Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

-This is the mighty Indus River,

which gave its name to the whole Indian subcontinent.

The Indus will take us back in time

into Ancient India,

5,000 years into the past,

where we will find some of its hidden treasures.

♪♪

An ancient civilisation grew up here

on the shore of the Indus.

We will reveal the lost Buddhist culture

of northern Pakistan...

and luxuriate in the extraordinary

architectural flowering of the Mughal Empire...

and the exuberant temples of South India.

All of which produced some extraordinary artworks.

My name is Sona Datta,

and as an art historian and museum curator,

I've looked after treasures like these for most of my life.

In this series, I'm exploring their stories

and the people who created them.

♪♪

♪♪

We start in Lahore,

home to over 5 million people,

and the vibrant, beating heart of modern Pakistan.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Today we think of Pakistan as an Islamic country,

and indeed it was religion that was the cause

of its violent severance from Greater India in 1947.

What was India's loss was the birth of a new nation --

the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

But this country's rich, complex, and diverse past

is often forgotten.

A time when women were celebrated,

the Buddha was worshipped,

and the Mughal Empire recreated paradise on Earth.

♪♪

♪♪

This is Lahore, one of Pakistan's busiest cities.

A couple of hours away, though,

are the remains of a city so old

it makes Lahore look as if it was built just yesterday.

[ Speaks indistinctly ]

A city that is not just one of the most ancient sites

in Pakistan, but in the world.

[ Train horn blows ]

♪♪

Pakistan was born less than 70 years ago.

It's a much younger country than India,

so it's perhaps ironic that it was the birthplace

of a far older civilisation.

It is the cradle of ancient India.

♪♪

♪♪

This is Harappa.

It was here, about 100 years ago,

that, under the British, railway workers

were creating a passageway

to dig this railway

and stumbled upon what appeared to be

a very ancient mound of terracotta bricks.

"How convenient," the workers must have thought,

and just used the bricks to help make the railway embankment.

But when archaeologists were eventually called in,

they made one of the great discoveries of the 20th century.

♪♪

What they found defied belief.

In this quiet and neglected corner of Pakistan,

an enormous city -- stretching for miles --

began to emerge from beneath the dusty plains.

♪♪

It's thought the city of Harappa was large enough

to house up to 80,000 people.

This city was at the height of its success in 2,200 BC.

It's not until the late 19th century, over 4,000 years later,

that European cities

reached anything like the scale and order.

♪♪

Even more extraordinary than its size

was the realisation of quite how old it was.

♪♪

The story of Ancient India

began here in the subcontinent,

and this wasn't the story that had somehow been imported

from Europe or the Middle East,

as early archaeologists had imagined.

This was a history that was India's own,

a new beginning, if you like, for India's ancient past.

♪♪

What is striking about this place

is how clearly this was laid out on a grid pattern

like a modern city.

These people really understood their right angles.

Every structure here is built out of a rectangular,

hand-made terracotta brick.

But what is extraordinary is what isn't here.

For a civilisation on this scale,

contemporary with the pyramids,

is that there isn't any grand monument to a single ruler,

there isn't any celebration of a military might

or a ruling theocracy.

This was clearly, in a contemporary sense,

a much more egalitarian society.

♪♪

And this is not the only city built by what came to be called

the Indus Valley Civilisation,

after the mighty river that threaded them together.

Many others were later found, built to a similar template.

And yet more remain to be excavated,

still buried under mounds in the desert.

This was an empire, albeit one without any rulers,

and it's an empire that is still giving up its secrets.

Gosh, so this was only excavated five or six days before?

-Yeah. -Still fresh with the mud.

-Yeah.

-Many of these finds celebrate fertility

and the female form, and similar artefacts

are found all over the Indus Valley.

These were people who liked their bling,

and some of the jewellery found here reveals

the use of sophisticated manufacturing techniques.

So this delicate bead...

This bead of carnelian was considered

a highly precious stone,

and the technology they had was remarkable,

using diamonds to drill very uniform holes

so they could string them together

to produce elaborate necklaces.

Unlike Pakistan today,

this seems to have been a culture that valued,

even worshipped, powerful women.

And nowhere can this be seen better than in one tiny figure,

a priceless treasure from the era known as The Dancing Girl,

with the stance of an impudent teenager.

Some have described this figure as the Mona Lisa

of ancient Indian art.

For a young woman at this very early date,

she stands incredibly confidently with her hand

on her hip, her head held high, decorated with bangles.

There is a confidence and a poise about her,

which is really surprising

to some of our traditional conceptions

and notions of women in South Asia.

♪♪

The Dancing Girlis unusual and almost unique.

At Harappa, what has been found far more commonly

are these mysterious seals carved in reverse,

presumably so they could act as a stamp,

leaving a clear image in wax, perhaps to seal a transaction.

One of the most amazing features of these tiny seals

that were found at Harappa

was that nearly 50% of them represented the unicorn,

the mythological animal

that we usually associate with mediaeval Europe,

but it first originated here

and clearly had great spiritual significance for these people.

It appears over and over again,

but then completely disappeared from this region

and travelled through Mesopotamia into Ancient Greece

and into the legends of Europe that we've all grown up with.

Craftsmanship and detail is astonishing.

You can see all the individual hooves,

even the hairs on the tail.

♪♪

♪♪

So why did this remarkable civilisation disappear

without trace for thousands of years?

It's hard to believe

in the heat and dust of the excavated city

that a great tributary of the Indus once flowed here,

which supplied the city with a wealth of water.

There was in fact an indoor bathroom for almost every home,

and a sophisticated drainage system.

But over the millennia, the river changed course,

leaving the city and its farmlands without water.

It's no wonder then

that this civilisation eventually collapsed.

The great River Indus dominates the history

of civilisation here.

And as the river shifted course, whole cities came and went.

♪♪

It was here that the next great empire

emerged in the Indus Valley,

with consequences which would last for 1,000 years.

♪♪

This is the place, in 326 BC,

where that Macedonian megalomaniac Alexander the Great

crossed the river as he attempted to conquer India.

He arrived with no language, no maps,

and in fact, Alexander was so lost

that he thought he had arrived at a distant source of the Nile,

after having seen crocodiles in the Indus.

He was simply driven by a testosterone-fuelled obsession

to outdo the legendary Darius of Persia

and find this fabled land to the East,

which was known only by rumour.

♪♪

One of his historians, Arrian, wrote,

"When Alexander arrived at the River Indus,

he found gifts of silver, gold, and elephants

from Taxilus the Indian.

And that prince sent word

he would surrender to him Taxila,

the largest city near the River Indus."

[ Horns honking ]

♪♪

♪♪

This is the ancient city of Taxila,

a thriving cosmopolitan centre,

the Paris or Mumbai of its time,

with a complete cacophony of languages,

customs, and influences.

Trusting no-one, Alexander marched into Taxila,

ready for battle, but the governor welcomed him

with a tribute of silver.

Bribery will get you everywhere,

and Alexander had made his first ally near the Indus.

Everything the Greeks encountered was new,

fresh, and exotic.

The markets held spices

and foodstuffs unrecognisable to them.

And here, in this market,

Alexander and his men

came across the naked holy men,

the Buddhist monks.

♪♪

Nearby, the Greeks and their new allies

rebuilt the ancient city of Taxila.

[ Speaks foreign language ]

But this was to be like no other city

that India had ever seen before.

♪♪

Today, that city is known as Sirkap.

It's actually vast, spread over a really big area.

There is a main boulevard, the high-street.

There were shops and houses,

and the city was planned very much

like a Hellenistic city would have been.

Many of the walls are still standing,

and the whole place is neatly ordered.

And this was a really thriving metropolis.

There were Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Jains, Hindus.

It was a real mix, a buzzing place.

Alexander's arrival here was just the start

of a long relationship between India and Greek culture,

which went on for several hundred years.

♪♪

And one result of that Greek invasion

was the effect it had on the local religion of Buddhism,

which now changed dramatically in its art and architecture.

♪♪

This is a really complete example

of an early Buddhist temple,

which has all the hallmarks of Greek influence.

You've got the stupa in the middle,

the steps leading up to it.

This motif here actually shows a double-headed eagle.

And you can see these beautifully carved

acanthus leaves at the top of each of these pilasters.

You can see all around in the detail, the fusion

of Hellenistic influence with the traditional,

local religion of Buddhism.

♪♪

When the Greeks arrived,

Buddhism had already been established for some centuries

since the death of the Buddha himself in around 480 BC.

But their arrival had a fundamental impact

on the way the Buddha was now portrayed.

Although we're used to seeing the Buddha

represented in human form,

in the very earliest manifestations,

he was actually represented by his absence.

He was represented in symbolic form,

like this magnificent footprint

decorated with symbols of Buddhism,

which celebrated aspects of the Buddha's life,

rather than showing him in human form.

And then something really interesting and dramatic

starts to happen in this region

after the invasion of Alexander the Great,

and that is the representation of the Buddha as a real,

living person in human form.

It's hard to exaggerate how important a moment this was

in the history of Buddhism.

For the first time, the Buddha was given features.

He had died too long before for anyone

to remember what he really looked like,

so the features he was given were idealised ones,

and the new ideal came from this innovative Indo-Greek culture

that took Buddhism from its home on the North Indian plain

and embedded it onto a completely new form,

one that we might find more recognisable today.

Here are youthful Buddhas with hair arranged in wavy curls

that resemble Greek sculptures of Apollo.

The monastic robe covering both shoulders is arranged

in heavy, naturalistic folds, reminiscent of a classical toga,

and compared to other more rotund Buddhas,

he has the toned body of a Greek athlete.

[ Horn honks ]

♪♪

This was not a one-way exchange in Gandhara.

The Greeks themselves took gold,

silver, and Sindh cotton back to Europe,

along what started to become a thriving trade route.

But more importantly, they also took with them

a myth and a name.

The River Indus was the whole subcontinent

for the European imagination, as India.

And the stories that went back with Alexander and his men

of a wild, fabulous place filled with mystics,

seers, and gold were to influence

the European view of India for thousands of years.

In some ways, you could say

we are still unpicking the reality from that myth.

For it was after the arrival of Alexander

and the long Indo-Greek culture that followed

that the idea of India was born.

♪♪

Alexander left behind him an Indo-Greek culture

which took on a life of its own.

It was a golden age for the growth of Buddhism.

A great Buddhist monastery was built here in Taxila,

at the crossroads of Asia.

♪♪

Students came here from Persia in the west,

India to the south,

and from the north along the silk route.

Perhaps most important of all

came inquisitive Chinese pilgrims,

many of whom took Buddhist scriptures

back with them to China.

♪♪

Representation of the Buddha continued to develop,

and here in the museum in Lahore

is one of the most significant --

the Fasting Buddha.

This really dramatic representation of the Buddha

shows him during the six years he undertook fasting

as part of his journey to reach nirvana.

And you can see it's actually

a complete masterpiece of Buddhist sculpture.

It's made out of single piece of schist,

and you can see how the full-bodied form

has completely withered away,

and he's shown with his ribs protruding,

his arteries, his veins, the robes are slipping off him.

And in particular, if you look at his face,

the eyes are completely sunken.

The cheeks are sallow,

but there is a certain serenity to his expression.

You know, this is not the expression of a dying man,

this is the expression of a man who's on a path,

looking for something.

And if you look very carefully into his eyes,

they're actually open,

they're actually looking at you as you stand before him.

And beneath, you can see the narrative sequence,

the story that tells that actually he realised

this wasn't the way to enlightenment,

and that he ended up begging for food to feed himself,

and continued on his journey to nirvana.

♪♪

In other regions of South Asia,

Buddhism ultimately survived only in small pockets,

whereas this area surrounding the high Indus

had a different kind of sacred landscape altogether.

Here, more than 3,000 Buddhist institutions

flourished across Gandhara.

And the world has not only forgotten,

but I suspect it doesn't really know that Buddhism,

as we know it today, actually emanated

from this part of the world, right here in Pakistan.

So why was it that Buddhism spread from here

to the four corners of Asia?

Because this area of Pakistan was at the heart

of one of the busiest trade routes in Asia,

market towns like these exchanged art,

ideas, and cultural influence

just as easily as they did textiles, ivory, and spices.

And as the merchant class grew more prosperous,

they could afford to turn their attention to manufacturing.

♪♪

These images of the Buddha were being mass-produced

to cater for expanding markets in the Far East.

The irony is, of course,

that a religion based on principles of austerity

and rejection of the self, its ego, and material wealth

now found itself enveloped

in decidedly commercial concerns.

♪♪

♪♪

[ Horn honks ]

So one of the things you see when you're travelling

around Pakistan are these incredible bursts of colour,

which are these painted trucks.

And I'm here at the moment in a yard

where they not only make the trucks and repair them,

but also take great care to decorate them.

This is one of my absolute favourites.

It's got all the scale of an American juggernaut,

but look at the difference.

Every inch of this vehicle has been decorated,

painted, made colourful.

It's glittering in the sunlight.

Here, in the centre, you've got Father of the Nation,

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, flanked by the Pakistani flag.

And everywhere there is colour, symbols of fish,

which they particularly like here

because it gives them lots of opportunity

to provide texture and colour and pattern.

You don't see a lot of colour in what people wear.

The men are dressed in quite earthy colours,

and the woman may be brightly dressed,

but many of them are covered in the veil,

and then you see this incredible burst of colour

along the road for everyone to enjoy.

There's a lot of detail on the outside.

There's these wonderful tassels.

And then when you look on the inside,

an absolute driver's boudoir.

I wanted to have a look in one of the actual workshops,

where a lot of the crafting of these designs

actually takes place.

♪♪

I like to think that these skills

are an echo of the Taxila craftsman of old.

Their fine work with gold, silver, and precious stones

helped build ancient trade routes here,

and thus the spread of Buddhism.

♪♪

Yet however successful abroad, by the eighth century,

Buddhism had all but disappeared in Pakistan itself.

So why is there virtually no trace of it

in the country that was for so long its home?

It's not in Pakistan but in China and the Far East

that Gandharan civilisation made its greatest impact,

and its influence can still be felt today.

Through the early Chinese pilgrims that came here,

Buddhism established a firm foothold in Imperial China,

which served as the base for the Buddhism

which spread to the whole of the Far East.

Centuries later, Chinese monks returned

to see the source of their Buddhism.

♪♪

Buddhism in northwest India was being eclipsed

by more intruders from Central Asia.

A series of invaders, like the White Huns,

entered the region, and eventually,

the grand city of Taxila was brought to its knees.

♪♪

In the seventh century,

when the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang came to Taxila

to find the source of the Buddhism

that had transformed China,

it lay desolate and in a state of half ruin,

a mere shadow of its former glory.

♪♪

He described the monasteries as "filled with shrubs

and solitary to the last degree, wasted and desolate,"

and the monks as "indolent

and given to indulgence and debauchery."

And in some ways, one could say

that the old tolerance of Taxila,

the cosmopolitan university open to all faiths,

also now lies in ruins.

♪♪

It now feels barren, laid waste.

It feels like a great civilisation has gone.

♪♪

♪♪

The invaders who destroyed the old Buddhist cultures

were followed out of the Afghan mountains centuries later

by more horsemen from the north,

who brought with them a new religion.

♪♪

Islam.

♪♪

And to explore the Muslim legacy they left behind,

we've come back to the city they founded,

the cultural centre of modern Pakistan -- Lahore.

[ Islam call to prayer ]

♪♪

-[ Singing in native language ]

♪♪

-Around 1,000 AD, the Muslim sultan Mahmud of Ghazni

gained control of the Indus Valley,

and Lahore rose up as a great city under his rule.

Scholars and poets gathered from as far away

as Iraq and Samarkand

and made Lahore a city of music and the arts.

-[ Singing in native language ]

-Today, Ali Sethi typifies

a younger group of Pakistani artists

who are rediscovering how much their country's past

still has to say to them.

Is there something about the fact

that it's a song of suffering

that draws people do it? -Yeah, absolutely.

Every person that I've ever heard singing it,

like, sublimates or channels

whatever it is they're feeling, whatever pain or angst

or, like, you know, achy emotion they're feeling, into this song.

And I've heard, you know, traditional musicians,

people you would call minstrels,

singing it with tattered clothes

at shrines, you know, in deserts,

and I've heard kids in jeans and t-shirts,

with joints in their hands,

singing this, you know, with great feeling and fervour,

and taking great ownership of it, you know?

And that seems to me to be a great miracle of life here,

is that despite so much...

truncation and so much revisionism, you know,

and so much loss of what ought to have been memorialised,

there is still this... -Persistence.

-...persistence. This really amazing persistence

of things that are ancient

and that are very strong and that continue to live in us,

and that we continue to sort of pour into newer forms,

ever newer forms and styles and situations,

and yet we're not conscious of those things.

Politically, we are very young, and culturally we're very old.

So what does that make us?

-Interesting.

It makes Pakistan very interesting.

-I agree, I agree.

-[ Singing in native language ]

♪♪

-To see how Islam has lasted for 1,000 years in Lahore,

we've come to this ancient shrine.

Even though Taliban suicide bombers

killed 42 worshipers here in 2010,

the congregation still comes to praise Islam

in verse and song.

-You know, spiritual music is very powerful,

and I think all the people who go to shrines,

they lose... -Themselves.

-They lose themselves.

It's like going into another space and...

-It's like a trance. -It's a trance,

it's the trance music.

I've seen 500 people going into a trance for hours.

♪♪

-You get caught up in the energy of it as well.

There's a momentum.

-You get caught up in the energy,

and the best thing is that they do it not alone.

They're doing it with friends, and hundreds of them doing it.

And it's like headbanging or something

that you do at a rock concert.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

♪♪

♪♪

By the 10th century, Lahore was being described

as a place with impressive palaces,

large markets, and huge orchards.

500 years later, this thriving cultural hub of a city

became a natural choice for a capital

for the greatest of Muslim connoisseurs -- the Mughals.

For this is where Islam from Persia

met the land beyond the Indus

to recreate a paradise on earth.

Lahore is often described as the city of gardens,

of gardens watered by the Indus.

The city reached the peak of its glory during the Mughal rule.

Not only did they build lavish monuments and splendid gardens,

they bestowed upon Lahore customs and traditions

that have echoed down the ages.

♪♪

And it's Islam which is often credited

with introducing a new concept to Pakistan --

the concept of purdah.

♪♪

Purdah or purd-ah was originally a Persian word

that came to India with the Mughals,

and means veil or curtain,

and was a way for a wife to show complete loyalty to her husband.

Eventually it was also taken up by high-class Hindu women

as a form of protection.

Previously in the subcontinent,

all women were uncovered from the waist up,

as we've seen previously in the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro.

And here we have these wonderful architectural metaphors

for the veil in these jali screens,

which would have been a way

to separate the women from the world outside,

but also for them to create their own world within.

So what lay behind the harem

was often of great intrigue to the commoner.

The politics of the harem was much more complex

than we might imagine.

♪♪

Nowhere can this be seen better than in the relationship

between the Mughal emperor Jahangir

and his charismatic wife Nur Jahan.

-♪ Today is gonna be the day ♪

♪ That they're gonna give it back to you ♪

-Born on a caravan travelling from Tehran to India,

she became the last but most beloved wife of the Emperor.

Jahangir's two brothers had died of alcoholism

and, as Crown Prince, he was not much better himself,

being heavily addicted to opium.

So when he came to the throne,

he depended completely on his favourite wife

to run the kingdom,

while he built rock star extravaganzas like this --

a minaret in which to keep one of his favourite pet deer.

This was, of course, the long summer of the Mughal Empire,

and with Nur Jahan by his side,

Jahangir patronised the arts

and built beautiful buildings.

This was a relationship based on love,

as well as political power.

And in a real sense, they ruled the empire together.

♪♪

♪♪

Just a step behind the magnificent public balcony

where the Emperor sat to give audience is this darker chamber,

which was actually the nerve centre of power.

And who was here?

It was Nur Jahan, his beloved wife,

the Empress, the Mughal empress.

And she actually held a lot of power in the Mughal court

and made many of the decisions.

So she was effectively standing just over his shoulder

whispering in his ear, directing him.

♪♪

So this series of chambers, private chambers,

was actually built for Nur Jahan by Jahangir,

and she traversed these spaces in privacy,

but completely connected to the public government

imperial decisions that he was making just a few feet away.

Despite the dust and graffiti of centuries,

you can really get a sense of how magnificent

these private quarters were.

I particularly love this space because if you look up,

the ceiling is covered with mirrors.

And there's also -- there's a little bit of restoration work

that's taken place which shows you the depth of colour

that actually there would have been during the time

that Nur Jahan would have been walking through these rooms.

And there are remnants still of gold paint and blue.

This really would have been a sumptuous

interior chamber for the Empress Nur Jahan.

Her grip on the reins of imperial power was absolute.

But such were the rules of purdah,

that no other men ever got to see her face.

Not even, bizarrely, the artist who painted her portrait.

So, Salima, this is a very intimate image

of the private quarters... -Yes.

-...of a high-class lady.

-Yes, and preparing herself for, you know, her toilette,

and obviously preparing herself for something important.

And when you consider that it is invariably a male artist

who is doing this and with no access...

-So there would have been no access, certainly not this kind?

-Absolutely. No, no. No access at all.

So this is kind of second-hand information

which was fed to the artist and presumably...

-Through who?

-Presumably through the informants.

[ Laughter ]

So, you know, there's a lot of imagination,

a little bit of fantasy, which is involved in this.

So, but then the other ways in which, presumably,

they got to know what women did, what they got up to.

So you find you do have works...

I mean, for example, that one, in which there's a rival life

going on in the women's quarters, in which the --

-Amongst the women themselves.

-Yeah, and they are enjoying themselves.

They have some of the same pastimes as men, actually.

They're smoking, they're, you know...

-Drinking. -Uh, I don't know

whether they were drinking the same things,

but presumably they were having a jolly good time.

♪♪

-Jahangir's reign was a golden age

that only came to an end with his death in 1627.

The tomb that was built for him

was magnificent in its ostentation.

♪♪

The building was clad in zigzags of white and yellow marble,

and there was once an ornate pavilion built here on the roof.

But not far away is the much smaller mausoleum of Nur Jahan.

She had tried to intervene with Jahangir's succession,

and as a consequence was confined to Lahore

for the rest of her days.

She lies not alongside the love of her life,

but beside her daughter, in an unassuming tomb

she had to build for herself.

♪♪

♪♪

But to remember Nur Jahan best,

I've been allowed to return to the beautiful Palace Of Mirrors

in the women's quarters of the Lahore Fort

at night when it's empty and deserted.

♪♪

♪♪

This surely is her true spiritual resting place --

as a woman who patronised the arts

and helped make Lahore a glittering centre

for artists and writers.

As it still is.

[ Laughter ]

[ Indistinct conversations ]

-[ Speaks native language ]

-Today Lahore is a complex city.

Hi, I'm Sona. -Hello, how are you?

-[ Laughs ]

-Lahore is a very spiritual city

because here you find all the arts.

It is also a city of music and of politics.

♪♪

-It's at parties like this that you can really sense

that visual artists, writers, poets in Pakistan today

are really engaging with the rich cultural past

and unpicking it and exposing it,

and exploring it, to reveal that this isn't just a country

with a 50-year Islamic history,

that there's something much, much deeper.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

One of the artists at the party has produced a work

that has become famous

and which explores the tensions between old and new Pakistan,

and its relationship with the West.

I've been particularly drawn to this remarkable series

that you did called The Veil.

Can you tell me, firstly, what inspired you?

What was the moment that made you choose this subject?

-I was intrigued to see in this post-9/11 period,

to see Western media in particular,

whenever there was a mention of a Muslim country,

it will be referenced with the image of a veiled woman.

And...

so, in a way, I think it kind of reduces

the representation of women from a certain part of the world,

which made me think of another simplification of the woman

in the minds of the men,

especially, from the non-Western world,

because of their exposure to pornography.

-What is amazing about this work is that Rashid has used

this process of photomontage.

When you look at it from a distance,

it looks like a burqa-clad woman wearing a veil.

But look close up, and it is made up

of tiny images of pornography,

captured from the Internet.

The artist is playing with the contradictions

of the perceptions that we have in apparent distinctions

of what goes on in the East and the West.

Pakistan has a population of over 200 million people,

greater than Russia.

Its position at the crossroads of Asia

makes it crucial to world politics.

And yet my journey through the country has been a reminder

of how little outsiders know about its complicated past

and equally complicated present.

Today, Pakistan is searching for its identity.

Not because it doesn't have one, but because this civilisation,

this 5,000-year-old civilisation,

is so textured, so multi-layered.

And some of that history is shared and contested

with its neighbour India, but a lot of it isn't,

for this was always a frontier land

between India to the south, China to the North, Afghanistan,

Iran, and Ancient Babylon and Greece.

And running through this, like an artery,

nourishing the civilisations that have lived here,

has been the River Indus.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪