Place · Makran mound & legend site · Pakistan
Miri Qalat / Sassi Punnun's fort
A mound in the Kech valley near Turbat, occupied from the fourth millennium BCE and dug by the French mission under Roland Besenval, whose sequence runs from the Chalcolithic to the Islamic period — the anchor for Makran's prehistory, in a region with very few. Locally it is not known as a prehistoric site at all. It is Punnun's fort, from the Balochi romance of Sassi and Punnun, which Shāh Abdul Latīf made one of the surs of the Shāh Jo Risālo.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 26.034, 63.013
Worth knowing
The oldest settlement in the valley is known to the people around it by the name of its saddest story, so the archaeological label and the local one describe the same mound four thousand years apart.
The identification of the mound with the fort of the Sassi–Punnun narrative is traditional; the prehistoric sequence established by the French mission is independent of it.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencySutkagan Dor
The two fixed points of Harappan and pre-Harappan Makran. Sutkagan Dor, close to the Iranian border, is the westernmost Harappan site known and was read by Stein as a staging post on the coastal route toward Mesopotamia. Miri Qalat, in the Kech valley inland, was occupied from the fourth millennium and gives the sequence that the coast lacks. Between them they mark the land and sea arms of the same movement of goods west, which is why lapis, carnelian and Indus seals reach the Gulf at all.
- Canonised by textShāh Jo Risālo
A fourth-millennium mound in the Kech valley is known locally not by its archaeology but as the fort of Punnun, from the Balochi story of Sassi the washerman's daughter of Bhambore and Punnun of Kech, who is carried off by his brothers and whom she dies crossing the desert to reach. Shāh Abdul Latīf made the tale one of the surs of the Shāh Jo Risālo, and it is sung in Sindhi and Balochi alike. The oldest settlement in the valley therefore carries the name of its saddest narrative rather than its earliest one.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sassi Punnu Fort”. Roland Besenval, French Archaeological Mission in Makran, Miri Qalat excavation reports; Shāh Abdul Latīf, Shāh Jo Risālo, Sur Ma'zūri.
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