One winter, Dervla Murphy and her six-year-old daughter explored 'Little Tibet' high up in the Karakoram Mountains in the frozen heart of the Western Himalayas. Dervla records their adventures, from crumbling tracks over bottomless chasms, to assaults by lascivious Kashmiris.

Based on corpora of Indus writing and a dictionary, the book validates Aristotle's insight on writing systems. Indus writing is composed using symbols of spoken words. The symbols are hieroglyphs of meluhha (mleccha) words spoken by artisans recording the repertoire of stone, mineral and metal workers. The writing results in a set of catalogs of metalworking of bronze age. Evidence of this competence in metallurgy which evolved from 4th millennium BCE of bronze age, is provided in corpora of metalware catalogs and a dictionary of melluhha (mleccha). Indus writing was a principal tool of economic administration for account-keeping by artisan and trader guilds and did not record literature or, history. Some sacred ideas and historical links across interaction areas between India and ancient Near East, may be inferred from the writing.

“Alice Albinia is the most extraordinary traveler of her generation. . . . A journey of astonishing confidence and courage.”—Rory Stewart One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. It has been worshipped as a god, used as a tool of imperial expansion, and today is the cement of Pakistan’s fractious union. Alice Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated cities grew on its banks. “This turbulent history, entwined with a superlative travel narrative” (The Guardian) leads us from the ruins of elaborate metropolises, to the bitter divisions of today. Like Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, Empires of the Indus is an engrossing personal journey and a deeply moving portrait of a river and its people.

"The book is a history of the political and environmental transformation of the Indus basin as a result of the modern construction of the world's largest, integrated irrigation system. Begun under British colonial rule in the 19th century, this transformation continued after the region was divided between two new states, India and Pakistan, in 1947. Massive irrigation works have turned an arid region into one of dense agricultural population, but its political legacies continue to shape the politics and statecraft of the region"--Provided by publisher.

*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading When one thinks of the world's first cities, Sumer, Memphis, and Babylon are some of the first to come to mind, but if the focus then shifts to India, then Harappa and Mohenjo-daro will likely come up. These cities owe their existence to India's oldest civilization, known as the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization, which was contemporary with ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt and had extensive contacts with the former, making it one of the most important early civilizations in the world. Spread out along the rivers of the Indus River Valley, hundreds of settlements began forming around 3300 BCE, eventually coalescing into a society that had all of the hallmarks of a true civilization, including writing, well-developed cities, a complex social structure, and long-distance trade. Mohenjo-daro was the largest city of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the most advanced civilizations to have ever existed, and the best-known and most ancient prehistoric urban site on the Indian subcontinent. It was a metropolis of great cultural, economic, and political importance that dates from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE. Although it primarily flourished between approximately 2500 and 1500 BCE, the city had longer lasting influences on the urbanization of the Indian subcontinent for centuries after its abandonment. It is believed to have been one of two capital cities of the Indus Civilization, its twin being Harappa located further north in Punjab, Pakistan. The fact that the ancient Indus Valley Civilization is also often referred to as the Harappan Civilization demonstrates how important the discovery of Harappa is. As archaeologists and historians began to uncover more of the ancient Harappa site in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a more complete picture of the city emerged, namely its importance. Research has shown that Harappa was one of the three most important Indus Valley cities, if not the most important, with several mounds of settlements uncovered that indicate building activities took place there for over 1,000 years. Ancient Harappa was truly a thriving and vibrant city that was on par with contemporary cities in Mesopotamia such as Ur and Memphis in Egypt. During the last centuries of the first millennium BCE, most of the Mediterranean basin and the Near East were either directly or indirectly under the influence of Hellenism. The Greeks spread their ideas to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia and attempted to unify all of the peoples of those regions under one government. Although some of the Hellenistic kingdoms proved to be powerful in their own rights - especially Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire, which encompassed all of Mesopotamia, most of the Levant, and much of Persia during its height - no single kingdom ever proved to be dominant. The Hellenic kingdoms battled each other for supremacy and even attempted to claim new lands, especially to the east, past the Indus River in lands that the Greeks referred to generally as India. But as the Hellenistic Greeks turned their eyes to the riches of India, a dynasty came to power that put most of the Indian subcontinent under the rule of one king. The dynasty that came to power in the late 4th century BCE is known today as the Mauryan Dynasty, and although the ruling family was short-lived and their power was ephemeral, its influence resonated for several subsequent centuries and spread as far east as China and into the Hellenistic west. Through relentless warfare and violent machinations, the Mauryans were able to take a land that was full of disparate and often warring ethnic groups, religions, and castes and meld it into a reasonably cohesive empire. After establishing the empire, subsequent kings were able to focus their attentions on raising the living standards of their people, especially Ashoka.