Page 324 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
old inhabited towns was clearly Mohenjo-Daro, right down to the
characteristic brick-covered drains.
The art of adobe is as old as civilisation in the Indus valley, and in
Mesopotamia and Egypt too. Where not already introduced by
these culture founders, it was spread by the Arabs later, for it is a
simple and ingenious building process perfectly suitable to a rain­
less land where no other building material is found.
We stopped to see village people in the Indus Valley making their
adobe blocks. They made them in the same large size and in the
same wooden frames I had already seen used in Iraq and Mexico,
and when the mixture of selected soil, straw and water began to dry
they removed them from the frames and baked the blocks in the
sun. Independent invention of such a simple procedure would not
be at all surprising in desert countries like those along the North
African coast from Egypt to Morocco, but it is surprising to find
adobe blocks used by the founders of Mexican civilisation on the
jungle coast across the Atlantic. Adobe was used by the Olmecs, the
unidentified founders of American civilisation, when they built
their sun-oriented temple-pyramid in the coastal swamps at La
Venta, where timber and reeds abounded. And adobe blocks were
also used by the pre-Incas of Peru when they built their pyramids
along the coast in the form of sun-oriented ziggurats with temples
on top. The Cerro Colorado pyramid on the north coast of Peru
I covers 4,000 square yards of ground and some six million adobe
blocks had to be manufactured before the early architects could
erect this colossal structure. Despite a complete contrast in climate
and environment, the founders of pre-Columbian civilisation in the
rain forests of Mexico and deserts of Peru were used to building
houses in Old World style from adobe bricks.
When we saw donkeys and camels bringing Indus Valley cotton
to market, I could not help thinking again of early Mexico and Peru.
As far as science has been able to ascertain, cotton cultivation that
produced a useful species with spinnable lint was begun in the Indus
Valley plain and spread to Egypt. Yet, extensive fields of cultivated
cotton were found by the Spaniards when they reached Mexico and
Peru. Until today it has remained a puzzle to scientists that the
vertical-frame loom with two-warp beams, found by the Spaniards
in use among the Incas, was identical with that which had been used
in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Even the most peculiar,
ornamented spinning whirls of pottery, used for preparing
the yarn, are sometimes indistinguishable and scholars have
pointed out that the final fabrics were in certain cases made into
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