Page 33 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Cities 15

are not unknown. But the wild beasts rarely venture into the
cultivated areas. The boundary between the desert and the sown,
drawn before the dawn of history, is better respected by animals
than by man.

The sun that rose over the Nile and the Twin Rivers is high
in the sky over the valley of the Indus far to the east beyond
the mountainous plateaus of Persia. The Indus valley contains
the biggest river system of them all, broader than the Nile,
longer than the Euphrates and the Tigris. A complex of parallel
rivers and tributaries, the traditional Seven Rivers of the Punjab,
many of which in our day have dried up, occupy the thousand
miles of valley which drain the snows of Korakoram and the
Hindu Kush into the Indian Ocean. It is a lush valley, a place
of swamps and jungles, vastly different from the deserts through
which the Indus flows today. Very likely the monsoon rains at
this period extended farther north than in our day, and possibly
there was more rain and snow in the mountains that feed the
river. But the desert of today is largely man-made, the result of
intemperate agricultural exploitation, followed by destruction
and neglect. In 2000 b.c. the destruction had not yet taken place
(we shall see it happen), but the agricultural exploitation was
in full swing.
Like the valleys of the Nile and of Mesopotamia, the valley
of the Nine Rivers is occupied by an old-established farming
civilization. It covers a vastly greater area. Its small towns and
fortified settlements lie along eight hundred fifty miles of
coast, from the borders of Persia to the neighborhood of Bombay.
And inland they stretch for over eight hundred miles, along the
Indus river system and over the foothills that divide the head­
waters of the Indus from those of the Ganges. Each town and
village has its acreage of irrigated land, on which its livelihood
is based; and these towns and villages are legion. Most of the
inhabitants of the Indus valley five in these towns and in
scattered dwellings amid the fields. The large, semi-independent
cities of Mesopotamia have no parallel here. Instead, as in Egypt,
the government of the whole area is centralized, though here,
unlike Egypt, in two large cities. The lower Indus has its capital