Waterways

With the city at the banks of the Indus River , the fishermen tend to use riverboats to fish and travel across the waters. Riverboats are not accessible to general public but local fishermen, in attempts of making money for their daily ration, sail people aboard their fishing ferries at Al-manzar, a restaurant at the banks of the Indus.

History

The position of the Sindhu River in Vedic India .

Indus Valley archaeological sites.

Main articles: Indus Valley Civilization , History of Sindh , and History of Punjab

Paleolithic sites have been discovered in Pothohar , with the stone tools of the Soan Culture . In ancient Gandhara , evidence of cave dwellers dated 15,000 years ago has been discovered at Mardan .

The major cities of the Indus Valley Civilization , such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro , date back to around 3300 BC, and represent some of the largest human habitations of the ancient world. The Indus Valley Civilization extended from Balochistan to Gujarat , with an upward reach to the darcon(?) from east of Jhelum River to Rupar on the upper Sutlej . The coastal settlements extended from Sutkagan Dor at the Iranian border to Lothal in Gujarat. There is an Indus site on the Oxus river at Shortughai in northern Afghanistan (Kenoyer 1998:96), and the Indus site Alamgirpur at the Hindon River is located only 28 km from Delhi (S.P. Gupta 1995:183). To date, over 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Ghaggar-Hakra River and its tributaries. Among the settlements were the major urban centers of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro , as well as Lothal , Dholavira , Ganeriwala , and Rakhigarhi . Only 90-96 of the over-800 known Indus Valley sites have been discovered on the Indus and its tributaries. The Sutlej , now a tributary of the Indus, in Harappan times flowed into the Ghaggar-Hakra River , in the watershed of which were more Harappan sites than along the Indus (S.P. Gupta 1995: 183).

Most scholars believe that settlements of Gandhara grave culture of the early Indo-Aryans flourished in Gandhara from 1700 to 600 BC, when Mohenjo-daro and Harappa had already been abandoned.

The name Indus is a Latinization of Hindu , in turn the Iranian variant of Sindhu , the name of the Indus in the Rigveda . Sanskrit sindhu generically means "river, stream", probably from a root sidh "to keep off"; sindhu is attested 176 times in the Rigveda, 95 times in the plural, more often used in the generic meaning. Already in the Rigveda, notably in the later hymns, the meaning of the word is narrowed to refer to the Indus river in particular, for example in the list of rivers of the Nadistuti sukta . This resulted in the anomaly of a river with masculine gender: all other Rigvedic rivers are female, not just grammatically, being imagined as goddesses and compared to cows and mares yielding milk and butter.

The Indus has formed a natural boundary between the Asian Subcontinent hinterland and its frontier with Afghanistan and Iran . It has been crossed by the armies of Alexander the Great - Macedonian forces retreated along the southern course of the river at the end of the Indian campaign. The Indus plains have also been under the domination of the Persian empire and the Kushan empire . The Muslim armies of Muhammad bin Qasim , Mahmud of Ghazni and Babur also crossed the river to strike into the inner regions of Gujarat , Punjab and Rajputana .