Debunking the Myth of the Silk Road
24 December 2017
Eos on December 3 carried an article on the journey of some people along the Silk Road. Some parts of this series were printed earlier and I admit I did not read any. In fact, I do not read anything written on the Silk Road by the average Pakistani. The simple fact is we have no clue about the geography and history of the classic Silk Road.
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| The old trade route dubbed the ‘Silk Road’ by 19th century German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen |
One of the accompanying images in the mentioned article has a man and a woman standing in front of a sign saying ‘Old Silk Road’. The location of this sign is somewhere between Gilgit and Hunza. That the classic Silk Road ever entered what is now Pakistan by way of Hunza is patent rubbish. But if people repeat the same falsehood a few times, let alone over decades, it becomes established truth.
Read more »Labels: Historic Myths, History, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:29,
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Travel writers are myth busters
07 April 2016
I first wrote in 1986 that the Kalasha people of Chitral are NOT of Greek descent. That was a time when everyone, including everyone, believed that. Now, thankfully, DNA testing has shown my assertion to be true.
There have always been quasi-religious stories of the power of holy men. The story of the struggle between Wali Kandahari and Guru Nanak and the resulting hand print in Hasan Abdal is shown to be false by history. Wali Kandahari died twenty years before Guru Nanak was born. Not that Guru Nanak was not one of the greatest spiritual leader.
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The myth of the Karakoram Highway being the old Silk Road. The road between Hunza and Kashgar was a local travel route. No long distance trade came into the subcontinent this way. Least of all silk. The old trade route from, say, Yarkand or Kashgar was over the Karakoram Pass in the east that led to Leh (Ladakh) and eventually Srinagar via Kargil.
Labels: About, Historic Myths, Silk Road, Travel Writer
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:00,
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The Silk Road
13 June 2015
Notwithstanding the lies we believe in about the Silk Road passing through Hunza and Gilgit, there was one ancient road that also brought silk to India. Having left Karghalik (south of Yarkand), it came due south by way of Sanju, crossed the pass of the same name to the high altitude camp ground of Shahidula. At Sanju, incidentally, the road was joined by another coming in from Khotan in the east. Of Khotan we know that it sat on the southernmost branch of the three-branch Silk Road.
From Shahidula, the road made the Karakoram Pass, 5,200 metres high. Then down it was into the valley of the Shyok River to Leh, the capital of Ladakh. Thence onward, it was nice and easy to the caravanserais of Srinagar.
Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Myth of the Silk Road
13 September 2014
That being settled, it has to be said that the point of the piece in question was lost on these persons. The point I was making was that no silk ever came from China to India by the road through Hunza and Gilgit. The fact is that when the Karakoram Highway was first opened in the early 1980s, it was not, I repeat, NOT billed as the Silk Road. The ‘Silk Road’ Hotel in Guilmit (pluse a co8ple more elsewhere along the road) came later as well as the bus service of the same name that does not cross the border into China.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Historic Myths, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Silk Road
12 September 2014
Until the Karakoram Highway — connecting Abbottabad with Kashgar via Gilgit and Hunza — came near completion in the mid-1980s, no one knew that the Silk Road ran through Pakistan. With the great highroad ready and with lorries plying its nearly seven hundred kilometre-length, suddenly someone upped and told us that this was the fabled Silk Road. And we, the Great Unwashed of this land, gobbled it up hook, line and stinker (pun intended).
We, or our bureaucracy, have spent sixty-four very diligent years creating a huge body of lies, lies and lies that now passes for history. (No wonder with such industry occupying us, nothing else of any consequence ever got done in this sorry land.) The Karakoram Highway being known as the Silk Road is another one of those many nuggets of official mendacity.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Historic roadways
31 May 2014
One thing has been drilled into our heads more than any other: Sher Shah's expertise at building and his predilection for the baoli well with steps leading down to the level of the water. It has now come to such a pass that the minute Pakistanis see a stepped well in, say, Greenland or at the South Pole, they mechanically attribute it to Sher Shah.
Eighteen hundred years before Sher Shah, in the year 300 BCE, Megasthenes came to the court of the Mauryan king Chandragupta as an ambassador from Seleucus Nikator, the king of Syria. For about fifteen years, this man lived in Patliputra (Patna) and travelled extensively about the country. Thank heavens for the Greeks' penchant for writing, upon his return home he wrote the Indika which survives to our time in fragments. Reading it one can only wonder what a delightful compendium of things Indian it must have been in its original complete form.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Punjab, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Walking history’s highway
29 April 2013
I hobbled across the floor of large shattered rocks, the remnants of a glacier past, and painfully hauled myself over the low saddle behind which my two companions had disappeared only shortly before. Then I saw it, the object of a long-held desire: the concrete pillar that marks the Mintaka Pass between China and Pakistan.
The meadows on the way to Morkushi
But I could not believe I was actually there. For one, as we came up to the last bit of glacial remains, my guide Irfanullah had said that the boundary pillar lay about an hour away. Secondly, I had imagined the pillar to be much taller. Why, it marked the boundary between two countries and ought to be of monumental proportions, yet as it was, the column was just about the height of a man, a metre and seventy centimetres. Having caught sight of it, it was not without a good deal of gratitude that I trudged the last painful steps to the crest of the pass.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mintaka, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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