Indus River
— the river that wrote the first cities.
Not only on a wall.
“The river rises near Mount Kailash and runs three thousand kilometres to the sea, gathering the Punjab on its way down. The Karakoram cliffs hold it narrow at first, the plains let it spread. Five thousand years ago the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro grew along its banks. Most of the water now goes to wheat and cotton before it reaches Karachi.
Indus River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Indus runs about 3,180 kilometres from a spring near Mount Kailash in western Tibet, across Ladakh, then south through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea at Karachi. Its drainage basin covers roughly 1.12 million square kilometres. The river's five major Punjab tributaries — the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej — join it through the Panjnad confluence in southern Punjab. The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, brokered by the World Bank, still governs how the basin's water is shared between the two countries.
The colour shifts by season and reach. In the upper Karakoram the river runs grey-green with rock flour ground from the Baltoro and Hispar glaciers. Below Skardu it carries one of the highest sediment loads of any river in the world — about 250 million tonnes a year before the Tarbela Dam captured most of it in 1976. By the time the water reaches the Sindh delta it has slowed to a silty brown, and in dry season the lower reaches sometimes do not reach the sea at all.
The river runs on a snowmelt-and-monsoon cycle. Discharge is lowest from December through February, when the upper catchments are frozen. Snow and ice melt drives the rise through April and May. The summer monsoon, which reaches the basin from late June into September, pushes the peak flow — historically more than 30,000 cubic metres per second at Sukkur in big years. The 2010 floods, which followed an unusually heavy July monsoon, displaced about 20 million people and submerged a fifth of Pakistan's land area.