Pakistan’s Indus gateway still hosts Mohenjo-daro’s ruins
Sindh, Pakistan’s third-largest province by area and second by population, faces the Arabian Sea between Balochistan and Punjab and shares India’s border. Settled life in South Asia began around Sindh and Punjab some 9,000 years ago along the Indus, ripening into the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Most of the province is alluvial plain along the Indus, with the Thar Desert to the east along the Indian frontier and the Kirthar Mountains to the west against Balochistan. Its economy ranks second in Pakistan, carrying a large share of national industry, while the countryside supplies fruit and vegetables to the rest of the country. Sufism shapes Sindhi identity among both Muslims and Hindus, and the province holds two World Heritage Sites, Mohenjo-daro and the Makli Necropolis at Thatta, a royal burial ground covering some 10 square kilometres.
Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BCE, was one of the earliest great cities, laid out with standard bricks, grid streets and covered drains, contemporary with Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was abandoned in the nineteenth century BCE, perhaps as the region dried, and lay forgotten until the 1920s; erosion and poor restoration now threaten it. The name comes through Persian from Sanskrit Sindhu, 'river'.
After Aryan migration, the kingdom of Sindhu-Sauvīra held the lower Indus until the Achaemenids took it in 518 BCE. Alexander built a harbour at Patala, and in 303 BCE Chandragupta Maurya forced Seleucus to cede lands west of the Indus in exchange for 500 elephants. Local Rai and Chach dynasties followed, until Muhammad ibn al-Qasim defeated Raja Dahir in 712 and made Sindh an Umayyad province, opening the Muslim era in South Asia. Mahmud of Ghazni ended Arab rule in 1026, and Akbar, who was born at Umerkot in Sindh, brought it into the Mughal Empire.
The Talpurs ruled from 1783 until the East India Company seized the region in 1846. Sindh became a separate province in 1936, was the first to endorse the Pakistan Movement after the 1940 Lahore Resolution, was merged into West Pakistan in 1955, and regained provincial status with Karachi and Khairpur in 1970.
Source: Sindh
