Province of Sindh Pakistan is part of the Indus Valley which is one of the world's earliest urban civilizations, along with its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.
At its peak, the Indus Civilization may have had a population of well
over five million. Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley
developed new techniques in handicraft (carnelian products,
seal carving) and metallurgy (copper, bronze, lead, and tin). The
civilization is noted for its cities built of brick, roadside drainage
system, and multi storied houses.
Photograph
showing four men fishing for palla at the water's edge, with nets and
earthernware floats, near Kotri in Sindh province, Pakistan, taken by an
unknown photographer in the 1890s. Sindh encompasses the Lower Indus
Basin with its delta, and is edged by the Arabian Sea on the south-west.
The palla (tenualosa ilisha), a type of shad, is the most important
variety of freshwater fish caught in Sindh. In February and March the
fish ascend the Indus River in large numbers for spawning. The most
common method of fishing for palla is to use a bag net attached to a
long pole forked at the end. The limbs of the fork are about five feet
in length and keep the net open as long as a double cord which runs
along them is kept taut. The fisherman floats downstream on a chatty or
earthen pot such as the ones seen in this view. His stomach forms a
stopper over the mouth of the chatty while he is in the water. The fish
are caught in the net then stabbed with an iron spike and placed into
the chatty. The waters of the Indus provided rich fisheries, but in
modern times these are under threat from over-fishing, abandoning of
traditional methods, and reduction of freshwater by the increase of
dams, barrages and reservoirs. This photograph is from an album of 91
prints apparently compiled by P. J. Corbett, a PWD engineer involved in
irrigation work at the famine relief camp at Shetpal Tank in 1897, and
in canal construction in Sindh in the early 1900s
