DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.36954#0018
to us by the authorities of Pakistan. And even without this
restraint, much of the remains elsewhere preserved in the soil
were here destroyed by terrible floods sweeping again and again
the base of the Indus valley. In 1841, when a natural barrage,
formed by a huge landslide in the gorges north of the Nanga
Parbat finally broke, hundreds of Sikh soldiers, camping on the
banks of the Indus near Attock were drowned; and a similar
inundation in 1859 let the Indus rise for ninety feet during one
day — at the same place (DREW 1875: 414—421).
However, for a part of my interpretations I could refer to texts
written in China (dynastic histories, reports of Buddhist pil-
grims), in Eastern Iran, in the Tarim Basin, or Kashmir. As
almost no ancient coins were found in these distant mountains,
the typical "index artefact" of the Indo-Iranian borderland is
lacking.
Since 1984 we have tried to gain the interest of a broader public
for this province of rock-art by arranging exhibitions of large-size
photographs in several European museums. That proved to be a
great help for obtaining the financial support which we badly
needed for our programme. In order to write the text of a per-
tinent catalogue (JETTMAR—THEWALT 1985) in a compre-
hensible way — explaining the sequence of the photos — I had to
transform my reflections into a coherent "story" of what had
happened during the Prehistoric and Early Historic periods in the
valleys which we will call the Karakorum Region — strictly speak-
ing, the area between the Hindukush-Karakorum ranges and the
westernmost Himalaya.
This is not the place for a synopsis of this kind; but a few state-
ments must be made in advance of the publication of the linguis-
tic articles which form the body of this volume:
The inscriptions which have been properly studied in respect of
content and palaeography offer valuable although not unshake-
able points of reference for the classification of most of the as-
sociated "figural" petroglyphs. They tell about their date and
meaning, forming a rough guide-line during the first millen-
nium A.D.
From the second century B.C. onwards — when ZHANG QIAN
collected concrete information — we have an almost continuous
XIV
restraint, much of the remains elsewhere preserved in the soil
were here destroyed by terrible floods sweeping again and again
the base of the Indus valley. In 1841, when a natural barrage,
formed by a huge landslide in the gorges north of the Nanga
Parbat finally broke, hundreds of Sikh soldiers, camping on the
banks of the Indus near Attock were drowned; and a similar
inundation in 1859 let the Indus rise for ninety feet during one
day — at the same place (DREW 1875: 414—421).
However, for a part of my interpretations I could refer to texts
written in China (dynastic histories, reports of Buddhist pil-
grims), in Eastern Iran, in the Tarim Basin, or Kashmir. As
almost no ancient coins were found in these distant mountains,
the typical "index artefact" of the Indo-Iranian borderland is
lacking.
Since 1984 we have tried to gain the interest of a broader public
for this province of rock-art by arranging exhibitions of large-size
photographs in several European museums. That proved to be a
great help for obtaining the financial support which we badly
needed for our programme. In order to write the text of a per-
tinent catalogue (JETTMAR—THEWALT 1985) in a compre-
hensible way — explaining the sequence of the photos — I had to
transform my reflections into a coherent "story" of what had
happened during the Prehistoric and Early Historic periods in the
valleys which we will call the Karakorum Region — strictly speak-
ing, the area between the Hindukush-Karakorum ranges and the
westernmost Himalaya.
This is not the place for a synopsis of this kind; but a few state-
ments must be made in advance of the publication of the linguis-
tic articles which form the body of this volume:
The inscriptions which have been properly studied in respect of
content and palaeography offer valuable although not unshake-
able points of reference for the classification of most of the as-
sociated "figural" petroglyphs. They tell about their date and
meaning, forming a rough guide-line during the first millen-
nium A.D.
From the second century B.C. onwards — when ZHANG QIAN
collected concrete information — we have an almost continuous
XIV