Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Now I hear nothing but the wind. There is a shout: I turn, and see the jeep driver. I have been away for an hour, if not two. He has grown worried, and climbed up to find me.

  We drive up to the next village, which is spread out gently along a slope on the further side of the river. From here, Afghanistan and the Oxus river are barely two days’ walk. The river has breached its banks and we have to leave the jeep and walk up under the walnut trees, along the village path to a meadow of blue wild flowers. From the path, through the trees, we can see the circle of large boulders, four foot high, standing shoulder to shoulder like people in a ring. The orchard belongs to a farmer, Akhil, whose aged father puts on his sunglasses, takes up his lyre and, in between songs, tells me the local legend of the circle’s construction. ‘People round here,’ he says, ‘might report that the circle was built by giants, but my family were rajas in this place a century back, and our fathers knew that the circle was made one, two thousand years ago by a Russi warrior.’ ‘Russian?’ I ask. He nods: ‘People have always come to these parts from outside. The Russi built it to mourn the death of his best friend. They are very sentimental people.’

  We walk inside the circle through the entrance at the eastern side. Some stones are square, some V-shaped, and this gives each one a personal, individual air. The lichen has grown slowly across those that point north, and stones on the southern side have carvings of ibex upon them. There used to be flat table stones on top, Akhil says, but they were easy to remove, and every time he went to Skardu one of his neighbours would steal them. A standing stone is missing too: it was taken during Akhil’s childhood to use as a grindstone. ‘There was another circle like this one just over there,’ Akhil says, pointing to a field of waving maize near the river. ‘But the owner got fed up with it and pulled it down last year.’ ‘People might pay money to see this circle,’ I say to Akhil, ‘but only if you protect it.’ I try to describe Stonehenge. He looks at me, unconvinced.

  That evening, back in Yasin, I explore the village with the help of Sayed Junaid, a burly young member of the border militia, who drives me up and down the stony paths on a borrowed motorcycle. In another orchard near the river we find the remains of a stone circle which the owner has dismantled and chopped up, in order to build an extension on his house. He has also dug out the centre of the circle, where he found some clay pots, which his children have planted with basil, and four graves (thus confirming Biddulph’s speculation that the circles were ‘in all probability funeral mounds’). The bodies, encased in green schist coffins, were in varying states of putrefaction. One was quite ‘taza’ (fresh: perhaps an ancient grave reused in historic times). The other three were just a pile of bones, and they turned to dust as soon as the graves were opened. He scooped up the bone dust and scattered it on his fields.

  The Magistrate, for whatever reason, warns me not to listen to Sayed Junaid, who says that there is one of these pattar ka chowks on his own land at the southern end of the valley near Goopis. ‘These men know nothing,’ he says. So I arrange to meet Sayed Junaid at his house the following afternoon, and tell the Magistrate I am leaving for Gilgit. It is a bright, cold day when the jeep driver drops me outside a green door in a wall just short of Goopis.

  Sayed Junaid and his brother are waiting for me under a white mulberry tree on the bank of the river. The river is too wide and fast to cross by boat at this time of year, so the family have strung up a cable car, made from a crate, between the mulberry tree and a rock on the other side. I stand on the riverbank and watch Sayed Junaid clamber on to the crate, slide down to the middle of the river, and up towards the cliff, as his brother sits in the mulberry tree and tugs. Then it is my turn. I perch in the crate, clutch on to its sides, and watch the river rushing past far below me. In the middle, the crate comes to a halt, and I look up towards the rocky slice of land on the other side. Where the rivers meet, the tongue of land narrows, and it is here that the stone circle is supposed to stand.

  I tip myself out of the crate, and Sayed Junaid leads me over to the mound. ‘There it is,’ he says.

  I hear myself gasping out loud. The circle is resplendent, majestic, isolated–a solid ring of stones in this silent, empty place. On our left is a sheer brown wall of rock, and the blue slither of the river; to our right, a wider, greener river, and a dark mass of mountains in the distance. In the east, beyond the point where the rivers meet, snow-topped mountains shine fiercely in the afternoon light. I can almost hear, like a whisper, the footsteps of the people who created this circle. For the first time in my life I want to get down on my knees and worship at this altar to human endeavour, to the power of Nature.

  We walk slowly towards the circle, then around it. The standing stones are huge–almost as tall as me, and wider than my arm span. The circle’s isolation has saved it from thieves: without a bridge nobody could tow away these stones, and even the flat table-stones on top have been left intact. Somebody, though, has tried to dig out the graves in the middle–green schist slabs stick out from the earth like broken arms. Two drystone walls have been built leading from the circle’s eastern and western point towards each of the rivers. There are carvings on the circle stones themselves, though they appear to vary in age: ibexes, mostly, but also a warrior on horseback with a pennant in his hand.

  Since Biddulph’s day, nobody has done a thorough study of Yasin’s circles. Professor Dani guessed that they were built for chieftains, monumental versions of the stone circle-topped graves in Chitral. German archaeologists dispute this, but until permission to excavate has been granted by the Pakistan Government, everybody’s guess is valid. They could be Iron Age, Bronze Age, or even relics of that three-thousand-year-old Vedic-era grave culture. Or examples of how, till recently, age-old traditions and customs persisted to modern times in these remote mountain valleys.

  I stay that night in Ishkomen valley, parallel with Yasin, where more ‘Aryan-era’ graves were found in 1996. There is no hotel, but the woman I sit next to on the bus, the wife of a stonemason, offers to have me to stay. Gilgiti women have a charming kissing habit. They take each of your hands in each of theirs, kiss both, extend their hands to your lips to be kissed, then exchange cheek kisses. (The Kalash kiss like this too, though there the embrace is not confined to separate genders.) The physical contact is unusual in Pakistan. It creates a feeling of intimacy that lasts throughout the evening, as the women show me round their house–down to the stream where their fridge, a little wooden house, sits over the water–in and out of their orchard, and back into the room with posters of Saddam Hussein and the Aga Khan on the walls, where I will sleep. That night they tell me that there are many martyrs in this village from the 1999 Kargil War–Musharraf’s brief failed invasion of that part of Kashmir occupied by India, which triggered his dismissal as army chief, and in turn resulted in his coup.

  This is all that remains of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan after the statues were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. When the monk Xuanzang visited Bamiyan in the seventh century CE, en route to Gandhara (in what is now Pakistan), the Buddha statues glistened with gold. Xuanzang also described a 1,000-foot-long ‘sleeping Buddha’—which archaeologists believe may be buried somewhere at the feet of the standing Buddhas.

  A seventh-century CE statue of a Maitreya Buddha in Swat, northern Pakistan. This valley became a Buddhist holy land from around the third century BCE onwards, and is rich with monastic ruins and Buddhist carvings–many of which have been defaced in recent years. This statue, which had stood here untouched since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, was targeted by Muslim extremists as soon as they took over the valley in autumn 2007. In a Bamiyan-style attack, they dynamited the rock and drilled away the Buddha’s face and shoulders.

  These underground cells are from Takt-i-Bahi, the largest Buddhist monastery complex yet excavated in Pakistan, which stands on a hilltop near Mardan in NWFP.

  Muslims in northern Pakistan commonly consider themselves to be the descendants of Alexander t
he Great, who in medieval Islamic epic and romance was reborn as a pious Muslim hero. This picture was taken on the banks of the Indus in northern Pakistan; locals believe it to be the imprint of Alexander’s hand, made while he was waging war here in the fourth century BCE.

  My host in Kaladaka, the Black Mountains, a ‘tribal’ area which straddles the Indus in Northern Pakistan.

  Mansoor and Ferooza, Gujar shepherds, on Pirsar, the mountaintop in Pakistan encircled on three sides by the Indus. This place, known as ‘Aornos’ to the ancient Greeks, was where Alexander the Great finally defeated the hill tribes.

  Kalash girls just back from school in the village of Bumboret, Chitral, Pakistan. The Kalash follow an ancient religion that pre-dates Hinduism.

  A Kalash graveyard of wooden coffins in Bumboret village; it was apparently boxes like these that Alexander the Great’s army found on a hillside and burnt as firewood.

  A stone circle on a spit of land between two rivers, near the village of Yasin, Gilgit valley, northern Pakistan. Because of the disputed status of this area, archaeologists have not been granted permission to work here, but this structure is believed to be an ancient burial ground.

  A prehistoric carving of archers in the hills near Gakuch, Gilgit valley, northern Pakistan. They are probably hunting ibex, a wild mountain goat still revered (and hunted) here today.

  This prehistoric carving of a huge human outline was incised into a rock on the banks of the Indus near Chilas in Pakistan. Similar carvings are found on rocks upstream, on the banks of the Indus in Ladakh, northern India, suggesting a shared reverence for gigantic, god-like figures among the people who roamed the northern Indus in ancient times.

  Menhirs near Burzahom, on the banks of the Dal lake, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, placed here in Neolithic times or before. The people who lived here in the third millennium BCE traded cedarwood with merchants from cities farther south in the Indus valley, such as Harappa.

  A recently discovered upper Paleolithic rock carving above Bomoi village. The carving seems to show a hunt, and possibly a map of nearby lakes and rivers.

  A Dard woman from one of the clusters of villages on the banks of the Indus in Ladakh, northern India, very near the border with Pakistan. The Dards follow an independent religion, and their customs and folklore bear some resemblance to those of the Kalash in north-western Pakistan. Fraternal polyandry–when a woman marries two or more brothers–was widely practiced by the Dards and the Buddhists of Ladakh and Tibet until recently. It is said to keep population levels low and thus conserve resources.

  Drokpa (nomads) at their encampment two days’ walk from the source of the Indus, Tibet.

  Senge Khabab: the ‘Lion’s Mouth,’ a mossy spring traditionally held to be the source of the Indus in Tibet. Both my cameras broke in Tibet, so these photographs were taken on a cheap camera I bought in the Chinese shop in Darchen.

  Early the next morning, I climb up to the excavation site where circle graves were discovered. A formal report has never been written, and estimates of its connection to other graves vary. Grave-goods included cowrie-like shells–clear evidence of long-distance trade, and also of a possible connection with the Kalash. The same green schist has been used to make the graves here as was used in the stone circles at Goopis and Yasin.

  Every other field in this valley has yielded some ancient grave or other. In the village of Hatun, further downriver, where a large black rock is carved with Ashoka’s Brahmi, amateur excavations have yielded many lucrative objects. In a field where women are cutting up apricots and laying them out in the sun to dry, a farmer this year found a small metal horse which he reputedly sold to a Pashtun dealer for 52,000 rupees.

  I reach the main Gilgit road, hungry and exhausted, and am drinking my fifth cup of tea in a small shop, when an old shepherd comes in to see his son, who is the waiter. We get chatting, and it soon turns out that the shepherd knows every rock this side of Chilas. ‘There are many carvings in these hills,’ he says, ‘but the best one is high up on the mountain, a picture of men fighting.’ He pulls his arm back as if drawing a bow taut. ‘Like the war between Pakistan and India. Follow the stream to the top. Keep walking upwards. It’s on a big flat rock.’

  The mountainside is bare of settlements. We walk for hours–Mohsin, the shepherd’s son, and I–up along the stream, and into the barren brown face of the mountain. As we walk, Mohsin teaches me his mother tongue of Shina–the word for horse, aspa, is similar to the Sanskrit, asva, for Shina is an archaic mountain tongue. There is a lake at the top, he says, where the cowherders live in summer. South of us, eighty kilometres away as the crow flies, is the Indus. We are in Rigvedic territory again, I think.

  Panting for breath, I stop and see the river, a pale thread encrusted with green far below us; to the right are gorges still scattered with the last snows of winter. It is early afternoon now. ‘Where is it?’ I call down to Mohsin. ‘I can’t find it either,’ I hear him shout back. We climb up rock faces and over boulders; and are on the point of returning, despondent, when Mohsin gives a shout. I scramble down quickly to where he is standing, anticipating a crude line drawing: stick men on horseback, the usual ibex and dogs. But when I kneel down on the edge of the large, pale-grey rock, what I see etched there is far more lithe and vivid than that. Bodies falling through the sky, I think at first, or struggling upwards from the depths. Once again, I am left entranced and wordless by northern Pakistan’s ancient beauty.

  The carving is of six hunters. They are tall, muscular and naked, as strong and energetic as Matisse’s dancers. They have all been carved in the same pose: running after their prey, arms drawn back, legs slightly bent, bow poised to shoot. All are of different sizes, perhaps implying a sense of perspective, and each version is exact and evocative and complete. In contrast to the line drawings that are common to most prehistoric art along the Indus, the hunters have been etched in three-quarter profile, the shape of their bodies filled in by a technique known to petroglyph academics as ‘bruising’. Unlike the awkward carvings of warriors in caps and cloaks that appear in this region from the first millennium BCE, these hunters are naked: you can see the outline of their thighs and calves, their huge upper bodies, their small, alert heads. They could be men or women: only one of the seven figures has a penis.

  ‘Look,’ says Mohsin. In the top left-hand corner of the rock, there is a stark white mark: something has been carved, a name, Jalil, graffitied in Urdu. One of the only ways of guessing the age of a carving, aside from stylistic details, is the extent to which the lines scratched into the rock have recoloured over time. The original rock face is layered by a patina known to geologists as ‘desert varnish’, which builds up over thousands of years. The very oldest carvings, like this one of the hunters, are almost the same colour as the background rock, repolished to a brown lustre which is visible only in direct sunlight. The newest ones are the colour of Jalil’s name.

  I crouch on the rock and wonder. The old shepherd described the carving as a scene of war; and remembering the skeleton found in a grave at Dir with a copper arrowhead in his chest, I wonder if he is right. But in the top right corner of the carving are two animals–one a domesticated dog with a curly tail; the other an ibex. The herders here still hunt; only a few weeks ago, Mohsin and his friends went on an ibex hunt up to the lakes at the top of the mountain. Maybe, as in north-western China, this is the art of Mesolithic hunters who subsisted even into historic times. Possibly, it is a drawing by one of the Kalash, who were still using bows and arrows in the nineteenth century. Or is it, as the colour of the stone, the primitive weaponry and lack of clothes suggest, much older than that? ‘I fled like a buffalo before the bowstring of a hunter’ ‘Our words flow together like rivers…like gazelles fleeing before a hunter.’ A proto-Sanskrit-speaking herder, summering at the lake? A Rigvedic warrior, chanting praises to the dark and dangerous Sindhu? Or a non-Sanskrit-speaking hunter, fleeing to the highlands from invaders on horseback?

  Most of the roc
k carvings in northern Pakistan have been found at Chilas, on the banks of the Indus. For several hundred kilo metres, the Indus cuts its way deeply and inhospitably through the mountains–and so humans have long preferred to live in its more fertile side-valleys. But if the deep-brown gleaming rocks along this hot dry stretch of riverbank make a desolate habitat, they are excellent canvases. From Stone Age times up to the incursions of Islam, humans have come down to the river’s banks to worship it and other deities with carvings and rituals, or to leave indelible images of their culture and themselves. But of all the many thousands of carvings that I see, pecked or hammered with stone tools–pictures of giants and demons, hand and foot shapes, river gods or river scenes–nothing compares with the sophistication of the hunter engraving.