Sources

Rohri.net is a reference site, and this page shows the evidence behind it. The articles on Rohri, Bukkur island, Sukkur and Aror are built from three kinds of material: primary sources written at or near the time, colonial gazetteers and survey reports, and modern scholarship in archaeology and history. Where those sources disagree, the articles say so rather than picking the neatest version.

This page lists the works most often relied on, explains how dates are handled, and gives a citation format for school and university use. It is a working bibliography, not an exhaustive one; the notes at the end of individual articles name the specific sources used for each claim.

Primary sources Gazetteers & surveys Modern scholarship Archives & collections How dates are used How to cite Corrections

Primary sources

Works written by people who lived through, or close to, the events they describe. Each entry notes what the source is good for and where it is weak.

• Chachnama — a thirteenth-century Persian chronicle of the Arab conquest of Sindh, translated into English by Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg (1900). It is the earliest narrative account of Aror and Raja Dahir, and the basis for most popular telling of the 712 CE conquest. It is also legendary in places, so dates and speeches in it are treated as literary rather than documentary.
• Al-Biruni, Kitab al-Hind — written around 1030 CE; describes the Indus, the towns along it, local religion and geography from direct observation. The standard English translation is E. C. Sachau's Alberuni's India (1910).
• Ibn Battuta, Rihla — the Moroccan traveller passed through Sindh in the fourteenth century and left one of the few eyewitness descriptions of the river crossing and its towns. English translation by H. A. R. Gibb (Hakluyt Society).
• Mir Muhammad Masum Bhakkari, Tarikh-i Ma'sumi — a court history of Sindh compiled around 1600, covering the Arghun, Tarkhan and early Mughal periods.
• Mir Ali Sher Qani' Thattvi, Tuhfat al-Kiram — an eighteenth-century biographical dictionary of Sindhi scholars, poets and saints. It is the starting point for the histories of many local shrines, including those around Rohri.
• Alexander Burnes, Travels into Bokhara (London, 1834) — an East India Company officer's account of the Indus route on the eve of British expansion.
• Richard F. Burton, Sindh, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (London, 1851) — written while Burton was serving in Sindh after the 1843 conquest; detailed on customs, trades and town life, and sharp-edged in its opinions.

Editions are given as the version most often consulted; later reprints and Urdu and Sindhi translations exist for most of these titles. Page references in individual articles follow the edition named there.

Gazetteers and colonial surveys

Official compilations are the backbone of any local history of Sindh: they record populations, trades, land revenue, buildings and routes at a fixed moment, which makes them unusually checkable.

• The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford, 1908–1931) — the provincial and district volumes contain the standard colonial entry for Rohri, Sukkur and the talukas around them.
• Gazetteer of the Province of Sind (Bombay, 1874; revised editions to 1907) — taluka-by-taluka descriptions of towns, crops, crafts and monuments.
• Archaeological Survey of India reports — annual reports and provincial volumes, most usefully Henry Cousens, The Antiquities of Sind (Calcutta, 1929), which describes and dates the mosques, tombs and bridges of the region.
• Bombay Presidency administration reports — annual departmental summaries that record the construction of the Sukkur barrage, the Lansdowne Bridge and the railways.

Modern scholarship

• H. T. Lambrick, Sind: A General Introduction (Hyderabad, 1964) — still the standard short history of the province and the most readable bridge between the chronicles and modern research.
• Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (1998) — the standard account of Harappan urbanism, craft production and trade, used here for the Bronze Age setting of the Rohri crossing.
• Paolo Biagi and Andrea Pessina — fieldwork reports on the Rohri Hills flint mines, published in Ancient Sindh and related journals through the 1990s and 2000s. This is the core literature for the Stone Age quarry landscape immediately east of the city.
• Ancient Sindh (Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur) — the main regional journal for archaeology and heritage studies in upper Sindh.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre documentation — used for the regional context of Indus Valley sites and for the criteria applied to monuments of the wider region.

Archives and digital collections

For original research, these are the collections to start with. None of them is a substitute for reading the sources listed above, but they let you check them.

• British Library — India Office Records, including the Bombay Presidency proceedings and the maps and surveys that document the Indus crossing.
• Digital South Asia Library (University of Chicago) — digitised gazetteers, maps and reference works for South Asia.
• Internet Archive — scanned copies of the nineteenth-century gazetteers and travel accounts listed above.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre — nomination files and management plans for the region's listed sites.
• Archaeological Survey of India reports — the published annual and provincial volumes (many digitised on the Internet Archive) record the pre-1947 survey of monuments in Sindh, including Cousens's 1929 volume.

How dates are used on this site

• Prehistoric dates come from radiocarbon determinations and pottery sequences, and are given as calibrated ranges with "c." (circa). A single year for a Stone Age or Harappan event is a convenience, not a fact.
• Dynastic dates follow regnal years recorded in the chronicles or on coins. Where two sources disagree by more than a year or two, the article gives the range and says which source prefers which.
• Colonial and modern dates are taken from official records — construction dates, administration reports, census years — and are normally exact.
• 1947 is a hard boundary in the record: the administrative series that document Sindh before partition are held in archives in the United Kingdom and India, while post-1947 material is mostly in Pakistani collections. Continuity across that line has to be argued, not assumed.

How to cite Rohri.net

Use the page title, the site name, the publication date shown on the article and the full URL, with your access date. For example:

Musavi, Sayed Sajjad Hussain Shah. "Indus Epochs: Rohri, Bukkur & Sukkur
History — Part 1 (2500–145 BCE)." Rohri.net, 26 October 2026.
https://www.rohri.net/2026/10/indus-epochs-rohri-bukkur-sukkur-part-1.html
(accessed 1 November 2026).

For academic work, cite the underlying source rather than this site wherever you can: the articles name their sources precisely so that you can go past them. Reference-management software can import the page directly from its URL.

Corrections and additions

Local history is full of claims that get copied from one publication to the next without anyone checking the original. If you find an error here, or know a source we have missed, please say so — corrections are logged on the article that carries the claim.

Contact: Rohri.net contact page.

Using this page

Teachers and students will find a reading order, glossary and citation help on the guide for students and teachers. For the full list of articles by subject, use the heritage directory; for chronology, the Rohri timeline.