Place · rock inscription site · Pakistan
Hunza
Also known as Hunza — the Sacred Rock of Haldeikish
A boulder outcrop in the Hunza gorge covered in carvings and inscriptions left over two thousand years by people going over the Khunjerab into the Tarim basin — ibex, riders, and names in Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian and Tibetan.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 36.320, 74.650
Worth knowing
Haldeikish means the place of many ibex. The Karakoram Highway was blasted along this gorge in the 1960s and 70s and destroyed a great deal of the record; what survives is fenced off a few metres from the traffic.
Connections (3)
- Route adjacencyShatial & Chilas
The Indus gorge carvings at Shatial and Chilas and the Sacred Rock at Haldeikish in Hunza are two halves of one record, about two hundred kilometres apart on the same climb from Gandhara to the Khunjerab. Together they hold something like fifty thousand images and five thousand inscriptions in eight scripts, left by merchants and pilgrims waiting to cross. The Karakoram Highway destroyed part of it and the Diamer-Bhasha dam will drown much of the rest.
- Trade routeKashgar
From the Hunza gorge the route climbs to the Khunjerab and drops into the Tarim basin toward Kashgar — the shortest line between the subcontinent and Central Asia and one of the highest. The Sacred Rock at Haldeikish is covered in the names of the people who took it, in Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian and Tibetan. The Karakoram Highway now follows the same line and destroyed a great deal of the record building it.
- Site withinBaltit Fort, Hunza
Baltit Fort sits within the Hunza Valley in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, 100 kilometres north of Gilgit. The 700-year-old Mir of Hunza's fort at Karimabad commands the Hunza Valley from an outcrop above Baltit village and served as the Hunza royal residence from the 13-century Mir dynasty until the 1945 move to a modern residence. The 1992 Aga Khan Trust for Culture restoration preserved the fort as the Baltit Fort Museum, Hunza's chief heritage landmark.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sacred Rock of Hunza”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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