Cultural Connections between Pakistan and China; Historical Grounds for Cultural Diplomacy

Abstract

The Indus civilization is the least studied of the three great ancient civilizations that were located beside rivers. Its towns and villages were stretched from the Arabian Sea to the banks of the Amu Darya in northern Afghanistan and two of its cities-Mohenjo-Daro in the south and Harappa in the north-were among the biggest of the third millennium B.C. More than 3,000 years before Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, multiple agricultural settlements were prospering, according to archaeological excavations in the Baluchistan region of central Pakistan. The Mehrgarh site was excavated by the Pakistan Depal1ment of Archaeology and the French Archaeological Mission in Pakistan 13. It is situated at the foot of the Bolan Pass, one of the two most famous routes between the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley. In the clifflike exposure made by the new channel that was established when the Bolan River altered its course to the west during a flood at the turn of the 20th century, approximately 10 meters of superposed Neolithic buildings that had been nearly completely buried by alluvial deposits were uneat1hed. Carbon-14 study has demonstrated that the mudbrick constructions in this area date to the sixth millennium B.C.