walked through Mohenjo-Daro, from the lower town up the stairways between the buildings clustered around the central tower, we knew, from what fifty years of excavation had revealed, that this was the empty shell of a community once ruled by a priest-ldng, regarded as a demigod, just as were the rulers of Mesopotamia and Egypt. These streets, carefully oriented to the sun, had seen his wise men walking about among the common crowd: high priests, scribes, astronomers, architects, inventors. The ehte of this society, together with the rulers of the equally large and no less important city of Harappa, five hundred miles farther up the river, had created a common empire that had left its ruins and monuments throughout the plains of the Indus Valley. Their territory rapidly grew to stretch a thousand miles from north to south along the river, and twice that distance along the ocean coast, from somewhere in the chffs of Makran to the jungles of southern India. Perhaps all this land was Meluhha to the Sumerians. To us it has become known as the Indus or Harappan civihzation, since the first and so far most significant sites reveahng its former existence were found in areas so named today.
The mystery of the Indus Valley civilization is not so much why it disappeared as how it began.f As in Egypt and Smner, this, the third of the large and contemporary early civilizations, lacks
t Excavations have shown a remarkably uniform and imchanging culture in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, from the time these simultaneous cities were founded until they died out a millennium later. Indeed, instead of progress there was a clear deterioration in construction details which some scholars have suspected as due to rapid reconstruction following devastating floods.
The Tigris Expedition Page 33
