Aornos by train

I keep telling myself to give up the blog and use my time more productively, but then an image like this comes along.

It was sent me by Luca Olivieri, Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, and it’s a photo of a tunnel entrance he saw on the Peshawar-Rawalpindi railway line when travelling it in the 1980s. Heading from Peshawar toward Pindi, this is apparently the last tunnel before the line crosses the river Indus by the bridge at Attock.

Aornos was the mountain fastness captured by Alexander in 327/6, his last significant military success before crossing the Indus and entering India proper. As I suggested both here and here, Aornos is to be identified with Mt. Ilam in Swat, which is about 60 miles as the crow flies from this tunnel entrance.

So what were they thinking about in 1883?

Well, as I also indicated back when, the location of Aornos has long been a matter of dispute, and even today you’ll find scholars who don’t accept the identification with Ilam. Earlier or other candidates for Aornos tend to have a particular thing in common which Ilam lacks, and that is a location, strongly encouraged by Curtius Rufus 8.11.7, Diodorus 17.85.3 and Strabo 15.1.8, close to the river Indus. Here is an extremely rough-and-ready map of the four most influential proposals for the site of Aornos before Ilam, while Ilam is the dot far off to the west.

The Indus-adjacent dots are the locations proposed, from bottom to top, by Claude-Auguste Court in 1836, a Napoleonic veteran who served Maharajah Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, Alexander Cunningham in 1848, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, James Abbott in 1854, founder of Abbottabad, and Aurel Stein in 1926, archaeologist and explorer, and they track the right bank of the river from south to north. The Aornos railway tunnel is situated close to General Court’s candidate across the river from Attock, possibly actually right underneath it.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before the remarkable energy that the British (and other Europeans) in N.-W. India put into identifying the vestiges, real or imagined, of Alexander’s campaigns, and identifying the rock of Aornos was the ultimate prize. This quest was never innocent of a sense of their own presence and purpose in these unfamiliar places, needless to say. It is unexpected, but entirely apt, that we find that preoccupation with Alexander here married to the most familiar example of British efforts to pacify their Indian possessions, the railways.