KARACHI: Head of a French archaeologists’ team Dr Aurore Didier has said they have successfully completed the fresh season of excavation at Chanhon jo Daro in Benazirabad district and found it to be a busy industrial centre of the Indus Valley civilisation.
People of ancient India were famous for building highly impressive step wells. The architecture of the wells varies by type, location and age.
Now, archaeologists excavating in one of the largest Harappan cities, Dholavira, in Kutch have unearthed a 5,000-year-old step well that is huge is size.
It is three times bigger than the Great Bath at Mohenjo Daro. The site represents the largest, grandest, and the best furnished ancient reservoir discovered so far in the country.
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Sindhi is a major world language and one of the great literary languages of Indus civilization, with more than 19 million speakers in Pakistan, more than a million in India and growing numbers in communities throughout the world. Yet this language of poetic masterpieces like the Risalo of the great sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, remains little known and neglected even among scholars of the Subcontinent. Addleton and Brown’s work for the first time offers linguists, students of religion, anthropologists, and second generation Sindhis in the West a practical and systematic introduction to the vocabulary and grammar of spoken and written Sindhi. First developed for English speakers living and working in southern Pakistan, Addleton and Brown’s work has recently been revised and updated, and is now the best available pedagogical introduction to Sindhi for English speakers. Sindhi: An Introductory Course for English Speakers will be of interest not only to linguists and scholars, but to anyone interested in the culture, language and heritage of the Sindhi people.
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http://www.amazon.com/Sindhi-Introductory-Course-English-Speakers/dp/0977837289
An Archaeological Survey in the Neighborhood of Thari in the Thar Desert (Sindh, Pakistan)
Paolo Biagi and G. Mohiuddin Veesar report on the discovery of many Mesolithic (roughly 10,000 BCE and afterwards, many thousands of years before the height of the Indus Civilization) sites in the Thar Desert in the 1990s.
Courtesy: Harappa
http://a.harappa.com/content/archaeological-survey-neighborhood-thari-thar-desert-sindh-pakistan#.UuVIO0zTQkc.facebook
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Mohenjo Daro likely was, at its time, the greatest city in the world. Roughly 4,500 years ago, as many as 35,000 people lived and worked in the massive city, which occupies 250 acres along Pakistan’s Indus river.
Mohenjo Daro sat beneath the soil for thousands of years, a preserved relic of the ancient Indus Valley civilization. But excavation exposed the city to the elements, and now, says the Telegraph, the ruins may have as little as 20 years left.
[T]he once lost city is in danger of disappearing again as its clay wall houses, grid system roads, great granaries, baths and drainage systems crumble to dust, a victim of government neglect, public indifference and tourists’ fears of terrorism.
Archaeologists have told The Sunday Telegraph that the world’s oldest planned urban landscape is being corroded by salt and could disappear within 20 years without an urgent rescue plan.
Last year, heavy flooding threatened the ruins, but even outside of natural disasters the town is fading fast.
Preservation work has been going on since the first major excavations in 1924 and intensified after it was made a World Heritage Site in 1980, but the effort has flagged as scarce government funds have been diverted by earthquakes and floods, officials said.
They need 350 labourers, as well as masons, supervisors and technical staff, but on the day The Sunday Telegraph visited there were just 16 men wheeling barrows of mud to shore up the walls.
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