Page 323 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Indus Valley in Search way$ 5000
and found ourselves once again in a wor£?jnto a wealth of
^„pa ™;:iLbywht £*£ «• «t1 ttrf of
like Karachi, with everything money can buy in_ the t nm
press-button aids and computers, side-roads show the traveller ail
stages in the few long leaps from the Indus Valley ronze & ,
present. Clearly the Aryan invaders in their early ^Ys
strangle or eliminate the Indus civilisation before it had lett lasting
benefits throughout the territory it dominated. We saw tribes trom
the highlands of Baluchistan, the land we had first seen against the
sky when approaching Makran from the sea, who had come to
settle near the river. Their carts, drawn by pairs of oxen sharing a
common pole, conformed in the smallest details with the pottery
models from Mohenjo-Daro. Since these hill-people had never seen
the museum, their carts must have followed a tradition which the
Aryans had never disturbed. Some of the perishable wooden wheels
were so beautifully carved with relief ornamentation that they
could have been used for chandeliers in any modern home. Their
houses, as in Ormara, were reminiscent of those of the Iraqi Marsh
Arabs who, too, had simply maintained an ancient house-form
well known from illustrations on the Sumerian seals. Within these
homes we found women sitting on the ground grinding flour with
stone hand-mills, as shown in the pottery models of Mohenjo-Daro
and Ur. Ceramic bowls had given way to purchased metal ware;
otherwise Mohenjo-Daro was reflected in all they possessed. Their
animals were those first domesticated by the founders of the Indus
civilisation, and their cotton clothing was made from a plant first
cultivated, and on a loom first invented, by them. Even the grain
used for their bread was the species first grown by those pioneering
benefactors of whom they had hardly heard. They had been satis­
fied with this inheritance and had added nothing for four millennia
until now when they were about to absorb the twentieth-century
way of life.
A man was sitting by his grass-house hand-pressing dung from
his hoofed animals into small tidy cakes which he piled up to
sun-dry for fuel. I asked why he and so many other men in his tribe
painted their hair and their big bushy beards red. We were merely
told that this was their custom.
There was berdi and khassab along all creeks and dikes, and we
saw both plants harvested for the building of complete reed huts as
well as for the thatching of adobe homes. Most houses, and all
towns, were built of sun-baked adobe bricks. The prototype of all
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