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Who Are South Asians?

Ashgabat

Dushanbe

Mary

11

Shache Xining

Mashhad

Herat

Kabul

Golmud

Hotan

Mazar-e Sharif

Peshawar

Srinagar

Islamabad Jammu Kandahar

Gujranwala

Amritsar Jalandhar Lahore Chandigarh Ludhiana Multan Saharanpur

Quetta

Lhasa Xigazê Meerut Ghaziabad New Delhi Faridabad Kathmandu Thimphu Agra Lucknow Jaipur Dispur Jodhpur Guwahati Gwalior Kanpur Patna Bhagalpur Kota Allahabad Varanasi Rajshahi

Delhi

Bandar-e-Abbas Larkana

Gulf of Oman

Hyderabad

Muscat

Karachi

Dhanbad

Ahmadabad Vadodara

Nagpur

Surat

Akola

Population Per sq. mi.

250 and over 100–249 50–99 25–49 5–24 Less than 5

650 and over 250–649 128–249 63–127 13–62 Less than 13

Over 5,000,000 2,000,000–5,000,000 1,000,000–2,000,000 250,000–1,000,000 Under 250,000

Chittagong

Mandalay

Cuttack Bhubaneshwar

Sittwe

Nay Pyi Taw Chiang Mai

Nanded

Kolhapur

Hyderabad

Yangon

Vishakhapatnam

Gulbarga Vijayawada

Bay of Bengal

Hubli

Bangalore

Mangalore

Chennai

Mysore Salem

Andaman Sea

Pondicherry Coimbatore Tiruchchirappalli

Kozhikode

Madurai

Kochi

Cities

(Statistics reflect metropolitan areas.)

Khulna

Pune Sholapur

Per sq. km

Dhaka

Asansol

Kolkata

Raipur

Bhilai

Nasik Aurangabad

Mumbai

Ranchi Jamshedpur

Indore

Rajkot

Arabian Sea

Jabalpur

Bhopal

Baoshan

Thiruvananthapuram Kandy Colombo

Male

Laccadive Sea

0

400 miles

0 400 kilometers Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection

Banda Aceh

IN DIAN OCE AN

FIGURE 6.10 Population density of South Asia. People are primarily clustered in major cities, along the Ganges and Indus Rivers, and in coastal areas of South Asia.

The organization or arrangement of an ancient city reveals what the people and their culture valued and how their land use, art, engineering, and architecture represented their cultural values. In Mesopotamia and the Nile River Valley, researchers can clearly identify the leadership class by how the city was distinctly divided into zones that each had a certain purpose, known as the city’s functional zonation. In the Nile River Valley, elaborate structures such as pyramids where leaders were buried with riches beyond imagination point clearly to the leaders of society and also to the thousands of slaves who built the structures. In Mesopotamia, temples called ziggurats stood at the center of cities as a home for gods. Marking the connection between the leadership class (who took their domain from

gods) and the agricultural surplus, storehouses for the agricultural surplus were located adjacent to the ziggurats in ancient Mesopotamia. The Indus civilization, which flourished from 2900 BCE to 1900 BCE, was a contemporary of the Nile civilization in Egypt and the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (Figure  6.11). The Indus civilization was different from civilizations in the Nile and Mesopotamia in two remarkable ways: First, the Indus cities have no palaces or temples, no obvious signs of who was in the leadership class (presuming there was a leadership class), and second, the Indus civilization was enormous. It included over 2,000 towns and up to 5 million people over a land area twice the size of civilizations in the Nile Valley or Mesopotamia.