Chenab city that faced Alexander’s Mallian campaign
Multan, Pakistan’s sixth-largest city, sits on the east bank of the Chenab in Punjab and ranks among Asia’s oldest continuously inhabited places. Probably the Malli capital that Alexander the Great stormed in 326 BCE, it later earned the nickname City of Saints for its many Sufi shrines.
The origin of the name is uncertain. It may come from Malli-istan, after the Malli tribe, from the god of the ancient Multan Sun Temple, or from Old Persian or Sanskrit words. Early Harappan sites nearby date to around 3000 BCE, and Hindu texts credit the sage Kashyapa with founding the city. When Alexander attacked, the Malli and their neighbours reportedly fielded some 90,000 fighters against about 50,000 Greeks, and during the assault on the citadel Alexander took an arrow through the lung.
Arab rule arrived in 712, when Muhammad ibn Qasim took the city after a two-month siege, though most residents stayed non-Muslim for decades. From 855 it was the capital of the Emirate of Multan. The Sun Temple still stood in the busiest quarter and, by some accounts, supplied up to 30 per cent of state revenue, giving the city the Arabic nickname Frontier House of Gold. Tenth-century rulers lived in a camp outside the walls and rode in on an elephant each Friday for prayers.
Ismaili Qarmatians later seized power, prompting Mahmud of Ghazni to march on Multan in 1005, 1007 and 1010. On the last campaign he deposed its ruler and destroyed the Ismaili mosque built over the old temple’s ruins. Muhammad Ghori took the city in 1175, and under the Delhi sultans it repelled Mongol assaults, though Mongol forces held it to ransom in 1245 and 1246.
Through all this Multan remained a great commercial crossroads, where caravans from Khorasan gathered and merchants spoke Persian as well as Arabic. Sufi mystics flocked there in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the poet Baba Farid was born near the city in the 1200s.
Source: Multan
