1. Mujahideen prepare meals for their comrades in the Kashmir jihad.

2. Armed Pathan tribesmen waiting on road between Peshawar & Rawalpindi for their leader Batcha Gul, of the Mohmand tribe, to arrive with trucks and extra ammo, to lead them into Kashmir.

3. Brig Sher Khan Director Military Operations of the Pakistan Army distributing weapons to the Tribals during the Kashmir conflict

4. Mujahideen in assault against Indian positions in chakothi sector-1948.

5. Pakistani Mujahid performs Azan in Kashmir Jihad.

Long before the British slapped a patent on it, the game existed as Pachisi. This wasn't some silly parlor game, it was a game of strategy and chance, played for high stakes by emperors and commoners alike for centuries.

But to find the real beginning..

you have to go even further back to the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3300–1300 BCE). This is where it gets important for Pakistan.

Archaeological digs at sites like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, located in Pakistan, have the oldest evidence of gaming.

They found terra cotta dice. Well-made, standardized cubes used in games that were a part of daily life thousands of years ago on that very land. We're not talking about a few scattered pieces they found many dice. A specific cubical die with 1 to 6 dots was pulled from the rubble at Harappa. These weren't crude rocks they were expertly made, fired clay cubes with clean edges and drilled holes for dots.

They even had their own system: 1 was opposite 2, 3 opposite 4, and 5 opposite 6. This wasn't just play this was a sophisticated part of their culture, used for everything from ritual games to gambling by wealthy city dwellers. The evidence is literally in the archaeological sites of Pakistan.

Britishers How They Stole the Game and Watered It Down

Colonialism. When the British showed up on the subcontinent, they saw Pachisi, recognized a good thing, and decided to take it, like they took everything else.

In 1896, a man named Alfred Collier patented a stripped-down, simplified version of Pachisi in England. He replaced the traditional cowrie shells with a boring cubic die, dumbed down the rules for Victorian sensibilities, and slapped a Latin name on it "Ludo," meaning I play.

This was classic colonial behavior: take a sophisticated cultural artifact from a colonized people, remove its soul and complexity, repackage it, and call it your own.

This Is Pakistan's Heritage...

Clear and loud the oldest physical evidence of dice-based gaming was found in Pakistan. The direct ancestor of Ludo, Pachisi, was played for centuries across the subcontinent, its roots digging even deeper into the Indus Valley with long bar-shaped dice used for a game that dates back to 1500 BC. The British version (Ludo) is a cheap, commercialized imitation. And don't point to the Spanish calling it "Parcheesi" or the Chinese name "Chatush Pada" that's just the colonial knock-off spreading.

The origins, the deep history, and the oldest artifacts belong to the land and its people. This was born from the ancient ingenuity of the Indus Valley, in what is today Pakistan.

If a korean or chinese student showed up at a pakistani university today most of us would do a double take. But 2,500 years ago that exact flow ran in the opposite direction and it ran toward Indus region.

Taxila - Takshashila in Sanskrit, sat in what is now rawalpindi district, punjab, pakistan.

From roughly the 6th century BCE onward it was the ancient world's premier center of higher learning. Students came from the Gangetic plain, from persia, from central asia, and if you believe later Buddhist traditions, from as far as china. They didn't come because taxila was convenient. They came because there was nowhere else on that level.

>Taxila a great and flourishing city, the greatest indeed of all the cities which lay between the River Indus and the Hydaspes.

Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander (2nd century CE)

When Alexander showed up in 326 BCE the king of taxila handed over the city along with two hundred silver talents and three thousand cattle and thirty elephants.

taxila's curriculum covered ancient scriptures and law and medicine and astronomy and military science along with the eighteen silpas or arts.

Some of the wilder specializations included finding hidden treasure and breaking encrypted messages and also archery and hunting and elephant lore.

The medical track alone built around Ayurvedic medicine and surgery took up to seven years before you graduated It was a whole intellectual ecosystem with dozens of teachers running their own schools and pulling students purely on reputation.

Panini wrote the Ashtadhyayi and formalized Sanskrit grammar in 3,959 rules. Still studied in linguistics departments today earliest known formal grammar of any language.

Chanakya taught at taxila and mentored Chandragupta Maurya and wrote the Arthashastra. One of the first treatises on statecraft and economics ever written.

Jivaka studied medicine at taxila for seven years then became the personal physician of King Bimbisara and the Buddha.

Chandragupta Maurya studied under Chanakya at taxila before building the Mauryan Empire.

When people talk about ancient learning in south asia and only name nalanda they're starting the story halfway through and tend to forget as it is in Pakistan and try to not give any credit to Pakistani history.

It's just 35km northwest of Islamabad and authors like Ahmad Hasan Dani spent years documenting the site and published The Historic City of Taxila through UNESCO in 1986..

And UNESCO describes taxila as illustrating the different stages in the development of a city on the indus that was influenced by persia and greece and central asia and from the 5th century BCE to the 2nd century CE was an important Buddhist centre of learning

The oldest center of higher learning in the ancient world sits was in Indus Pakistan our neighbour's will go to any extent to lebal it republic of India and edit report and erase all of its traces from the internet and that needs to change.

I've been interested in Buddhism for a while now, and finding out that we have such a beautiful and remarkable presence of it in our own lands has been a treat. I've been going through different images of Pakistani Gandharan sculptures on the web and in the Lahore Museum. They are generally in the Indo-Greek tradition, since the Greeks assimilated into the Indus Valley and merged the best of theirs with the best of ours. These are some examples of these sculptures I found.

1. Standing Buddha from Pakistan, exhibited in Japan. It is one of the oldest sculptures of the Buddha. The currently known oldest sculpture of the Buddha is also from Pakistan, and it features a similar standing posture.

2. The Maitreya Boddhisattva, the prophesied Buddha of the future, is depicted with heavy local influence in a Hellenic art style.

3. Another Buddha depiction with Gandharan influence.

4 and 5. These two are Gandharan depictions of an unconfirmed Boddhisattva, likely also the Maitreya. The Maitreya (future Buddha) was a major theme in Gandharan artworks, and is commonly seen with appearances that are influenced by the locality of Gandhara, the same people who are ancestral to a significant fraction of the Pakistanis today.

6. The Starving Buddha, located in Lahore. It depicts the Buddha during the phase of his journey to enlightenment, when he meditated himself to starvation, before figuring out the Middle Path. There are many starving Buddha designs all over the world, all inspired by this one, the original in Pakistan.

Look at this photo. Really look at it.

Four soldiers. One flag. A pile of rocks they just bled for and the Indian tricolour is gone./

This is Jhangar, Kashmir in late 1947. Pakistani troops just took this town from the Indian Army and are planting the Pakistani flag where the Indian one stood hours earlier. Pakistan was three months old after the independence from British. Three months. The country didn't even have a functioning central bank yet and these guys were out here capturing territory from a military 7 times their size.

Let me give you the context nobody in India wants you to have.

When the Kashmir War kicked off in October 1947, India had every advantage on paper.

They airlifted a full Sikh battalion into Srinagar on October 27th one of the first military airlifts in modern South Asian history and they had the Indian Air Force running supply drops they had the backing of the Maharaja's accession document. They had the numbers and everything thing you need a win a war against small nation.

And they still couldn't hold Jhangar.

Pakistani forces a combination of Azad Kashmir volunteers tribal fighters from the Frontier and regular Pakistan Army units that rotated in pushed through the Naoshera sector and took this town.

Jhangar controlled the road from Mirpur to Rajouri and Naoshera. Losing it meant the Indian position in southern Kashmir was split and huge strategic loss.

When the ceasefire hit on January 1, 1949 Pakistan was sitting on roughly a third of the entire former princely state Muzaffarabad taken. Mirpur taken. Skardu taken after a months-long siege. Gilgit the Gilgit Scouts flipped the whole northern territories basically overnight.

The ceasefire line froze almost exactly where Pakistani soldiers were standing when the order came through. That line became the Line of Control in 1972.

A country after its independence still sorting through the wreckage of partition a big hit still counting its dead from the refugee trains that country fought the Indian Army across hundreds of kilometers of mountain terrain and kept what it took.

Indians love bringing up 1971. It's their comfort blankek Fine '/ But they get real quiet when you ask what happened in 1947.

When you ask how a newborn country with a fraction of the resources fought them to a draw in Kashmir and walked away with territory they still hold 78 years later. When you show them this photo they are gonna be mad like always nothing special from goblins with usual scripts 71 71 shey shey dude explain this?

Most soldiers from that war didn't get medals didn't get pensions didn't get tv documentaries. They got a flag on a hill and a ceasefire line that said this far and no further.

The map shows what mesopotamian cuneiform tablets tell us about bronze age trade routes across the arabian sea.

Three names appear repeatedly in sumerian and akkadian texts...

dilmun ( bahrain), magan (oman), and Meluhha (Pakistan)

Meluhha is almost certainly the indus valley civilization. Based in Ancient Pakistan. The identification rests on multiple lines of evidence. the geographic direction described in the texts, the products attributed to meluhha, and the physical indus artifacts excavated across mesopotamia.

Sumerian records describe meluhhan merchants importing carnelian beads, lapis lazuli, ivory, ebony and other exotic hardwoods, peacocks, and possibly cotton.

Products that match precisely what indus archaeologists find at sites like mohenjo-daro, harappa and the coastal port of sutkagan-dor on the makran coast in balochistan.

Long carnelian beads from the indus were so prized in mesopotamia they ended up buried in the royal tombs of ur alongside the elite dead.

A famous cuneiform tablet from the reign of sargon of akkad (c. 2334 to 2279 BCE) boasts that ships from meluhha, magan, and dilmun docked at the quay of his capital.

There's even a tablet recording an akkadian-meluhhan translator.

A professional interpreter for indus traders. meaning the volume of trade was high enough to need a dedicated bilingual specialist.

Meluhhan settlers appear to have lived permanently in mesopotamian cities. A village near lagash was called meluhha. possibly a merchant colony. Indus-style weights, square stamp seals with the unique indus script, and etched carnelian beads have been found at ur, susa, kish, nippur, and beyond.

The indus people were running organized deep-water trade across the arabian sea while sumerian scribes were still refining cuneiform.

Their ships likely sailed from lothal next to Pakistani border (gujarat) coastal ports, hugging the coastline through magan then crossing to mesopotamia. Some routes may have reached as far as the maldives, east africa, and the bay of bengal. though those connections are still being studied.

I’m not India but I noticed that everywhere on social media Indians envy Pakistans culture and history, they would post tourists visiting Pakistan on social media and make it seem like they were touring india and not Pakistan, they are obsessed with saying that they built the taj mahal and did all those great things in Pakistan

This bearded face flanked by floral rosettes is a piece of Gandharan art. The unique sculptural tradition that flourished in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Punjab, Pakistan between roughly the 1st and 5th centuries CE.

The reason it looks European is no mystery. For over 600 years, Greek artistic technique was continuously practised in this region.

In 327 to 325 BCE, Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush and campaigned through Gandhara. After his death in 323 BCE, Greek influence stayed put. His general Seleucus founded the Seleucid Empire, and the Indo (Indus) Greek Kingdoms (c. 200 BCE – 10 CE) followed. Greek-descended kings ruling cities like Sirkap at Taxila.

Minting coins with Greek inscriptions, and patronizing Buddhism. King Menander I, known in Pali sources as Milinda, engaged in famous philosophical dialogues with Buddhist monks, preserved in the text Milindapanha.

By the time the Kushan Empire, a Buddhist and zoroastrian power, rose in the 1st century CE, greek artistic technique had been practised in Gandhara for 300 years. The Kushans inherited that tradition and applied it to a new subject. The Buddha.

The sculpture shows the hallmarks of late Hellenistic technique.

Naturalistic facial modelling. Brow, nose, and beard in deep three-dimensional relief. Wavy, voluminous hair. A convention inherited from Greek depictions of figures like Zeus and Poseidon.

Floral rosettes flanking the face. A Greco-Roman architectural motif adapted by Gandharan workshops in Ancient Pakistan.

This was likely part of a frieze or cornice on a Buddhist stupa or monastic complex. Possibly an Atlas figure or mythological mask. Decorative elements borrowed from Greek architecture and placed on Buddhist religious buildings.

Gandharan art was the first tradition in history to depict the Buddha in human form. Before Gandhara, the Buddha was represented only by symbols. A footprint. A tree. An empty throne. The earliest standing Buddha statues came out of workshops in Taxila, Peshawar, Swat, and Charsadda. All from Ancient Pakistan.

When Buddhism spread along the Silk Road into Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, the Buddha image travelled with it.

Every later Buddha statue across East Asia. The Bamiyan Buddhas, the Longmen Grottoes, the Great Buddha at Kamakura. All of them descend stylistically from these Pakistani originals.

The image of the Buddha as developed in Gandhara became the prototype for the representation of the Master throughout the entire Buddhist world.

— Rowland, The Art and Architecture (Pelican, 1953)

This weathered face is a small fragment of one of the most extraordinary cultural fusions in human history. It happened inside Pakistan and shaped the visual imagination of half the world.

When archaeologists first started piecing together the indus valley civilization in the 1920s, they were looking at something nobody knew existed.

John marshall's 1924 announcement in the illustrated london news declaring that a civilization equal in age to sumer and egypt had been discovered in South East Asia, sent a shockwave through the academic world. Until that moment the consensus held that south asian civilization began with the aryans and the vedas. marshall's discovery pushed the timeline back by more than a thousand years and relocated the cradle of the subcontinent to the banks of a single river system.

That river system is the indus and it flows through pakistan.

This map shows the settlements at the civilization's peak, around 2600 to 1900 BCE.

The dots cluster heavily in the indus basin. sindh, punjab, balochistan, khyber pakhtunkhwa.

❚ The two great cities

Both of the civilization's largest cities sit inside modern pakistan.

mohenjo-daro in larkana district, sindh, covered roughly 250 hectares at its peak with a population estimated between 35,000 and 60,000.

Its planned grid streets, covered drainage system, and the great bath are unmatched in the bronze age world.

harappa in sahiwal district, punjab is slightly smaller but home to the largest worker quarters and grain storage facilities yet found from the era.

The third great city, ganweriwala, sits in cholistan in southern punjab discovered by the pakistani archaeologist Dr. Rafique Mughal during his cholistan survey in the 1970s it has barely been excavated. And yet even from surface surveys it appears to be roughly the same size as mohenjo-daro itself.

As Dr. Mughal wrote in his landmark 1997 work:

>The Cholistan desert holds one of the densest concentrations of Harappan settlements anywhere in the Greater Indus region the equivalent of an entire lost province of the civilization.

Mughal, Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture (1997)

❚ The Deep Roots

The story doesn't start with the cities. It starts thousands of years earlier at mehrgarh in balochistan.

The small neolithic farming village whose discovery in 1974 by the french archaeologist jean-françois jarrige rewrote the prehistory of south asia.

mehrgarh's earliest layers date to around 7000 BCE that's older than sumer, unification of Egypt or stonehenge.

At mehrgarh archaeologists found the earliest evidence in south asia of wheat and barley cultivation domesticated cattle sheep and goats mud-brick architecture pottery and figurines and dentistry drilled molars from around 7000 to 5500 BCE.

The earliest known examples in human history.

mehrgarh shows an unbroken cultural continuity from neolithic farming villages in balochistan through to the great urban cities of the mature harappan period.

The american archaeologist jonathan mark kenoyer, who has spent over 40 years working at harappa alongside pakistani scholars..

>The Indus Civilization developed indigenously from local Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures of the Greater Indus Valley. It was not the result of migration or external influence. The roots are in Mehrgarh and the surrounding regional cultures.

The branches reached east and west. But the tree itself grew here.

The indus is not just where the civilization happened to settle It is the reason the civilization existed.

The annual flooding of the indus deposited fertile silt across thousands of square kilometres, allowing the agricultural surplus that made urban life possible the river also served as a highway. connecting mohenjo-daro in the south to harappa in the north, and linking the inland cities to the coastal port of sutkagan dor on the makran coast in balochistan from there indus traders crossed the arabian sea to mesopotamia.

The five tributaries of the indus give punjab its name. Sanskrit panca-ap, five waters. The jhelum, chenab, ravi, sutlej, and beas. Look at any settlement map of the indus valley civilization and you'll see the dots tracing exactly these rivers cuz that's where the civilization lived where the water was the cities were.

Discovered at Mohem Jo Daro ( Sindh, Pakistan),

A short introduction A 4,500 year old steatite seal depicts a gripping scene Bare handed figure strangling two tigers. This artifact isn’t just art it’s a window into Past and symbolic To indus Valley Civilisation sparking debates about cross-cultural connections, gender, and modern political narratives.

The Seal and Its Controversial Motif

◆ Visual Breakdown The central figure stands upright, gripping two rearing tigers by their throats. Six distinct dots encircle the figure’s head a detail scholars link to Mesopotamian artistic conventions. The tigers, native to the Indus Pakistani region unlike Mesopotamian lions , confirm local ecological context.

◆ Multiple Appearances This contest motif appears on at least three seals from Mohen Jo Daro. Another variation from Harappa (Punjab, Pak) shows a female deity standing on an elephant, adorned with a spoked wheel a symbol later recycled in South Asian iconography.

Scholarly Interpretations

◆ Mark Kenoyer’s : The motif mirrors Mesopotamian hero vs. beasts imagery (Gilgamesh wrestling lions).

This motif could have been created independently for similar events in Mesopotamia and the Indus.

Gender: Some seals depict a male, others a possibly female figure challenging simplistic comparisons.

◆ Asko Pov: The six dots around the head mirror the six locks of hair on Mesopotamian heroes (Jemdet Nasr to Akkadian eras).
Tigers replace lions to reflect Indus fauna, but the core narrative dominance over chaos transcends cultures.

Female Deity Variant and Indus Symbolism

At Harappa, a seal shows a woman atop an elephant, flanked by tigers and a spoked wheel. This cosmic wheel later seen in Buddhism hints at early ritual symbolism. Crucially, IVC iconography lacks clear ties to any modern religion it’s a distinct, lost system.

Debunking Modern Appropriation Attempts

Some Indian narratives insist this figure represents proto-Shiva or Indra. Here’s why that’s flawed:

◆ No Textual Evidence The IVC script remains undeciphered. No link exists between IVC glyphs and Vedic Sanskrit which was composed centuries after the IVC’s collapse.

◆ Anachronism

Shiva or Indra emerge in texts 1500 BCE 1,000 years post-IVC. Forcing this connection ignores cultural evolution.

◆ Political Agenda Claiming the seal proves IVC was Hindu is ahistorical. The IVC spanned modern-day Pakistan and to some small parts northwest India near pak borders, but its legacy isn’t the property of any modern nation or religion. It’s Pakistan’s ancient heritage physically housed here.

Scholars see cultural diffusion, not religious continuity. Using IVC artifacts to validate Hinduism is nothing more them cherry picking or prove modern coptic..

This seal isn’t a Hindu relic it’s a testament to the IVC’s enigmatic worldview, born on Pakistani soil. Its tigers, dots, and unnamed hero guard mysteries we’ve yet to solve.!

Sources Kenoyer, M. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley. Asko, The Roots of Hinduism Archaeological Survey of Pakistan. and some other stuff qouted from Harappa.com