Attock Fort

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Attock Fort in the evening sun

Attock Fort is a former fortress in the north of the Punjab province of today's Pakistan . It stands on a rock ridge above the eastern, left bank of the Indus opposite the mouth of the Kabul . From there it dominated the river crossing over the Indus, which had been used since ancient times by the highway that connects Kabul in Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass with the Indian lowlands and finally with Calcutta and the natural port of Chittagong . The long-distance connection was later called Grand Trunk Road by the British , a name that is still used today, e.g. B. for the section of the national road N-5, which crosses the Indus on two modern bridges not far from the former river crossing.

The river crossing was already used by Alexander the Great during his Alexander campaign , as well as later by Babur , the founder of the Mughal Empire , or the British of the British East India Company and the subsequent British India .

The Attock Fort was built in the 16th century by Mughal Mughal Akbar I to guard the river crossing. In 1813 it fell to the latter in the Battle of Attock between the Durrani Empire and the Sikh Empire until it came under the control of the British East India Company in 1849 as a result of the Second Sikh War .

The Attock Fort is a listed building .

Attock

In keeping with local usage, the British called the place that had formed near the fortress over time, Attock . This name also served as a general geographical name, which included the place, the fortress and the river crossing and rather described the strategic importance of the site as a whole.

After the construction of the railway and the Attock Bridge in the 1880s, the British founded a town of Campbellpur around 20 km to the southwest . After Pakistan's independence in 1947, the name Campbellpur was changed to Attock , now the capital of the district of the same name with well over 100,000 inhabitants. To distinguish it, the place near the fortress was renamed Attock Kurd ( Little Attock ).

Web links

Commons : Attock Fort  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Attock . In: Der Große Brockhaus, 15th edition, Leipzig 1929
  2. ^ Governement of Pakistan, October 1997: Guidelines For Sensitive And Critical Areas; Appendix III, Archeological Sites and Monuments in the Punjab Province protected by the Federal Government ( Memento of October 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Pervaiz Munir Alvi: When Kabul comes to Attock . Article dated January 24, 2007 on All Things Pakistan.
  4. ↑ This change is often not reproduced in the publications that have appeared since then, so that Attock sometimes has the old British meaning, sometimes means today's city and often mixes both.

Coordinates: 33 ° 53 ′ 31 ″  N , 72 ° 14 ′ 4 ″  E