Place · mountain pass · Pakistan
Bolan Pass
The 320-kilometre mountain corridor at Bolan in Baluchistan, Pakistan, 120 kilometres southwest of the Khyber, opening from the Iranian plateau onto the Kachi plain and the lower Indus — the second great north-western gate of the subcontinent. The Bolan Pass connects Afghanistan's southern provinces (Kandahar and Helmand) with Mehrgarh, Quetta and the Sindh plains. Alexander's return march in 325 BCE used the Bolan corridor; the Mughals and the British used it in parallel to the Khyber. Mehrgarh — the Neolithic site of 7000 BCE — sits at the Bolan's mouth, suggesting the pass's role in the agricultural dispersal into the subcontinent from the Iranian plateau. The Quetta railway loop climbs the Bolan Pass today.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.800, 67.400 (approximate)
Connections (3)
- Alternative toKhyber Pass
The Khyber and the Bolan are the two doors, and they open onto different countries. The Bolan leads to the Kachi plain, Mehrgarh and the lower Indus, and carried the neolithic package of wheat, barley and cattle in the seventh millennium BCE. The Khyber leads to Peshawar, Taxila and the Punjab, and carried almost every army. Both were in use continuously for eight thousand years.
- Route adjacencyMehrgarh
Mehrgarh sits at the mouth of the Bolan pass, and that position is the whole explanation of it: the domesticated wheat, barley, sheep, goat and cattle in its lowest levels have their nearest parallels in west Asia, and this is the gap they came through. Cotton, dentistry and copper smelting all appear here before any Indus city exists.
- Route adjacencyQuetta
Quetta exists because of the Bolan. The pass is the only practicable way from the Indus plains up onto the Balochistan plateau, and the city sits at the head of it where the road forks for Kandahar. That is why the British, having marched an army up the Bolan in 1839 and lost another coming back, garrisoned Quetta permanently in 1877 and made it the base from which Afghanistan was watched for seventy years. The railway through the pass, hacked up the gorge in the 1880s, is one of the steepest main lines ever built in the subcontinent.
On these journeys
Sources
Historical geography of Balochistan
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