THE VEDAS and the Puranas speak of Sindh in terms of gods and kings. But, how about the land, the people, and the culture of ancient Sindh?
The outside world knew ancient India only by ancient Sindh and the adjoining coastal areas. And it had the strangest notions about the people here.
Herodotus, the great Greek historian, wrote: ``All the Indian tribes I have mentioned copulate in the open like cattle; their skins are all of the same colour, much like the Ethiopians. Their semen is not white like other people's, but black like their own skin. The same peculiarity is to be found in the Ethiopians. Their country is a long way from Persia towards the south and they were never subject to Darius.''
Strabo,another Greek historian, wrote: ``Indians had never been invaded and conquered by a foreign power.'' lt is good to hear great ancient historians confirm that India had till then never been conquered by a foreign power. As for copulation in the open, Herodotus was obviously referring to prehistoric times when men were yet to build houses. Why, even in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare tells us, many Englishmen loved to romance in ``fields of rye''.
But the ``black semen'' story reminds us. When the Chinese in the past century heard the Englishmen say that the heart was on the left, they were sure their own hearts must be on the right --- since they were so very different from the British!
The Greeks were great artists; but scientific temper was alien to their ethos. On one occasion, several Greek philosophers had gathered to discuss how many teeth a woman had. Since men had thirty-two teeth, and women were ``inferior'', they all had decided that the latter had fewer --- twenty-eight --- teeth. Not one of them had suggested that they might open a woman's mouth and count the teeth in it.
However, good old Herodotus did not know that his own great Greek civilization was the fruit of a marriage between lower Sindh and eastern Mediterranean. And Homer, the great Greek poet, actually mentioned ``Sintians'' on the island of Lemnos, who ``spoke a strange tongue'' (Iliad 1: 594).
Writes Pococke, an authority on India's influence on Greece: ``At the mouth of the Indus dwell a sea-faring people, active, ingenious and enterprising, as when, ages subsequent to this great movement, they themselves, with the warlike denizens of the Punjab, were driven from their native land, to seek the far distant climes of Greece. The commercial people dwelling along the coast that stretches from the mouth of the Indus to the Coree, are embarking on that emigration whose magnificent results to civilization and whose gigantic movements of art, fill the mind with mingled emotions of admiration and awe. These people coast along the shores of Mekran, traverse the mouth of the Persian Gulf and again adhering to the seaboard of Oman, Hadramant and Yemen sail up the Red Sea; and again ascending the mighty stream that fertilizes a land of wonders, found the kingdoms of Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia. These are the same stock that, centuries subsequently to this colonization, spread the blessings of civilization over Hellas and her islands. The connection, therefore, which is so constantly represented by Greek historians as subsisting between Egypt and Athens, as well as Benotia and other parts of Greece, is perfectly natural and in fact is just what we should anticipate from a people, who so highly honoured and deeply venerated their parent state as to receive from its hands their sacred fire, and their ministers of religion....
``And thus it was that the native of Indus and of the rocky heights of Hela, when he became a settler in the Hellas, and thus it was with his polished descendant in Athens who, though called a Greek, was as thoroughly Sindian in his taste, religion and literature as any of his forefathers.
``Of the triple connection that links Egypt, Greece and the lands of the Indus, there will remain no longer the shadow of a doubt, as the reader accompanies me in the geographical development of the colonizations of Africa founded by the mercantile and thriving community of Corinthus. This is past controversy; for the Abusin, .. classical name for the Indus, is reproduced in Greece as the Coi-Indus (Corinthus), that is the people of the Cori Indus.''
These people are known to history as Phoenicians. The early historians always wondered where these great fathers of western civilization came from. But no more. Now it is established that the Vedic Panis (who, in India, became Vaniks, Vanias, and Banias) became, in the West, Panikas, the Punic race or the Phoenicians. Although the modern Suez Canal, connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, did not then exist, there was a canal connecting the eastern most estuary of the Nile to the Red Sea. The ancient people used this channel to go from the Red Sea via the Nile to the Mediterranean. Our Phoenicians went ahead and even set up the state of Phoenicia on what is the Syrian and Lebanese seaboard today.
Although the Panis had to leave Sindh to settle abroad --- allegedly because they had killed a king --- they took the sacred fire and holy men with them. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, ``the Phoenicians claimed that their oldest cities had been founded by the gods themselves and that their race could boast an antiquity of 30,000 years.'' Here are clear echoes of ancient lndia with her yuga upon yuga of civilization. And here, too, are the ancient trading traditions of Sindh.
What was this great little Sindh like?
All early civilizations were born in river valleys; the mountain and the sea were too inhospitable for the early man. And obviously the Indus civilization is about as old as the Indus, which itself belongs to geology, not history.
The early man not only needed river water for sustenance, he needed protection from the elements as well. It is therefore believed that in the Sindh area the first habitations began in the Khirthar range in the west, not far from the river. The mountain caves in this range provided a good natural shelter close to the river. It is therefore no coincidence that Mohen-jo-daro, the crown of Indus civilization, is situated between the Indus and the Khirthar range. The ancient Laki Tirath is found in the same hilly area.
Geographically, historically, and culturally, Sindh has always been part of India. The vast rocky Baluchistan desert has effectively cut it off from Iran in the west. But the small Kutch and Rajasthan deserts have also historically partially isolated it from the east. And that left the Indus as the main artery connecting Sindh to Multan in the north. This gave Sindh a certain identity and personality of its own. And so ancient Sindh was semi-isolated. It included not only Baluchistan and Kutch but also Multan. Till 1947, when the Sindhis flooded Bombay, they were known to the Maharashtrians as ``Multanis''!
The Indus then followed an easterly course and the eastern- most channel emptied itself in Kutch, which then was under the sea. No wonder Harappa (vedic Hariyupiya) above Sindh and Lothal below Sindh (Gujerat) have the same civilization as Mohen-jo-daro. And the ruins of Mohen-jo-daro are a more eloquent testimony of the glory of ancient Sindh than all the other records put together.
Today when ,the Sindhi nationalists in Pakistan refer to their province as ``Sindhu Mata'', they are only re-stating an ancient fact. Sindh is not only mother for Sindhis, it is the mother of. ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, too.