The Case for Pakistan as a Civilizational State

[Master Chief]

Any links to ANY CREDIBLE evidence to confirm this?

Sir...evidence was serialised on Channel 4 every Sunday morning in the late 80s..

 

[peacemaker99]

Minus the kingdoms, invasions and caste systems that make it something for fairytales

Like how many muslim kingdoms waged war, got invaded by oyher relegions snd still belong to islamic civilization.

 

[Master Chief]

Like how many muslim kingdoms waged war, got invaded by oyher relegions snd still belong to islamic civilization.

Thread title: the case for ***Pakistani*** civilisation.

Confused Jeetistanis: hindu civilisation can exist if Islamic civilisation can too, saaar!

 

[hydrabadi_arab]

Don't understand this obsession with indus valley civilization , only the Dravidian can claim indus valley civilization.... Pakistan of today shares nothing with indus valley civilization other than geography.

Why there is no sign of civilization in bronze age south India then?

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

Don't understand this obsession with indus valley civilization , only the Dravidian can claim indus valley civilization.... Pakistan of today shares nothing with indus valley civilization other than geography.

Do you ACTUALLY understand what you just wrote? Modern day indians are dravidians and their descendants whearas the Indus Valley Civilisation is based in modern day Pakistan and Pakistanis are the descendants of the pioneers and inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilistation.

 

[peacemaker99]

Why there is no sign of civilization in bronze age south India then?

Neither was IVC unique for the age and nor was itthe most advanced. The biggest IVC sites are in india so its origins are in indian heartland

 

[mythbuster]

Why there is no sign of civilization in bronze age south India then?

Because Dravidian civilization was centered around indus valley , second reason is that Hindus are notoriously bad records keepers .

 

[rakib]

From AI:

The Chronological Time Frame of Urdu language

The development of Urdu happened across roughly 700 years, evolving from a spoken local market blend into a sophisticated literary tongue:

Quora

[12th - 13th Century] [14th - 16th Century] [17th - 18th Century] [19th Century Onward]

Early Blending (Hindavi) ──> Regional Spread (Dakkhani) ──> Court Prestige (Lashkari) ──> Script Standardization

• 12th – 13th Century (The Seed): Following the Ghaznavid and early Ghurid expansions, Persian-speaking rulers set up their capital in Delhi. The local Khari Boli grammar absorbed Persian and Arabic vocabulary, creating an early form called Hindavi or Dehlavi.

Facebook·Dilli Dehat +3

• 14th – 16th Century (The Expansion): The language migrated south to the Deccan plateau with the armies of the Delhi Sultanate. Here, it gained its first royal patronages under the Bahmani and Golconda kingdoms.

Rekhta-Learning +1

• 17th – 18th Century (The Royal Prestige / Lashkari era): During the late Mughal era, the language returned to the north as a refined dialect. It was adopted by the imperial military and court circles, gaining names like Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mu'alla (language of the exalted camp) and Lashkari Zaban.

Wikipedia +1

• 19th Century (The Modern Standard): The British East India Company made it an official administrative language in 1837. By this time, it was written primarily in the Nastaliq Perso-Arabic script, separating its identity from modern Sanskritized Hindi.

Wikipedia +4

 

[rakib]

I have done some research on South Asian prehistory and genetics. Here is the politically correct summary from AI:

The Comprehensive Trajectory of the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization: From Twin Origins to Post-Urban Collapse

The lifespan of the Harappan Civilization is defined by a distinct geographic shift: beginning as localized cultures in the west, merging into a unified urban superpower, and ultimately fracturing into a de-urbanized rural population. Analyzing this timeline reveals a dual-river origin story that explains the distinct territorial, genetic, and cultural legacies shared by modern Pakistan and India.

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Phase 1: The Pre-Harappan Formative Phase (c. 7000 – 3300 BCE)

The Highland Roots and the Dual-River Valleys

The civilization did not arrive from a foreign land; it began as indigenous farming communities developing simultaneously along two separate, parallel river systems.

• The Western Frontier (Entirely Pakistan): The fundamental Neolithic foundation of the civilization was born exclusively within modern Pakistan. At Mehrgarh in the Balochistan foothills, hunter-gatherers transitioned to pastoral farming, mud-brick architecture, and early pottery as early as 7000 BCE. Populations gradually expanded along the mountain piedmont, eventually moving down into the fertile but volatile alluvial plains of the Indus River, giving rise to advanced metallurgical cultures like Kot Diji and Amri-Nal.
• The Eastern Frontier (Geographically Shared): Simultaneously and independently, a distinct parallel culture emerged along the Ghaggar-Hakra River system (often identified with the ancient Sarasvati). This perennial, monsoon-fed river ran from northwest India right across the modern border into eastern Pakistan's Cholistan Desert. Indigenous communities established the Hakra Ware Culture at early sites like Bhirrana and Kunal (Haryana, India), utilizing the river's gentler, more predictable flood cycles to build dense networks of farming villages long before any major eastward migration occurred.

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Phase 2: The Early Harappan Regionalization Era (c. 3300 – 2600 BCE)

Fortification and the Mountain "Highway"

As populations outgrew their initial valleys, they expanded along the base of the northern mountains. This geographical path naturally led western groups to intercept the headwaters of the Ghaggar-Hakra system.

During this era, regional agricultural networks transformed into fortified, organized towns. Locations like Early Harappa (Punjab, Pakistan) and Kalibangan (Rajasthan, India)—which features the world's earliest discovered plowed agricultural field dating to c. 2900 BCE—began developing independent trade networks, early administrative structures, and rudimentary granaries.

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Phase 3: The Mature Harappan Integration Era (c. 2600 – 1900 BCE)

The Great Economic Merger and Imperial Peak

Around 2600 BCE, expanding trade networks reached a tipping point, prompting the purely Pakistani Indus cultures and the geographically shared Hakra cultures to merge into a single, monolithic civilization. Operating much like a prehistoric trading bloc, these independent regional groups mutually adopted a universal "standard package" to maximize economic efficiency:

• Standardized Engineering: All major settlements stopped using local dimensions and adopted an identical, mathematically precise mud-brick baking ratio of 1:2:4 (thickness to width to length).
• Unified Metrology: Merchants across both river systems utilized the exact same system of highly accurate stone cubical weights.
• The Indus Script: A shared symbol system was invented, allowing merchants from different valleys to seamlessly read and verify commercial seals.

The Resulting Modern Territorial Claims

This integration created a Bronze Age superpower spanning 1.5 million square kilometers. However, the distribution of power during this peak era establishes the foundation for modern national claims:

• The Case for Pakistan (The Civic Heartland): Pakistan holds a definitive territorial claim as the custodian of the imperial core. The apex megacities and dominant capitals—Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa—sit entirely within its borders, housing 75% to 80% of the civilization's dense urban population. The entire empire was structurally and logistically anchored to the Indus River spine.
• The Case for India (Site Density and Genetics): Modern India contains a significantly higher total volume of discovered sites (over 900 out of roughly 1,400 total), serving as critical industrial outposts like Lothal (Gujarat) or sprawling frontier metropolises like Rakhigarhi (Haryana). Furthermore, ancient DNA (aDNA) confirms that the population was not a genetic monolith; eastern and southern sites maintained a higher percentage of Ancient Ancestral South Indian (AASI) lineage, making modern Indian populations the closest living genetic descendants of the Harappan people.

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Phase 4: The Late Harappan Localisation Era (c. 1900 – 1300 BCE)

Climate Shift and De-Urbanization

The civilization did not suffer a sudden military conquest. Instead, shifting tectonic plates, weakened monsoons, and severe environmental degradation caused the core river basins—particularly the Ghaggar-Hakra system—to dry up completely, while the main Indus River suffered catastrophic, unpredictable flooding.

By 1900 BCE, the signature civic infrastructure collapsed. The sophisticated empire fractured into its rural aftermath:

• Standardized weights, advanced drainage networks, uniform brick ratios, and the written Indus script vanished.
• The population underwent a multi-generational, post-urban drift away from the dried-up core valleys. Survivors migrated eastward into the fertile Ganga-Yamuna Doab (establishing late pottery workshops like Alamgirpur and cemeteries like Sanauli in western Uttar Pradesh) and southward into the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat.

By 1300 BCE, the grand urban traditions were completely gone, leaving behind fragmented, rural populations whose descendants eventually integrated into the broader cultural fabric of the subcontinent.