Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c5.6

c5.6

The northern group today converges on the Khyber Pass, which has been a major traffic-axis since the establishment of Peshāwar, the ancient Purushapura, as a metropolis about A.D. 100. An important earlier route, after penetrating the Hindu Kush south-east of the ancient Bactra and the modern Mazar-i-Sharif, followed the more northerly and devious line of the Kābul river with Chārsada, the ancient Pushkalāvati (twenty miles north-east of Peshāwar), as its immediate goal. South of the Khyber alternative tracks used and still use the Kurram valley and the Peiwar Pass; and farther south again the Tochi, Gumal and other valleys carry ancient thoroughfares from the direction of the Ghazni-Kandahār uplands. At this point, feeders from the southern group spread delta-like towards the Indus plain. The Zhob valley carries or carried a modest traffic north-north-eastwards from the direction of Quetta, itself the northernmost of the three focal points of the southern group; the others being Kalāt and Las Bela. South-eastwards from Quetta a route, now followed approximately by the railway, enters the plains *via* Sibi. Westwards from Quetta a camel-route leads towards Kirman and southern and western Iran. And at the southern end of our series, Las Bela, now ‘an insignificant Baluch town, . . . must have stood full in the tide of human immigration into India for centuries in the past. It is a true gateway’.¹