Harappa.com
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The site Harappa.com was launched in November 1995. Initially, this site began with 10 pages. Since then, there has been a steady growth in the number of new pages added to the site and by the end of 2007 there were more than 2,000 pages on the site.
Harappa.com goal is to bring long buried and unknown artifacts from the past to contemporary audiences.
The site’s major focus is the ancient Indus Valley. Many of the world’s experts on this Bronze Age culture in India and Pakistan are regular contributors to the site. These include J.M. Kenoyer (University of Wisconsin), Richard H. Meadow (Harvard University), Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki), Iravatham Mahadevan (Indus Research Institute), Kuldeep Bhan (M.S.U. Baroda) and many more.
There is a multi-level analysis of the Indus script, featuring interviews and papers with key analysts like Mahadevan, Parpola, Ahmad Hasan Dani and the current research being undertaken by scientists at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai. All viewpoints are presented in the words of their authors with illustrations.
New discoveries by archaeologists are posted on the site. This included the discovery of some of the earliest possible writing found in South Asia, from nearly 3500 BCE in 1999, which was later picked up by the BBC [1]. Recent discoveries in Gola Dhoro, Gujarat were also featured here first. There are over a thousand images of in a growing library of ancient Indus objects and places available. Many of these images have educated students and scholars about what remains the world’s largest and least known ancient urban civilization.
Another part of the site deals with the history of India and Pakistan during the Raj or British Indian period, roughly 1857 until Independence in 1947. Early media objects including old photographs, rare archival film from unique private archives like The Shah Collection, early postcards, lithographs, engravings and other ephemera have been used to bring forth the colonial era. The voices of Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru can be heard on the site. There are also substantial audio interviews made with important witnesses from the period, such as the writer Attia Hosain, Princess Abida Sultaan of Bhopal and the Pushto poet Ghani Khan. These are part of a larger oral archive on the Pakistani Independence struggle built over many years.
Since its inception, Harappa.com has recorded a continuous traffic growth. Today the site receives many thousands of visitors each day, from all over the world, but especially the US, India, the UK and Pakistan. The site was named Best Online Reference by the New Media Awards InVision Awards (1996), received an Honorable Mention from the Prix Ars Electronica (1997)[2], a Britannica Internet Guide award (2000), and is part of the Thomson scholarly Current Web Contents (CWC) index [3]. It has been called "fabulous" by the About.com Archaeology Guide [4].
[edit] References
- Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. "Art of the First Cities in the Third Millennium B.C.". In Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. October 2004
