Place · rock carving corridor · Pakistan
Shatial & Chilas
Also known as Shatial & Chilas — the Upper Indus carvings
Some fifty thousand petroglyphs and five thousand inscriptions along a hundred kilometres of the Indus gorge where the route from Kashmir and Gandhara climbs toward the Karakoram passes — stupas, hunting scenes, and the names of travellers in Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian, Bactrian, Middle Persian, Hebrew and Chinese.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.420, 73.630
Worth knowing
It is the working register of the route: merchants and pilgrims cut their names where they waited to cross. The Sogdian inscriptions at Shatial mark a point where Sogdian traders apparently stopped and handed goods on. Much of the corridor will be submerged by the Diamer-Bhasha dam.
Connections (4)
- Route adjacencyHunza
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.
- Route adjacencyGilgit
The Indus gorge carvings at Shatial and Chilas and the Gilgit manuscripts belong to the same corridor and the same centuries. The carvings are the travellers' register — stupas, ibex, names in eight scripts, cut where people waited to cross — and the manuscripts are what some of them were carrying: birch-bark Buddhist texts of the fifth to seventh centuries, found in a collapsing stupa near Naupur by children playing on the mound.
- In the same set asManthal Buddha Rock, Skardu
The upper Indus between Chilas and Skardu is one continuous carved corridor. At Shatial and Chilas the rocks by the river carry thousands of petroglyphs and inscriptions in Brahmi, Kharoshthi, Sogdian, Bactrian and Chinese, left by traders and pilgrims crossing between Gandhara and the Tarim. Manthal, upstream at Skardu, is the monumental end of the same practice — a full Buddha with attendants on a granite boulder rather than a traveller's scratched stupa. One route, two scales of carving.
- Route adjacencyNanga Parbat
The carvings are where they are because of the mountain. The Indus, forced into a gorge as it turns the corner of the Himalaya round Nanga Parbat, gave the only practicable line between Gandhara and the Tarim basin, and everyone who used it stopped at the same few places. At Shatial and Chilas, below the massif, the rocks by the river carry thousands of petroglyphs and inscriptions in Brahmi, Kharoshthi, Sogdian, Bactrian and Chinese. The Karakoram Highway now runs the identical route through the identical gorge.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Shatial”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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