town in the Montgomery district of the Punjab. The other is Mohenjo-daro, more than three hundred and fifty miles to the southwest. Mohenjo-daro is on the Indus; Harappa is on one of its tributaries, the Ravi. Between and beyond these two large cities, each three miles in circumference, archaeologists have identified sixty smaller settlements on the Indus Plain and more in the hills to the west, all of which have yielded evidence of a common civilization, though uniformity was greatest among the valley settlements. The total area covers more than one thousand miles from Rupar, at the foot of the Simla hills, to Sutkagendor, which lies close to the coast of the Arabian sea. This area is much greater than that of either Ancient Egypt or Sumeria; in fact almost twice as large.

Anyone who has driven from Karachi across the Sind Desert will agree that this is not the most attractive area of the earth's surface. Where the Indus wanders slowly across the plain, it is bordered by a wide green band of vegetation, and here and there are areas which man has reclaimed from the desert by artificial irrigation; apart from these the eye has no rest from the monotonous, duncoloured desert, on which only the tough desert scrub and small bushy trees are able to survive. Throughout the long summer it grills under an unrelenting sun; on windless days the heat-waves dance and eddy above the tamarisk trees; when there is a wind the blown dust stings the eyes. As the sun sucks from the earth the last vestiges of winter rain, a scum of salt rises to the surface, looking as one writer has expressed it, "like a satanic mockery of snow". Creaking bullock-carts move slowly along the dusty roads, linking the dusty villages from which, occasionally, the tall stupa of a Buddhist temple breaks the skyline. As in Babylonia, the modern traveller finds it hard to believe that such an apparently sterile land could have supported a numerous population.

As the traveller moves northward, following the great river, he sees, far away to his left, the hills of Baluchistan. Some three hundred miles from Karachi a tributary flows into the Indus. Following this for another hundred miles he reaches a point where another river, the Ravi, flows into it from the east, and fifty miles farther on, on the right bank, rises the extensive village of Harappa, overlaying part of a complex of mud-coloured mounds. It was here, in 1921, that Sahni dug into the mounds and discovered evidences of a civilization which had existed for at least a thousand years before the Aryans entered the Indus Valley; we call it Harappan, after the site at which it was first found.

Harappa was a difficult and somewhat unrewarding site to excavate; difficult because the modem village occupies part of the mound, unrewarding because it had been largely wrecked by brick