Place · Talpur fort · Pakistan
Kot Diji Fort
A brick fort raised on a narrow limestone ridge by Mir Sohrab Khan Talpur in the last years of the eighteenth century, guarding the Khairpur state's approach from the north. Fifty-odd bastions step up the spine of the rock in three tiers, with the walls following the ridge so closely that the fort is barely wider than the path. What makes it remarkable is what lies at its foot: the mound of Kot Diji, whose pre-Harappan phase names a whole ceramic horizon.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.345, 68.706
Worth knowing
One ridge carries a town of about 3000 BCE at its base and an eighteenth-century Talpur garrison on its crest, so the parade ground sits directly above the phase that gave its name to pre-Harappan Sindh.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyKot Diji
One limestone ridge in Khairpur carries both. At its foot is the mound of Kot Diji, whose pre-Harappan levels F. A. Khan excavated in the 1950s and whose distinctive pottery gave the Kot Dijian phase its name across Sindh and the Punjab. On its crest Mir Sohrab Khan Talpur built his fort in the 1790s, fifty bastions stepping up the spine of the rock. The Talpur garrison's parade ground therefore sits directly above the horizon that dates everything beneath it, and the two occupations are separated by roughly forty-eight centuries on the same outcrop.
- In the same set asRanikot Fort
Both belong to the Talpur fortification of Sindh between about 1790 and 1815, and between them they show its two answers to the same problem. At Kot Diji the walls follow a narrow ridge and the fort is barely wider than its own path, defending a route. At Ranikot the walls run twenty-six kilometres around an entire Kirthar valley, defending a refuge with its own water and no town inside it. The Talpurs were a dynasty with a short reign and very little revenue, and this is what they spent it on.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kot Diji Fort”. Sindh antiquities department records; F. A. Khan, Excavations at Kot Diji (1965) for the mound below.
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