A report on South Asia and Indus River

Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia.

The Indus region, which covers most of present day Pakistan, was the site of several successive ancient cultures including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation (2,800–1,800 BCE) at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

– "India (Republic of India; Bharat Ganarajya)" is a country in South Asia.

Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley civilisation of the third millennium BCE.

The Indus Valley civilisation (IVC), also known as the Harappan civilisation or Indus civilisation, and described as ancient Indus, was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE.

The civilisation flourished both in the alluvial plain of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial monsoon-fed rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the Ghaggar-Hakra, a seasonal river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan.

The Hindu Kush is an 800 km mountain range in Central and South Asia to the west of the Himalayas.

It divides the valley of the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus) to the north from the Indus River valley to the south.

The terms Indian subcontinent and South Asia are often used interchangeably to denote the region, although the geopolitical term of South Asia frequently includes Afghanistan, which may otherwise be classified as Central Asian.

The Himalayas (from Brahmaputra River in the east to Indus River in the west), Karakoram (from Indus River in the east to Yarkand River in the west) and the Hindu Kush mountains (from Yarkand River westwards) form its northern boundary.

Punjab (ਪੰਜਾਬ; ; ; also romanised as Panjāb or Panj-Āb) is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising areas of eastern Pakistan and northwestern India.

In the 16th century Mughal Empire it referred to a relatively smaller area between the Indus and the Sutlej rivers.

Some of the world's major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo–Brahmaputra, rise in the vicinity of the Himalayas, and their combined drainage basin is home to some 600 million people; 53 million people live in the Himalayas.

The Himalayas have profoundly shaped the cultures of South Asia and Tibet.

Sindh's landscape consists mostly of alluvial plains flanking the Indus River, the Thar Desert in the eastern portion of the province along the international border with India, and the Kirthar Mountains in the western portion of the province.

In 712, Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the Sindh and Indus Valley, bringing South Asian societies into contact with Islam.

The Iranian plateau or Persian plateau is a geological feature in Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia.

From the Caspian in the northwest to Balochistan in the southeast, the Iranian plateau extends for close to 2000 km. It encompasses a large part of Iran, all of Afghanistan, and the parts of Pakistan that are situated west of the Indus River; covering an area of some 3700000 km2.

Later conquests under Cyrus and his successors expanded the empire to include Lydia, Babylon, Egypt, parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper, as well as the lands to the west of the Indus and Oxus rivers.

Owing to its geopolitical position, Iran has influenced cultures as far as Greece and Italy to the west, Russia to the north, the Arabian Peninsula to the south, and south and east Asia to the east.