Hindu Kush

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 1842, the Hindu Kush became a graveyard for a retreating British column. About 16,000 soldiers and camp followers were massacred as they fell back through the range toward India. The first British invasion of Afghanistan ended in disaster on those slopes.

  The mountains sit on the western edge of the great Himalayan system, in Central and South Asia. They carry a name that sounds like a threat. Why is the range called what it is called? What lifted it, and what flows out of it? And why did Greeks, Turks, Mongols, monks and merchants all push through its passes?

  78361469

• 2. A Contested Name

  ›

  Ibn Battuta, the traveler of the 14th century, is the first writer known to mention the name Hindu Kush. The early Arab geographers never used it. The name is therefore young compared with the mountains it describes.

  Other readings point to geography rather than death. The Mughal court historian Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak, writing in the 16th century, called the range Hindu Koh in his Ain-i-Akbari. Several scholars think Hindu Kush is a corruption of that phrase, meaning mountains of India. Nigel Allan adds that the name carried two meanings for centuries: mountains of India and sparkling snows of India. In the second meaning, Kush describes the quality of the snow. He also notes that Arab geographers treated the range as the frontier of Hindustan.

  Two more theories reach for older roots. One traces the name to ancient Avestan, with the sense of water mountain. The other comes from Hobson-Jobson, a 19th-century British dictionary. It suggested a corruption of the Latin Indicus Caucasus, the Caucasus of India. The same entry admitted that Ibn Battuta's explanation was already popular, even though it cast doubt on it. Some 19th-century gazetteers claimed the term first belonged to a single peak near the Kushan Pass, in country that had become a center of the Kushan Empire by the first century.

  In the age of Alexander the Great, Greeks called the range the Caucasus Indicus, to tell it apart from the Greater Caucasus between the Caspian and Black Seas. Late in the first millennium BCE, they named its extension Paropamisos. The Macedonians who served with Alexander simply said Kaukasos. In the medieval period the name Hindu Koh returned, as Abu al-Fazl's work shows from the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar.

  The oldest names are Indo-Iranian. In Vedic Sanskrit the range was upariśaina. In Avestan it was upāirisaēna, from a Proto-Iranian word meaning covered with juniper. The same word can also be read as beyond the reach of eagles.

  41216178

• 3. Rock, Ice and Passes

  ›

  Tirich Mir stands 7708 metres high in the Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, and no other summit in the Hindu Kush rises higher. Noshaq and Istoro Nal, two other giants, share the same district. The whole range runs about 800 kilometres across Central and South Asia, west of the Himalayas. It starts in central and eastern Afghanistan, crosses into northwestern Pakistan, and reaches far southeastern Tajikistan. Measured as a full system, it stretches about 966 kilometres, with a median width of about 240 kilometres from north to south.

  The mountains shrink as they run west. The average peak stands near 4500 metres. Around Kabul the heights fall to between 3500 and 4000 metres, while in the east they climb from 4500 to 6000 metres. Geographers describe the range in sections. The western part rises above 5100 metres, and the central part tops 6800 metres. The eastern section, called the High Hindu Kush, has peaks above 7000 metres. It lies mostly in northern Pakistan and in the Nuristan and Badakhshan provinces of Afghanistan. At the northeastern end, the range buttresses the Pamir Mountains near the point where the borders of China, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet. At its eastern end it merges into the Karakoram.

  About 160 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, a piece of Gondwana drifted away from East Africa. It carried the Indian subcontinent northeast. Nearly 55 million years ago, near the end of the Palaeocene, that landmass collided with the Eurasian Plate. The collision slowly raised the Himalayas, and the Hindu Kush with them. The rock is schist, gneiss and marble, cut by intrusions of granite and diorite. The range is still rising and prone to earthquakes, and major ones struck in 2005 and 2015. The north sees Himalayan winter and holds glaciers, while the southeastern end feels the fringe of the subcontinent's summer monsoons.

  The Salang Pass, at 3878 metres, is the most important crossing in Afghanistan. It lies north of Kabul and links the south of the country to the north. Beneath it runs the Salang Tunnel, at 3363 metres, built with Soviet financial and technological help. Engineers drilled 1.7 miles through the heart of the range and added a long network of galleries on the approach roads. Since the wars in Afghanistan began, parties have fought to control this strategic tunnel.

  The Tang-e Gharu gorge near Kabul offers another feat of engineering. A road built through it replaced the ancient Lataband Pass and sharply cut travel time toward the Khyber Pass on the Pakistani border. Elsewhere the crossings are higher. The Broghil Pass reaches 12,460 feet in Pakistan, and the Dorah Pass, between Pakistan and Afghanistan, reaches 14,000 feet. The Lowari Pass stands at 10,200 feet, the Darmodar Aghost Pass at 14,341 feet, and the Ishkoman Aghost Pass at 15,049 feet. The southern Shibar Pass, at 9000 feet, is the lowest, and it marks the place where the range ends. Called kotal, these passes form a strategic network for caravan traffic.

  8233233100

• 4. Water and Warming

  ›

  The Amu Darya, which the ancients called the Oxus, drains the northern side of the Hindu Kush, while the Indus valley lies to the south. Snow and ice melting in the range feed several major rivers. The Amu Darya flows on to the Aral Sea. The Helmand River is a major source of water for the Sistan Basin in southern Afghanistan and Iran. The Kabul River is a major tributary of the Indus. Smaller rivers rise here too, including the Khash, the Farah and the Arashkan, also called the Harut.

  These basins support the ecology and economy of the region, but the flow in the rivers swings widely. Extended droughts have long been commonplace, and reliance on the rivers has been a historical problem. The eastern end of the range, with its highest peaks, gathers heavy snow that stays stored for a long time.

  A land cover study by ICIMOD used 30-meter satellite imagery of the wider Hindu Kush Himalayan region, known as the HKH. Grassland was the largest cover, at 37.2 percent in 2000 and 38.2 percent in 2015. Barren ground came second, falling from 32.1 percent to 30.7 percent over the same years. Cropland rose from about 5.1 percent to about 5.4 percent. Snow and glaciers covered about 4 percent of the high-elevation section in 2018, and water bodies and riverbeds covered about 2 percent. Forest sits mostly in the wetter south and southeast, and grassland in the north and northwest.

  On the slopes of the Hindu Kush itself, trees are sparse and bushes stunted. Between about 1300 and 2300 metres, forests of hard-leaved evergreens dominate, with Quercus and wild olive. Above that, up to about 3300 metres, conifers take over, including cedar, spruce, fir, pine and juniper. The inner valleys get little rain and hold desert vegetation. The eastern Himalaya is richer. Between 1998 and 2008, scientists described 353 new species there, an average of 35 a year. The whole Hindu Kush Himalaya region is home to an estimated 35,000 plant species and more than 200 animal species.

  The 2019 Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment found that the region warmed by 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade between 1901 and 2014. Over the past 50 years the pace doubled to 0.2 degrees per decade. Glaciers have retreated nearly everywhere since the 1970s. The exceptions are the Karakoram, the eastern Pamir and the western Kunlun, where snowfall unexpectedly increased. Retreating ice has left more glacial lakes, and some may be prone to dangerous floods.

  The projections for the century ahead are stark. Even if warming is held to 1.5 degrees, one third of the region's glaciers are expected to be lost by 2100. Under the intermediate RCP4.5 scenario the loss is about 50 percent, and under the high-warming RCP8.5 scenario it exceeds two thirds. Meltwater is expected to speed up river flows until it peaks around 2060, then decline irreversibly. Up to 81 percent of the region's permafrost could degrade by the end of the century. The assessment also described three storylines for the years up to 2080, named business-as-usual, downhill and prosperous.

  2985868788

• 5. Monasteries and Manuscripts

  ›

  Xuanzang, the Chinese Buddhist monk, visited a monastery at Bamiyan in the 7th century. It belonged to the Lokottaravada branch of the early Mahasamghika school, which was prominent in that area. Manuscripts from the monastery's collection were later found in caves of the Hindu Kush. They are written on birchbark and palm leaf and include Mahayana sutras. Some are in the Gandhari language and Kharosthi script, while others are in Sanskrit written in forms of the Gupta script. They now belong to the Schøyen Collection.

  Alfred Foucher argued that the Hindu Kush and nearby lands had gradually turned Buddhist by the 1st century CE. From this base, Buddhism crossed the mountains into the Oxus valley of Central Asia. The southeastern valleys, which lead toward the Indus Valley, hosted monasteries, scholars from distant lands and merchants. The giant rock-carved Bamiyan Buddhas stood at the southern and western end of the range. Taliban Islamists destroyed them in 2001.

  North of the mountains, in the Hephthalite dominion, Buddhism was the leading religion by the middle of the first millennium CE. Its followers lived alongside Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Nestorian Christians. The later fate of Buddhism in the region was harsh. It disappeared, and locals were forced to convert to Islam.

  Some valleys held out far longer. The land called Kafiristan kept ancient polytheistic beliefs into the 19th century. Pre-Islamic peoples of the range included the Shins, Yeshkuns, Chiliss, Neemchas Koli, Palus, Gaware and Krammins. In 1896, Afghans under Amir Abdur Rahman Khan invaded Kafiristan and converted its people to Islam. The region was renamed Nuristan, which means land of light.

  434546443

• 6. Roads of Conquest

  ›

  Darius I of the Achaemenid Empire is the earliest ruler on record to take note of the Hindu Kush. Alexander the Great entered the Indian subcontinent through the range in the spring of 329 BCE. His army moved past the Afghan valleys, and by 327 BCE it was heading for the Indus. In the two years between, his forces built several towns in the region. After Alexander died in 323 BCE, the Seleucid Empire held the region, according to the ancient historian Strabo. Around 305 BCE it passed to the Maurya Empire, and near the start of the common era it joined the Kushan Empire.

  In the mid to late seventh century, the Tang dynasty of China destroyed the Northern Turks. Its rule then reached the Oxus valley, along the northern side of the Hindu Kush. By the eighth century, Western Turks and Arabs controlled that region. Islamic armies did not take the valleys of the Hindu Kush until the 9th century, even though they had conquered southern parts of the Indus valley such as Sind. In 808, Kabul fell to the army of Al-Ma'mun, the seventh Abbasid caliph. The local king agreed to accept Islam and pay annual tribute to the caliph. André Wink notes that inscriptions suggest Islam had reached the Kabul area earlier. Later, Sabuktigin took all of Jayapala's dominion west of Peshawar.

  Mahmud of Ghazni came to power in 998 in Ghazna, south of Kabul and the Hindu Kush. He raided the kingdoms of north India seventeen times, as far as the Yamuna River, until 1030. He plundered treasuries, sacked cities and destroyed Hindu temples. Each campaign began in spring, and his army returned to its mountain base before the monsoon arrived. He extended Islamic rule only into western Punjab.

  The scholar Al-Biruni was deported to the northwest of the subcontinent in 1017, after a war that Mahmud won. He stayed about fifteen years, learned Sanskrit, and translated many Indian texts. He wrote about Indian society, culture, sciences and religion in Persian and Arabic. In 1019 he recorded a solar eclipse in what is now Laghman Province of Afghanistan. He also found local Indian literature hard to reach, and he blamed Mahmud. In his words, "Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became the atoms scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people." He added that Hindu sciences had fled to Kashmir, Benares and other places beyond Mahmud's reach.

  In the late 12th century, the Ghurid ruler Mu'izz al-Din shifted his sultanate's base from Ghazni toward the Yamuna River and Delhi. That move helped seed the Delhi Sultanate and brought Islamic rule to the northern plains. Genghis Khan invaded the region from the northeast during the Mongol conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire. Ibn Battuta passed through the Hindu Kush to reach the Delhi Sultanate. Timur used the mountain passes for his invasion of 1398. He marched to Delhi, plundering and killing along the way, and he returned through the range with wealth and captured slaves.

  Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, was a descendant of Timur with roots in Central Asia. He first established himself and his army in Kabul and the Hindu Kush region. In 1526 he moved into north India and won the Battle of Panipat. That victory ended the last dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate and began the Mughal era.

  8455565966

• 7. Treasure and Human Cargo

  ›

  The Kowkcheh Valley holds ancient mines that produced lapis lazuli. Walter Schumann judged the western Hindu Kush the source of the finest lapis lazuli for thousands of years. Gem-grade emeralds come from the valley of the Panjsher River, north of Kabul, and from some of its tributaries.

  Silver from the mines of the Hindu Kush even reached Europe's money. Around 850, extraction was at its greatest, and silver lost value against gold. In response, the silver content of the Carolingian denarius was increased so that the coin kept its intrinsic value.

  The passes also connected the slave markets of Central Asia with people seized in South Asia. Seizures became intense in and after the 8th century CE. Evidence suggests that "hundreds of thousands" of people were taken from India in different periods of Islamic rule. John Coatsworth and others write that, before Akbar, the slave trade of the Mughal and Delhi Sultanate eras sent thousands of Hindus north each year to pay for horses and other goods. Trade across the range was broader than slavery, though, and also moved food, goods, horses and weapons.

  Raiding, hunting and kidnapping for the slave trade continued on a large scale around the Hindu Kush through the 19th century. A British Anti-Slavery Society report of 1874 described the governor of Faizabad, Mir Ghulam Bey. He kept 8,000 horses and cavalrymen who routinely captured non-Muslims and Shia Muslims as slaves. The report also named feudal lords such as Ameer Sheer Ali among those alleged to be involved. The isolated communities of the Hindu Kush were among the targets of these slave-hunting expeditions.

  4172747375

• 8. A Frontier of Empires

  ›

  For the British Empire, the Hindu Kush was a geographical barrier. Few British officials met Central Asian peoples directly, and information was scarce. The British relied on tribal chiefs and on Sadozai and Barakzai noblemen for news. They generally downplayed reports of slavery and other violence, for the sake of geopolitical strategy.

  In the colonial era, the range was informally treated as the dividing line between Russian and British areas of influence in Afghanistan. During the Cold War it became a strategic theatre. In the 1980s, Soviet forces and their Afghan allies fought the Afghan mujahideen, who were supplied through Pakistan. After the Soviet withdrawal and the end of the Cold War, many mujahideen became Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. They imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law and used Kabul and these mountains as bases. Other mujahideen joined the Northern Alliance to oppose Taliban rule.

  After the terror attacks of the 11th of September 2001 in New York City and Washington D.C., an American and ISAF campaign targeted al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. It made the Hindu Kush a militarized conflict zone once again. The range continues to matter to contemporary warfare in Afghanistan.

  7779808160