Place · Indus-mouth port · Pakistan

Barbarikon / Banbhore

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

24.750, 67.530

Connections (9)

• Port forSutkagan Dor

  The Makran shore and the Indus mouth carried the same westward traffic in different millennia: Sutkagan Dor in the third millennium BCE, at the far edge of the Harappan network, and Barbarikon at the delta in the Greek and Roman accounts two thousand years later. Banbhore, generally identified with it, also holds one of the earliest mosques in the subcontinent, so the same coast served three quite separate trading worlds.

• CampaignMihira Bhoja

  The Gurjara-Pratiharas' largest achievement was defensive and is almost never stated: they held the line against Arab expansion out of Sindh for two centuries after the conquest of 712, which is why the Ganges plain was not an Umayyad or Abbasid province. Al-Masudi and al-Baladhuri both describe the kingdom of al-Juzr as the principal enemy of the Muslims in India, with four armies facing the four quarters — and the Indus delta ports are where that frontier ran.

• Trade routeBharuch (Barygaza)

  Barbarikon at the Indus mouth and Barygaza at the Narmada's were the two great western entries, and the Periplus treats them as alternatives serving different hinterlands: Sindh and the Saka-Parthian courts upriver, or Gujarat, Malwa and the Deccan. The cargoes differ accordingly, with Chinese silk and Afghan lapis appearing only at the Indus port.

• Route adjacencyAror / Brahmanabad

  Aror, Brahmanabad and the Indus-mouth port at Banbhore are the three points of the Sindh corridor, on a river that has since moved away from all of them. Sea cargo landed at the delta and went upriver to these towns and on to Multan and the Punjab; the Arab conquest of 711 followed the same line in reverse, from the coast inland.

• River flowMakli Necropolis, Thatta

  Banbhore and Thatta are the ancient and the early modern ports of the lower Indus, and the river abandoned both. Sindh's whole urban history is a sequence of harbours stranded by a channel that moves across a province: Aror, Brahmanabad, Banbhore, Thatta, and now Karachi, which was chosen precisely because it sits on a coast rather than on the river.

• Successor capital ofManora & Varun Dev Mandir

  The same coast, the same function, fifteen hundred years apart. Barbarikon at Banbhore was the Indus-mouth port the Periplus names, handling the river's trade with the Gulf and Egypt, and it died as the delta channels shifted away from it. Karachi took the role over in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Manora is the headland that made it possible — the sandspit that shelters the harbour entrance. The Talpur fort on Manora was shelled by the British in February 1839, and the port they then built is the one that replaced Banbhore for good.

• Site adjacencyKahu-Jo-Darro, Mirpurkhas

  Buddhist Sindh is thinly attested and these are two of its firmest points, about two hundred kilometres apart on the lower Indus. Banbhore, the port, has yielded a stupa and Buddhist material alongside the mosque and the Hindu remains that make it one of the most layered sites in Pakistan. Kahu-Jo-Darro is a full stupa with its relic deposit intact. Together they indicate that the delta and the plain behind it held monastic establishments through the Kushan and Gupta centuries, which the Arab conquest accounts also imply.

• CampaignIslam

  The land route began at the Indus mouth. Muhammad bin Qasim took Debal in 711 — the port at Banbhore, where a mosque of that date has been excavated beside the Hindu and Buddhist remains — and Sindh became an Umayyad province while the rest of the subcontinent was untouched. It stopped there for three centuries. Banbhore is therefore both the oldest mosque site in the subcontinent and one of its most layered, which is the whole history in one mound.

• Site adjacencyKarachi

  Barbarikon / Banbhore — the Roman-era Indus port that later became Debal, taken by Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 — sits 60 kilometres east of modern Karachi on the Indus delta. The port's silting and the Indus shifting course drove its abandonment around 1200; Karachi's harbour became the delta's working seaport only after this older port had died.

On these journeys

• Indo-Roman & monsoon trade
• Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush
• Sindh — the Indus and its saints

Sources

Banbhore excavation reports

• Wikipedia