Place · Talpur hill fort · Pakistan
Ranikot Fort
A wall some twenty-six kilometres round, running along the ridges of the Kirthar range in Sindh and generally called the largest fort in the world by circumference. Dressed limestone ramparts with bastions link stretches where the cliff was left to do the work itself. Four gates — Sann, Amri, Shahpere and Mohan — open into the enclosure, and two inner citadels, Miri and Shergarh, hold the higher ground. The Talpurs rebuilt it around 1812 under Mir Karam Ali Khan, but who first walled the valley is unsettled.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.896, 67.903
Worth knowing
The walls enclose a valley with its own spring and seasonal stream rather than a town, so the garrison's water lay inside the defences — and no city has ever been found within the twenty-six kilometres.
The Talpur rebuilding of about 1812 is documented; earlier Sasanian, Scythian and Arab-period origins have all been proposed for the original circuit and none is established.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asKot Diji 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.
- AnalogueDerawar Fort
Two enormous forts raised on the desert margins of the lower Indus within a few decades of each other, by dynasties that were rivals. Derawar is the Abbasi Nawabs' work in Cholistan, forty square bastions in a solid drum-walled block standing clear of the sand. Ranikot is the Talpurs' in the Kirthar, a wall that disappears into the hills for kilometres at a stretch. One concentrates mass at a point on a caravan route; the other encloses a landscape. Both were built as the Sikhs and then the British closed in from the north-east.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ranikot Fort”. Pakistan UNESCO tentative list submission (1993); Sindh antiquities department survey records.
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