Khyber Pass
The Khyber Pass is a mountain pass in the northwest of Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan. It connects the town of Landi Kotal to the Valley of Peshawar at Jamrud by traversing part of the Spin Ghar mountains. An integral part of the ancient Silk Road, it has long had substantial cultural and geopolitical significance for Eurasian trade. Throughout history, it has been an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia and a vital strategic military choke point for various states that came to control it; the summit of the pass is 5 km inside Pakistan at Landi Kotal, while the lowest point is at Jamrud in the Valley of Peshawar. The Khyber Pass is part of Asian Highway 1. In a number of editions of the Indo-Aryan Migration Theory, the Indo-Aryans began relocating to India through the Khbar Pass. Well-known invasions of the area have been predominantly through the Khyber Pass, such as the invasions by Cyrus, Darius I, Genghis Khan and Mongols such as Duwa, Qutlugh Khwaja and Kebek.
Prior to the Kushan era, the Khyber Pass was not a used trade route. The Khyber Pass became a critical part of the Silk Road, which connected Shanghai in the East to Cádiz on the coast of Spain; the Parthian and Roman Empires fought for control of passes such as these to gain access to the silk, jade and other luxuries moving from China to Western Asia and Europe. Through the Khyber Pass, Gandhara became a regional center of trade connecting Bagram in Afghanistan to Taxila in Pakistan, adding Indian luxury goods such as ivory and textiles to the Silk Road commerce. Among the Muslim invasions of the Indian subcontinent, the famous invaders coming through the Khyber Pass are Mahmud Ghaznavi, the Afghan Muhammad Ghori and the Turkic-Mongols. Sikhs under Ranjit Singh captured the Khyber Pass in 1834 until they were defeated by the forces of Wazir Akbar Khan in 1837. Hari Singh Nalwa, who manned the Khyber Pass for years, became a household name in Afghanistan. To the north of the Khyber Pass lies the country of the Mullagori tribe.
To the south is Afridi Tirah, while the inhabitants of villages in the Pass itself are Afridi clansmen. Throughout the centuries the Pashtun clans the Afridis and the Afghan Shinwaris, have regarded the Pass as their own preserve and have levied a toll on travellers for safe conduct. Since this has long been their main source of income, resistance to challenges to the Shinwaris' authority has been fierce. For strategic reasons, after the First World War the British built a engineered railway through the Pass; the Khyber Pass Railway from Jamrud, near Peshawar, to the Afghan border near Landi Kotal was opened in 1925. During World War II concrete "dragon's teeth" were erected on the valley floor due to British fears of a German tank invasion of British India; the Pass became known to thousands of Westerners and Japanese who traveled it in the days of the hippie trail, taking a bus or car from Kabul to the Afghan border. At the Pakistani frontier post, travelers were advised not to wander away from the road, as the location was a controlled Federally Administered Tribal Area.
After customs formalities, a quick daylight drive through the Pass was made. Monuments left by British Army units, as well as hillside forts, could be viewed from the highway; the area of the Khyber Pass has been connected with a counterfeit arms industry, making various types of weapons known to gun collectors as Khyber Pass copies, using local steel and blacksmiths' forges. During the war in Afghanistan, the Khyber Pass has been a major route for resupplying military armament and food to the NATO forces in the Afghan theater of conflict since the US started the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. 80 percent of the NATO and US supplies that are brought in by road were transported through the Khyber Pass. Furthermore, it has been used to transport civilians from the Afghan side to the Pakistani one; until the end of 2007, this route had been safe since the tribes living there were paid by the Pakistani government to keep the area safe. However, since that year, the Taliban began to control the region, so there started to exist wider tensions in their political relationship.
Since the end of 2008, supply convoys and depots in this western part have come under attack by elements from or sympathetic to the Pakistani Taliban. In January 2009, Pakistan sealed off the bridge as part of a military offensive against Taliban guerrillas; this military operation was focused on Jamrud, a district on the Khyber road. The target was to “dynamite or bulldoze homes belonging to men suspected of harboring or supporting Taliban militants or carrying out other illegal activities”; the result meant that 45 homes were destroyed. In addition, two children and one woman were killed; as a response, in early February 2009, Taliban insurgents cut off the Khyber Pass temporarily by blowing up a key bridge. This unstable situation in northwest Pakistan, made the US and NATO broaden supply routes, through Central Asia; the option of supplying material through the Iranian far southeastern port of Chabahar was considered. In 2010, the complicated relationship with Pakistan became tougher after the NATO forces, under the pretext of mitigating the Taliban's power over this area, executed an attack with drones over the Durand line, passing the frontier of Afghanistan and killing three Pakistani soldiers.
Pakistan answered by closing the pass on 30 September
Urdu
Urdu —or, more Modern Standard Urdu—is a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. It is the official national lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, having official status in the six states of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi, it is a registered regional language of Nepal. Apart from specialized vocabulary, spoken Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, another recognized register of Hindustani; the Urdu variant of Hindustani received recognition and patronage under British rule when the British replaced the local official languages with English and Hindustani written in Nastaʿlīq script, as the official language in North and Northwestern India. Religious and political factors pushed for a distinction between Urdu and Hindi in India, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy. According to Nationalencyklopedin's 2010 estimates, Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with 66 million speakers.
According to Ethnologue's 2017 estimates, along with standard Hindi and the languages of the Hindi belt, is the 3rd most spoken language in the world, with 329.1 million native speakers, 697.4 million total speakers. Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani, it evolved from the medieval Apabhraṃśa register of the preceding Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language, the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages. Around 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit, 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit; because Persian-speaking sultans ruled the Indian subcontinent for a number of years, Urdu was influenced by Persian and to a lesser extent, which have contributed to about 25% of Urdu's vocabulary. Although the word Urdu is derived from the Turkic word ordu or orda, from which English horde is derived, Turkic borrowings in Urdu are minimal and Urdu is not genetically related to the Turkic languages. Urdu words originating from Chagatai and Arabic were borrowed through Persian and hence are Persianized versions of the original words.
For instance, the Arabic ta' marbuta changes to te. Contrary to popular belief, Urdu did not borrow from the Turkish language, but from Chagatai, a Turkic language from Central Asia. Urdu and Turkish borrowed from Arabic and Persian, hence the similarity in pronunciation of many Urdu and Turkish words. Arabic influence in the region began with the late first-millennium Muslim conquests of the Indian subcontinent; the Persian language was introduced into the subcontinent a few centuries by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties including that of Mahmud of Ghazni. The Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on the developing Hindustani; the name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was known as Hindi.
The language was known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. Hindustani in Persian script was used by Muslims and Hindus, but was current chiefly in Muslim-influenced society; the communal nature of the language lasted until it replaced Persian as the official language in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English. Hindustani was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian; this triggered a Hindu backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. This literary standard called "Hindi" replaced Urdu as the official language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of "Urdu" for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus, a divide, formalized with the division of India and Pakistan after independence. There have been attempts to "purify" Urdu and Hindi, by purging Urdu of Sanskrit words, Hindi of Persian loanwords, new vocabulary draws from Persian and Arabic for Urdu and from Sanskrit for Hindi.
English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language. There are over 100 million native speakers of Urdu in India and Pakistan together: there were 52 million and 80.5 million Urdu speakers in India as per the 2001 and 2011 censuses respectively. However, a knowledge of Urdu allows one to speak with far more people than that, because Hindustani, of which Urdu is one variety, is the third most spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English; because of the difficulty in distinguishing between Urdu and Hindi speakers in India and Pakistan, as well as estimating the number of people for whom Urdu is a second language, the estimated number of speakers is uncertain and controversial. Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is spoken, including in Pakistan. Urdu in Pakistan has undergone changes and has incorporated and borrowed many words from region
Summit
A summit is a point on a surface, higher in elevation than all points adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex and zenith are synonymous; the term top is used only for a mountain peak, located at some distance from the nearest point of higher elevation. For example, a big massive rock next to the main summit of a mountain is not considered a summit. Summits near a higher peak, with some prominence or isolation, but not reaching a certain cutoff value for the quantities, are considered subsummits of the higher peak, are considered part of the same mountain. A pyramidal peak is an exaggerated form produced by ice erosion of a mountain top. Summit may refer to the highest point along a line, trail, or route; the highest summit in the world is Everest with height of 8844.43 m above sea level. The first official ascent was made by Sir Edmund Hillary, they reached the mountain`s peak in 1953. Whether a highest point is classified as a summit, a sub peak or a separate mountain is subjective; the UIAA definition of a peak is.
Otherwise, it's a subpeak. In many parts of the western United States, the term summit refers to the highest point along a road, highway, or railroad. For example, the highest point along Interstate 80 in California is referred to as Donner Summit and the highest point on Interstate 5 is Siskiyou Mountain Summit. A summit climbing differs from the common mountaineering. Summit expedition requires: 1+ year of training, a good physical shape, a special gear. Although a huge part of climber’s stuff can be left and taken at the base camps or given to porters, there is a long list of personal equipment. In addition to common mountaineers’ gear, Summit climbers need to take Diamox and bottles of oxygen. There are special requirements for crampons, ice axe, rappel device, etc. Geoid Hill – Landform that extends above the surrounding terrain Nadir Summit accordance Peak finder Summit Climbing Gear List
Islamabad
Islamabad is the capital city of Pakistan, is federally administered as part of the Islamabad Capital Territory. Built as a planned city in the 1960s to replace Karachi as Pakistan's capital, Islamabad is noted for its high standards of living and abundant greenery. With a population of 1,014,825 as per the 2017 Census, Islamabad is the 9th largest city in Pakistan, while the larger Islamabad-Rawalpindi metropolitan area is the country's third largest with a population exceeding four million; the city is the political seat of Pakistan and is administered by the Islamabad Metropolitan Corporation, supported by the Capital Development Authority. Islamabad is located in the Pothohar Plateau in the northeastern part of the country, between Rawalpindi District and the Margalla Hills National Park to the north; the region has been a part of the crossroads of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with the Margalla Pass acting as the gateway between the two regions. The city's master-plan, designed by Greek architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, divides the city into eight zones, including administrative, diplomatic enclave, residential areas, educational sectors, industrial sectors, commercial areas, rural and green areas.
The city is known for the presence of several parks and forests, including the Margalla Hills National Park and Shakarparian Park. The city is home to several landmarks, including the Faisal Mosque, the largest mosque in South Asia and the fourth largest in the world. Other landmarks include Democracy Square. Islamabad is a beta-world city; the city has the highest cost of living in Pakistan, its population is dominated by middle and upper middle class citizens. The city is home to twenty universities, including the Quaid-e-Azam University, PIEAS, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology and NUST; the city is one of the safest in Pakistan, has an expansive surveillance system with 1,900 CCTV cameras. The name of the city, Islamabad, is derived from two words and abad, meaning "City of Islam". Islam is an urdu word which refers to the religion of Islam and -abad is a Persian suffix indicating an inhabited place or city; the name is influenced from the Mughal name for the port city of Chittagong known as Islamabad.
Islamabad Capital Territory, located on the Pothohar Plateau of the Punjab region, is considered one of the earliest sites of human settlement in Asia. Some of the earliest Stone Age artefacts in the world have been found on the plateau, dating from 100,000 to 500,000 years ago. Rudimentary stones recovered from the terraces of the Soan River testify to the endeavours of early man in the inter-glacial period. Items of pottery and utensils dating back to prehistory have been found. Excavations by Dr. Abdul Ghafoor Lone reveal evidence of a prehistoric culture in the area. Relics and human skulls have been found dating back to 5000 BCE that indicate the region was home to Neolithic peoples who settled on the banks of the Swaan River, who developed small communities in the region around 3000 BCE; the Indus Valley Civilization flourished in the region between the 23rd and 18th centuries BCE. The area was an early settlement of the Aryan community which migrated into the region from Central Asia. Many great armies such as those of Zahiruddin Babur, Genghis Khan and Ahmad Shah Durrani crossed the region during their invasions of the Indian Subcontinent.
In 2015-16, the Federal Department of Archaeology and Museums, with the financial support of National Fund for Cultural Heritage, carried out initial archaeological excavations in which unearthed the remains of a Buddhist stupa at Ban Faqiran, near the Shah Allah Ditta caves, dated to the 2nd to the 5th century CE. When Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the southern port city of Karachi was its first national capital. In the 1960s, Islamabad was constructed as a forward capital for several reasons. Traditionally, development in Pakistan was focused on the colonial centre of Karachi - a tradition which President Ayub Khan wished to abolish. Karachi was located at the southern end of the country, exposed to attacks from the Arabian Sea. Pakistan needed a capital, accessible from all parts of the country. Karachi, a business centre, was considered unsuitable because of intervention of business interests in government affairs; the newly selected location of Islamabad was closer to the army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the disputed territory of Kashmir in the north.
In 1958, a commission was constituted to select a suitable site for the national capital with particular emphasis on location, climate and defence requirements, along with other attributes. After extensive study, a thorough review of potential sites, the commission recommended the area northeast of Rawalpindi in 1959. A Greek firm of architects, led by Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, designed the master plan of the city based on a grid plan, triangular in shape with its apex towards the Margalla Hills; the capital was not moved directly from Karachi to Islamabad. Islamabad has attracted people from all over Pakistan, making it one of the most cosmopolitan and urbanised cities of Pakistan; as the capital city it has hosted a number of important meetings, such as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit. In October 2005, the city suffered damage due to the 2005 Kashmir earthquake which had a magnitude of 7.6. Isla
Burzil Pass
The Burzil Pass is an ancient pass in northern India, is part of the historic caravan route between Srinagar and Gilgit. The pass lies close to the Line of Control demarcating India and Pakistan, which has since closed the Burzil; the crest of the pass is wide and covered in summer with alpine grass vegetation. The Astor river originates from western slopes of the pass, it is the oldest route connecting Gilgit with Skardu through Deosai Plateau. The travellers used ponies to cross the pass. At the beginning of the 20th century a hut of post couriers was situated on the crest of the pass, they brought mail from India to China. Gilgit is some 367 km from Srinagar by road over the Burzil Pass above the northern banks of Wular Lake and Gurez. From Astore to Burzil Pass Road the following main places are in the route: Gorikot, Astore River Bridge, Dad Khiran, Chilam Chowki
Pakistan
Pakistan the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world’s sixth-most populous country with a population exceeding 212,742,631 people. In area, it is the 33rd-largest country. Pakistan has a 1,046-kilometre coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, China in the far northeast, it is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the northwest, shares a maritime border with Oman. The territory that now constitutes Pakistan was the site of several ancient cultures and intertwined with the history of the broader Indian subcontinent; the ancient history involves the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, was home to kingdoms ruled by people of different faiths and cultures, including Hindus, Indo-Greeks, Turco-Mongols and Sikhs. The area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Alexander III of Macedon, the Seleucid Empire, the Indian Maurya Empire, the Gupta Empire, the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mongol Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Afghan Durrani Empire, the Sikh Empire and, most the British Empire.
Pakistan is the only country to have been created in the name of Islam. It is an ethnically and linguistically diverse country, with a diverse geography and wildlife. A dominion, Pakistan adopted a constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic. An ethnic civil war and Indian military intervention in 1971 resulted in the secession of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh. In 1973, Pakistan adopted a new constitution which stipulated that all laws are to conform to the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Quran and Sunnah. A regional and middle power, Pakistan has the sixth-largest standing armed forces in the world and is a nuclear power as well as a declared nuclear-weapons state, the second in South Asia and the only nation in the Muslim world to have that status. Pakistan has a semi-industrialised economy with a well-integrated agriculture sector and a growing services sector, it is ranked among the emerging and growth-leading economies of the world, is backed by one of the world's largest and fastest-growing middle class.
Pakistan's political history since independence has been characterized by periods of military rule, political instability and conflicts with India. The country continues to face challenging problems, including overpopulation, poverty and corruption. Pakistan is a member of the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the OIC, the Commonwealth of Nations, the SAARC and the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition; the name Pakistan means "land of the pure" in Urdu and Persian. It alludes to the word pāk meaning pure in Pashto; the suffix ـستان is a Persian word meaning the place of, recalls the synonymous Sanskrit word sthāna स्थान. The name of the country was coined in 1933 as Pakstan by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in his pamphlet Now or Never, using it as an acronym referring to the names of the five northern regions of British India: Punjab, Kashmir and Baluchistan; the letter i was incorporated to ease pronunciation. Some of the earliest ancient human civilisations in South Asia originated from areas encompassing present-day Pakistan.
The earliest known inhabitants in the region were Soanian during the Lower Paleolithic, of whom stone tools have been found in the Soan Valley of Punjab. 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 at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro; the Vedic period was characterised by an Indo-Aryan culture. Multan was an important Hindu pilgrimage centre; the Vedic civilisation flourished in the ancient Gandhāran city of Takṣaśilā, now Taxila in the Punjab, founded around 1000 BCE. Successive ancient empires and kingdoms ruled the region: the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Alexander the Great's empire in 326 BCE and the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya and extended by Ashoka the Great, until 185 BCE; the Indo-Greek Kingdom founded by Demetrius of Bactria included Gandhara and Punjab and reached its greatest extent under Menander, prospering the Greco-Buddhist culture in the region.
Taxila had one of the earliest universities and centres of higher education in the world, established during the late Vedic period in 6th century BCE. The school consisted of several monasteries without large dormitories or lecture halls where the religious instruction was provided on an individualistic basis; the ancient university was documented by the invading forces of Alexander the Great, "the like of which had not been seen in Greece," and was recorded by Chinese pilgrims in the 4th or 5th century CE. At its zenith, the Rai Dynasty of Sindh ruled the surrounding territories; the Pala Dynasty was the last Buddhist empire, under Dharmapala and Devapala, stretched across South Asia from what is now Bangladesh through Northern India to Pakistan. The Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in 711 CE; the Pakistan government's official chronol
Chilas
Chilas is a small town located in the Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan on the river Indus. It is part of the Silk Road connected by the Karakoram Highway and N-90 National Highway, which link it to Islamabad and Peshawar in the southwest, via Hazara and Malakand Divisions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In the north, Chilas is connected to the Chinese cities of Tashkurgan and Kashgar in Xinjiang, via Gilgit, Aliabad and the Khunjerab Pass. Chilas comes under Gilgit-Baltistan, it is the Headquarter of District Diamir.1The weather is hot and dry in the summer and dry and cold in the winter. It can be reached through Karakoram highway and from the Kaghan valley passing over the Babusar Pass. Chilas is situated on the left bank of the mighty river Indus. Foreigners may need permission to travel in Chilas. Karakoram International University has opened its sub campus in Chilas to educate the students Even after Kashmiri-British rule was imposed a century ago, the Indus Valley west of Chilas was a hornet’s nest of tiny republics.
Though administratively lumped with Gilgit and its neighbours are temperamentally more like Indus Kohistan owing to a hostile environment and the same Sunni Muslim orthodoxy. Their ancestors were forcibly converted centuries ago by Pashtun crusaders from their original Pagan religions, whereas hardly anyone north of Chilas in the Gilgit-Baltistan province is Sunni. Although their lives a tiny Shia community which converted to Shia Islam some decades ago in the 80's; the large Chilas Fort was first garrisoned to protect British supply lines over the Babusar Pass, beefed up after local tribes nearly overran it in 1893. Now a police post, it has put a lid on Chilas, though not on the Darel and Tangir Valleys to the west. Chilasis are Shina speakers, with some Pashtun settlers speaking Pashto. Urdu and some English are spoken. There are more than 50,000 pieces of Buddhist rock art and inscriptions all along the Karakoram Highway in Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan that are concentrated at ten major sites between Hunza and Shatial, more have been found in the area of Skardu and Shigar.
The carvings were left by various invaders and pilgrims who passed along the trade route, as well as by locals. The earliest date back to between 5000 and 1000 BC, showing single animals, triangular men and hunting scenes in which the animals sometimes are larger than the hunters; these carvings were pecked into the rocks with stone tools and are covered with a thick patina that proves their age. — Buddhist — carvings were sometimes executed with a sharp chisel. The ethnologist Karl Jettmar has tried to piece together the history of the area from various inscriptions and recorded his findings in "Rockcarvings and Inscriptions in the Northern Areas of Pakistan" and the released "Between Gandhara and the Silk Roads: Rock carvings along the Karakoram Highway"; the Kharoshthi term "Kaboa" appears in a short commemorative Kharosthi inscription found from Chilas as reported by the Archaeological Department of Pakistan. The inscription has been transcribed and interpreted by Ahmad Hasan Dani, a Pakistani archaeologist and linguist, among the foremost authorities on South Asian archaeology and history.
According to Dani, Kaboa or Kamboa of the inscription is a Kharoshthised form of Sanskrit Kamboja. Thus, it seems that Chilas formed part of ancient Kamboja kingdom. Karakoram Highway Parri Bangla Gilgit-Baltistan Chilas Airport Jettmar, Karl & Thewalt, Volker: Zwischen Gandhāra und den Seidenstraßen: Felsbilder am Karakorum Highway: Entdeckungen deutsch-pakistanischer Expeditionen 1979-1984. 1985. Mainz am Philipp von Zabern. Jettmar, Karl: Bolor & Dardistan. Karl Jettmar. Islamabad, National Institute of Folk Heritage. Leitner, G. W.: Dardistan in 1866, 1886 and 1893: Being An Account of the History, Customs, Legends and Songs of Gilgit, Kandia Yasin, Hunza and other parts of the Hindukush, as a supplement to the second edition of The Hunza and Nagyr Handbook. And An Epitome of Part III of the author's "The Languages and Races of Dardistan." First Reprint 1978. Manjusri Publishing House, New Delhi. Rod MacNeil: The Fight at Chilas. Soldiers of the Queen. March 1999. Mountains on Webshots.com
N-15 National Highway
