#7 rivers

Lothal. The name means “the mound of the dead” in Gujarati — like Mohenjo-Daro in Sindhi. A linguistic coincidence that says something about how modern peoples named these sites without knowing what they were. For Lothal is not a mound of the dead. It is one of the most living, most active, most outward-looking sites in the entire civilization of the 7 Rivers. It is at Lothal — in Gujarat, at…

She is ten centimetres tall. Cast in bronze using the lost-wax technique, dated to around 2500 BCE. She stands upright, her left hand resting on her hip, her right arm hanging along her body, her head turned slightly. She is naked, adorned with bracelets that cover almost her entire left arm, and a necklace. She is looking at something we cannot see — with a quiet confidence, without the…

Mohenjo-Daro. The name means “the mound of the dead” in Sindhi — a name given by those who discovered the site, not by those who built it. Its inhabitants may have called it something else. We do not know: their writing has not yet been deciphered. What we do know is what archaeologists have uncovered since John Marshall’s first excavations in 1927: a city of thirty to forty thousand…

In the Vedic pantheon, some gods are philosophical abstractions — Varuṇa, guardian of the ṛta, or Brahman, cosmic principle. Others are internalised forces of nature — Agni, the fire that illuminates; Vāyu, the wind that vivifies. And then there is Parjanya. Parjanya is concrete. Parjanya is the thunder that rolls before the storm. The rain that falls on dry earth. The seed that germinates in…

Asceticism in India is a millenary tradition that has endured through the ages. Even today, ascetics, called sadhus, lead a life of renunciation and discipline to attain higher states of consciousness. Their goal is to free themselves from material attachments and elevate their minds to the infinite. Ancient Origins: The Seals of the 7 Rivers civilization Although we do not have direct evidence…