Ibn Battuta first wrote the name that may mean “Hindu-killer”
The Hindu Kush runs about 800 kilometres across Afghanistan into northwestern Pakistan and a corner of Tajikistan, west of the Himalayas. Tirich Mir, at 7,708 metres, caps a range that divides the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus) from the Indus drainage.
Early Arab geographers never used the name; it surfaces first with Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century. He explained it as Hindu-slayer, because enslaved people from the subcontinent perished in the cold while traders marched them to Turkestan. Rival readings abound. The Mughal chronicler Abu al-Fazl wrote Hindu Koh, mountains of India, and Nigel Allan notes that Kush may be a soft form of the Persian kuh or a word for sparkling snow. Alexander’s Macedonians called the range Kaukasos, the Indian Caucasus, while Vedic and Avestan texts used forms meaning covered with juniper.
At its northeastern end the chain props up the Pamirs near where China, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, then heads southwest. Most summits sit between 4,400 and 5,200 metres, shrinking to about 3,500 near Kabul, while the eastern High Hindu Kush in Chitral carries Tirich Mir, Noshaq and Istoro Nal. The whole system stretches roughly 966 kilometres, is still rising and shook in major earthquakes in 2005 and 2015. Its schist, gneiss, marble and granite trace back to India’s departure from the African side of Gondwana some 160 million years back and its collision with Eurasia nearly 55 million years ago.
Caravans crossed on high passes called kotal. The Salang Tunnel, bored 2.7 kilometres through the range at 3,363 metres with Soviet help, links northern and southern Afghanistan and has been fought over repeatedly; Shibar, at about 2,700 metres, is the lowest crossing. Snowmelt feeds the Amu Darya toward the Aral Sea, the Helmand into the Sistan Basin and the Kabul River into the Indus, though droughts often strain them.
Buddhism once flourished here, as the Bamiyan Buddhas showed, and monasteries lined trade routes linking Central and South Asia. Kafiristan held to older polytheistic beliefs until the Afghan emirate converted it in the nineteenth century and renamed it Nuristan, land of light. Invaders of the subcontinent repeatedly marched through these valleys.
Source: Hindu Kush
