Peshawar: Difference between revisions

Peshawar is a city high in the mountainous border of the Indian subcontinent. It maintains it'sits place by it'sits control of the strategic Khyber Pass, an area that has given much inspiration to poets and explorers and much headache to intelligence officers. The Khyber Pass is one of the main routes of military and mercantile traffic between Central Asia and India and most empires desired either to control it or be friends with those who did; which means they desired Peshawar.

The exact time of it'sits founding is unclear. It is mentioned in Hindu and Persian Mythology, winning the acclaim as the "seventh most beautiful place on Earth". Latter Later, HelenisticHellenistic pioneers set up in this area. After that came the Sogdians and latter the Kushans, another of the periodic nomad waves to establish a famed civilization, used this as one of their most important bases. The city was passed from Empire to Empire until it rested in the hands of the British.

To the British it served a place probably analogicalanalogous to that it had served for many previous powers. It was a lynchpinlinchpin of the frontier., Bothboth a fortress and a forward base used to control warlike tribes and watch over the competing ambitions of the Russians. Generations of English officers knew it as a place where they would make their career.

After Independence it passed to the control of Pakistan, who used it much in the way England did. The tribes in the area remain much as they were, and recent wars make a listening post here imperative. Interestingly a Pakistani assigned here might feel his life was not so different from an English officer three generations before., Andand both might have much in common with a Sogdian or a Kushan, or a Sikh soldier defending this important post high up in the war-torn frontier. In many ways it is still the same town it has been for ages.

* ''[[Ballad of the King's Jest]]'' by [[Rudyard Kipling]]: A poem with beautiful descriptions of the setting around the framework of a two traders relaxing around a cookfirecook-fire at the Peshawar market and telling tales.

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