Place · mountain pass · Pakistan

Khyber Pass

/d̪ə xebər d̪ara/

Function

Travel & migration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.080, 71.220 (approximate)

Connections (8)

• CampaignHydaspes (Jhelum) battlefield

  Alexander entered by the northern passes in 327 BCE, beat Porus on the Jhelum in 326 in the heaviest fighting of the whole campaign, and turned back at the Beas when his army refused to go further. He had been eight years marching and they had been told India ended much sooner than it does. What he left behind was a chain of Greek settlements in Bactria and the northwest, and the encounter through which classical Europe learned that India existed.

• Journey legKābul

  The stone crossed the Khyber twice in sixty years — west with Ahmad Shah Durrani after Nader's assassination in 1747, and back east with the exiled Shah Shuja to Punjab in 1812. The pass carried almost every invasion of India and, in this case, the same object in both directions, which is a fair summary of what the Kabul–Lahore relationship was in those decades.

• Alternative toBolan 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.

• Trade routeBalkh

  Balkh and the Khyber are the two halves of the route Buddhism took out of India and Greek sculptural convention took into it. The Kushans held both ends and minted coins with Greek, Iranian and Indian deities on them because their empire straddled the pass. When the Hunas broke the Gandharan monasteries the traffic did not resume, and the northern transmission continued from Kashmir instead.

• Route adjacencyQissa Khwāni Bazaar, Peshawar

  Qissa Khwāni is the Peshawar end of the Khyber. Caravans that came down through the pass from Kabul and Bukhara unloaded in this bazaar, and the storytellers it is named for were paid in its tea houses by traders with nothing to do between arrival and departure — the last commercial oral-narrative trade on the route. The pass supplied the audience and the bazaar supplied the reciters, and the arrangement lasted as long as the caravans did, which was into the twentieth century.

• Route adjacencyDarra Ādam Khel

  Darra Ādam Khel sits in the Kohat pass, in the belt that the Frontier Crimes Regulation placed outside ordinary law, and that is the condition the gun bazaar grew in. Afridi smiths copied whatever was brought to them — Lee-Enfields, Mausers, later Kalashnikovs — by hand, from the object rather than from drawings, and sold openly a few hours' drive from a colonial and then a national capital that could not licence them. When the tribal districts merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018 the legal exception ended and the trade contracted.

• Site adjacencyTorkham & the Durand Line

  Torkham is the Khyber's western mouth, and the Durand Line runs across it. The pass had been the road between Kabul and the Indus for as long as there were roads; in November 1893 an agreement signed at Kabul turned a stretch of it into a boundary, and the result is that the most-used crossing between the two countries sits at the point where a caravan route was cut in half. The Khyber's forts, the railway and the modern terminal are all arranged around a line drawn in an afternoon.

• CampaignThe Faqīr of Ipi (Mīrzālī Khān)

  The Waziristan campaign of 1936 to 1947 was the last and longest of the frontier wars, and it was fought in the country behind the passes rather than at them. The British committed more troops to it in the late 1930s than to any other internal commitment in India — against an opponent who never held a town, had no artillery, and moved between caves. The expense appears in the Indian budget while the war in Europe was beginning, which is the clearest measure of what the frontier cost to hold.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• Overland corridors
• The frontier — the Durand Line and the Pashtun century
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush

Sources

Historical geography of the northwest frontier

• Wikipedia