Zaman was leading us, our intellectual but absent guide was my friend and anthropologist Zulfiqar Kalhora, the master on rock and funerary art in Sindh. Our first stop was at Saddo Mazzo where some carvings sit precariously on a rock-face marked to be blown up. Here, we found a humped bull with magnificent horns. In his paper Zulfiqar tells us that such a bull with ‘joined legs’ — that is depicting two legs instead of four — dates back to the Neolithic period. For laypersons that would be 6500-4500 BCE.

 

When Mohenjo-Daro was in its fullest glory, hunters and herders — perhaps with some connection with that great city perhaps not — were walking through these hills taking time off from their chores to create these works of art that would one day be our milestones to the past. Shortly after the end of the great Ice Age, this area would have known far greater precipitation: the Nali stream would have been a powerful torrent and the hills covered with lush green vegetation. In these forests the creators of the rock art fattened their herds and lived off the swamp deer and Sindh ibex whose images I have seen at another site in the Kirthar.