Place · Mughal Indus fort · Pakistan
Attock Fort
Akbar's fort at the Indus, built between 1581 and 1583 under Khawāja Shamsuddīn Khawāfī to hold the crossing on the road to Kabul, during the campaign against his half-brother Mirzā Hakīm. It is the point at which the Grand Trunk Road meets the river, and therefore the gate between the Punjab and the frontier: Nādir Shāh, Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, the Sikhs and the British all had to take or pass it. The railway bridge of 1883 was thrown across beside it.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.892, 72.237
Worth knowing
The name has been read as attak, an obstruction, and the fort's whole purpose was to be one — the last defensible line before the Indus for an army coming down from Kabul, and the first for one going up.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueHund / Udabhāndapura
Two crossings of the same river, two thousand years apart, chosen for the same reason. Alexander bridged the Indus at Hund in 327 BCE and the Hindu Shahis later made that ford their capital. Akbar built Attock in 1581 about forty kilometres downstream, to hold the crossing on the road to Kabul during the campaign against his half-brother. Once the Mughal fort was there, the traffic moved to it: the Grand Trunk Road and later the railway bridge cross at Attock, and Hund became a village.
- Site adjacencyLahore Fort & Shalimar
Attock is where the northern highway crosses the Indus, and Lahore is the Punjab capital it feeds into — one fort at the mountain gate, one city at the plain's centre, and a hundred and eighty kilometres between them. Akbar built Attock Fort in 1581 to hold that crossing while his empire's Punjab stretch was administered from Lahore Fort of 1566. Nādir Shāh, Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, Ranjīt Singh and the British Indian army all moved between the two points on that road.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Attock Fort”. Abū al-Fazl, Akbarnāma, on the 1581 Kabul campaign; Punjab archaeology department records.
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