The Sulaiman mountains and Takht-i Sulaiman

At a glance

• The Sulaiman range (Koh-i Sulaiman) is a chain about 250 miles long that runs between the Gomal river in the north and the plain of the Indus in the east, and separates the Indus plain from the uplands of Balochistan. [2]

• Its highest point is a twin massif. The Pashtuns of the country call it Kaisa Ghar or Kasa Ghar, and the shrine on its southern bluff gave the whole mountain the name Takht-i Sulaiman, Solomon's Throne. [2, 5]

• Pashtun tradition, as Nimat Allah wrote it down in 1609 to 1611, says the Afghans were moved from Ghor into Koh-i Sulaiman and Roh. It does not say Qais Abdur Rashid was born there. [1]

• The Sherani hold the highest ground. The Musa Khel, Kakar, Mando Khel, Zmarai and Ushtarana live on the slopes and in the valleys around it. [2–4]

• Its pine forests are among the largest pure stands of chilghoza in the world, owned by the Sherani, and the nut is one of the main cash crops of Zhob. [7, 8]

The range between the Gomal and the Indus

The Zhob gazetteer of 1907 gives the Sulaiman range as a chain some 250 miles long between 28°31′ and 32°4′ north, lying between the Gomal river on the north and the Indus on the south, and separating what was then the North-West Frontier Province and the Punjab from Balochistan. [2] Its main ridge runs north and south. Parallel serrated ridges flank it on the east, beginning at the Ghwara Lara pass in the north-east corner of Zhob, where the Gomal cuts through the range, and multiplying towards the south around the great peak. [2]

The gazetteer quotes Sir Thomas Holdich, a British surveyor writing in 1904, who calls it one continuous chain from the Gomal river to Jacobabad and the original home, in his words, of the Pakhtun or Pashtu-speaking mountaineers. [2] Holdich's physical point is useful. The Sulaiman is not a water-parting. Its slopes, east and west, drain to the Indus, and the western streams break through the main limestone ridges in narrow gorges that are the only ways into the western plateau. [2]

The two faces differ. On the Balochistan side the high country is cold, wooded in places and grazed. On the east the hills fall to the Daman, the skirt of land under them, in bare, knife-edged ridges. Colonel McGregor, quoted in the Punjab gazetteer of 1883 to 1884, described them as rocky, precipitous and treeless, with no water in the ravines, and the gazetteer adds that between the first and second lines of hill a long valley forms a natural road from Bannu southward to the Sindh frontier. [4] The Baloch call these valleys tokh, and the gazetteer records local names for them among the Ushtarana (tsarunga and ragha), the Babar and the Bhittani (band). [4] For the Daman and the towns below, see Dera Ismail Khan and the Derajat. For the range's course north of the Gomal and Elphinstone's account of it, see the Pashtun lands.

Kaisa Ghar and the Takht

The highest point is known to Europeans as the Takht-i Sulaiman, the Zhob gazetteer says, but the people of the country call it Kaisa-ghar. [2] A Balochistan journalist, Asad Khan Betini, writing in Dawn in 2018, gives the local form as Da Qaisa Ghar or Qassay Ghar. [6] Ghar is the Pashto word for mountain.

The massif is a tableland capped with coral limestone, which the geologist Griesbach described as a plateau about 8,000 feet above the sea with a high rim on each side. [2] The western rim carries the highest peak, Kaisa Ghar, at 11,300 feet. The eastern rim ends in the Takht itself at 11,070. [2] The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer of 1883 to 1884 gives 11,295 and 11,070 feet for the northern and southern peaks. [4] Modern Pakistani writing gives 3,487 metres, about 11,440 feet, for the Takht. [5] The sources do not agree on the figures or on which summit is the higher, so each is given as its writer reports it. Between the two rims, about ten miles long and a mile apart, lies a plateau called Maidan at 8,950 feet, drained north into the Lahar or Khaisara stream that runs through the Gat pass to Daraban. [2]

The shrine on the ledge

The Takht-i Sulaiman shrine is a ziarat, a place of pilgrimage, on a ledge a little below the crest of the southernmost bluff of Kaisa Ghar. The gazetteer says it was visited "chiefly in the summer on Thursdays" by many pilgrims, both Hindu and Muslim. [2]

The fullest description is by an outsider who made the climb. In June 1891 Major McIvor, the British Political Agent in Zhob, and Captain Henry McMahon camped at the Pezai spring on the western slope, the highest water on that side, and climbed on 29 June. [2] McMahon's account, which the Zhob gazetteer prints, says they found two rough stone huts built by pilgrims, where earlier visitors had left cooking vessels and stores of flour and rice for those who came after. [2] The shrine itself, he says, is a small ledge of rock about four and a half feet by three, with a low stone parapet, twenty feet below the edge of a precipice that drops many thousands of feet on the east. It is reached by four foot-holes cut or worn in the rock. Not every pilgrim goes down. Many look at it from above, and those who do descend leave a small stick wedged in the parapet as a token. McMahon and McIvor left theirs. [2] He wrote that no European had reached the shrine or the summit before them, and that a survey party in 1884 had climbed the neighbouring Kaisa Ghar peak but left the Takht, which was said to be inaccessible. [2]

Two stories are told about the place. In one, Noah's ark came to rest on the mountain after the flood, a belief the geography article also records from Elphinstone. In the other, the one that gave the mountain its name, Sulaiman was flying home from India with his bride Bilqis in a flying throne, and she asked him to stop so that she could look once more on her own country; the throne came down on this peak. [2] A journalist from Zhob, Rafiullah Mandokhail, adds that jinn are said to be shut inside the peak and let out in the month of Safar, and that women go there for children. [5] Betini says visitors climb with a sheep or goat and cook it in a clay-sealed pit as khadda kabab, and that the walk takes nearly a day. [6]

A third belief ties the peak to Pashtun origins. Both Betini and Mandokhail report that people of the country believe the grave of Qais Abdur Rashid, the ancestor of the Pashtuns, lies on the summit. [5, 6] Mandokhail also records a Sherani researcher, Atlas Khan Sherani, who disputes it: the grave, he says, is that of a saint, Sheikh Sulaiman Sarwani, and the mountain has no connection with the prophet Sulaiman. [5] None of the three accounts offers a written source for either claim, and the gazetteer does not mention a grave of Qais.

What the genealogies say about the mountain

The Afghan genealogies were written down far from here. Khwaja Nimat Allah compiled the Makhzan-i Afghani at the Mughal court in 1609 to 1611, and Dorn's introduction says the materials were collected by Haibat Khan of Samana. [1] It is the source of the pedigree that the origins article sets out. In Bernhard Dorn's English translation of 1829 the book's plan names the second chapter as the story of Talut "and of the transmigration of the Afghans to the mountainous country of Ghor, and from thence to Koh Suleiman and Roh". [1]

The account in the text is a resettlement under the Ghurid sultans. When Sultan Shihab al-Din returned from Hindustan, Nimat Allah says, he ordered his officer Moizz al-Din to move "the whole nation of the Afghans" from the mountains of Ghor to the mountains around Ghazni, so that they would guard the seat of the empire. Moizz al-Din placed them in Koh Suleiman, Ashnaghar and the lands of Bajaur, "from the frontier of Kabul to the Neelab, and from the districts about Candahar to the Multan". [1] Nimat Allah adds that Roh is the same word as Koh, a mountain, and that Koh Suleiman and Ashnaghar lie within it. [1] In this telling the Sulaiman is where the Afghans spread to from Ghor. Qais himself, as the origins article records, went home to Ghor.

A colonial census writer put it differently. Hughes Buller, who wrote the Balochistan volume of the 1901 census report, said the traditional home of the race lay inside Balochistan, and that the home of Qais Abdur Rashid was "the tract immediately to the west of the Koh-i-Sulaiman, which is known to the Afghans as Khorasan and to us as Kakar Khorasan". [2, 3] The Zhob gazetteer repeats him; Buller gives no source for the placing. He adds that the descendants of the three sons of Qais, Ghurghusht, Sarban and Baitan, "are still to be found living in large numbers round the slopes of the Takht-i-Sulaiman". [2]

In Dorn's text Ghurghusht has three sons, Dani, Babi and Mandu, and Dani four, Kakar, Naghar, Davi and Pani. [1] The Kakar, Mando Khel and Panni of the genealogies are therefore the Ghurghusht line, treated in Gharghasht. Buller lists the Sherani among the five sons of Sharkhabun, Sarban's son, and the Zmarai among the descendants of another of them, Miani. [2] The Ghilzai, who winter on the same roads, belong to Baitan's side. See the Ghilzai.

The tribes around the range

The Sherani hold the Takht. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer places them in the hills behind Daraban and Chaudwan, with their country centred on the mountain, and says their main settlements are in the low valleys east of it. [4] It names three main divisions, Sainkhel, Ubakhel and Chuharkhel, and two chief towns, Drazand and Parwara. [4] The Zhob gazetteer adds the line the mountain makes between them: the Sherani east of the range are the Largha, the lower, and those on the west the Bargha, the upper. [2] In 1890 British troops marched against the Khidarzai, a section of the Ubakhel, and the British then divided the tribe between two administrations: the Bargha stayed with the Zhob Political Agency and the Largha went to Dera Ismail Khan. [2] In 1901 there were 6,974 Bargha Sherani in Zhob, in clans including the Babar, Haripal and Hasan Khel. [2] Their local tradition, recorded in the same gazetteer, says the Bargha lands were empty "for fear of the Wazirs" until, about three hundred years ago, a party of the Sherani was sent to occupy them. [2] Today Sherani is a district of its own, cut out of Zhob. [5]

On the Balochistan side the Musa Khel are the main tribe of the range's southern continuation, the Torghar, which the Loralai gazetteer calls its prolongation southwards. [3] The genealogies make them Panni, of Dani's line. They stayed in the country that is now the Musa Khel tahsil of Loralai, and in 1901 there were 10,525 of them, in two clans, the Bel Khel and the Laharzai. [3] The Ushtarana held the low hills below the Sherani in 1883, and the Musa Khel the higher ranges behind. [4] The Loralai gazetteer counts 635 Ushtarana in its district in 1901, mostly in Duki, some in Musa Khel and Barkhan, and says a group of them came from Zhob. [3] The genealogies make the Mando Khel of Zhob the descendants of Mandu. [2] The Zmarai appear in the same gazetteer among the descendants of Miani. [2] The Kakar of Zhob, for their part, hold in great reverence the shrine at Kot, 27 miles from Fort Sandeman, of Sanzar Nika, the ancestor of the Sanzar Khel Kakar. [2]

The Waziri hills lie north of the Gomal, as the geography article describes. Their neighbours' fields give a measure of the country. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer notes that the hill tracts held by the Sherani, Bhittani and Waziri grow little corn and that the tribes there drew most of their grain from the plains below, which it puts at no less than 75,000 maunds a year. [4] The same writer calls the Sherani "nearly as democratic as the Wazirs", with no use for chiefs. [4] That is a British official's description of their politics, given as his.

Passes and the Powindah roads

The Sulaiman has few gates. From Vihowa in the south to the Bain Dara leading into Bannu there are 71 passes into the hills; the principal ones across the main range, the Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer says, are the Vihowa, Zao, Gomal, Tank Zam and Shuza. [4] The Zhob gazetteer lists the Zao, Gat, Khidarzai Dahana and Chuhar Khel Dahana as the main routes from Zhob to the Punjab. [2] The Zao is a defile between limestone walls rising about 2,000 feet, 30 to 40 yards wide at its widest and narrowing to ten, blocked at one point by a rock about 30 feet across, past which only a lightly laden animal can go. [2] The Gat pass lies just north of the Takht, and the Shangan and Dahna passes below it. [4]

These are the roads of the Powindah, the nomad families, many of them Ghilzai, who come down in the autumn with camels and flocks, trade in the plains and go back in spring. The Zhob gazetteer records that they came from Afghanistan between October and December and returned in April and May, that the Sulaiman Khel spent the winter around Fort Sandeman, and that the Kibzai and Ghilzai Powindah wintered on the Kakal Duran plain, a grassland in Loralai that the Musa Khel used in summer. [2, 3] In 1901 to 1902 the Commissioner of the Derajat reckoned that some 50,000 people and 150,000 animals crossed the Gomal pass in a season. [2] The trade ran by the Gomal, Zao and Dahana passes, and by the Kakar Khorasan route, 127 miles from Fort Sandeman to Kamr-ud-din Karez. [2] The Derajat article follows the same road down to the plain.

Cold, snow and thin rain

The gazetteer's climate chapter describes Zhob, the district west of the range. The air is dry and winters are bracing. Upper Zhob and the highlands, it says, have excellent climatic conditions; temperature falls with height, averaging about 82 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and 47 in winter, and rain runs from about four inches at Kila Saifullah to about ten at Fort Sandeman, mostly between October and March, with snow over most of the district. [2] On the east face the Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer says the hills carry pines only high up, on the crest and in the upper valleys of the Takht. [4] Betini lists markhor, wolf, jackal, stag and eagle among the animals of the range. [6]

The chilghoza forests

The tree that has made the range's name outside the country is the chilghoza, the edible pine (Pinus gerardiana). The Zhob gazetteer says it grows at 6,000 to 12,000 feet, that its nut was exported to the Derajat and the Punjab, and that its resin was used against mange in camels and goats. [2] It predominated on Shin Ghar, Margha, Parai, Sharghalai and the Takht-i Sulaiman hills. [2] The Political Agent reported in 1897 that the stands on the slopes of the Takht and Kaisa Ghar were far from any market and in no danger, but that Shin Ghar, nearer and the most valuable, was at risk. In 1900 a forest officer found the Shin Ghar trees in poor condition, many dead or dying of age, thin rain and poor soil, with little natural seeding, which he put down partly to the yearly collection of seed and to grazing. [2] The Loralai gazetteer says the edible pine grows in its district only on the Torghar. [3]

The forests belong to the Sherani. Mandokhail writes that they are traditionally held by the tribe, whose communities live on both sides of the provincial line. [7] The Kasa Ghar Community Based Organisation of the Sulaiman range won an Equator Prize at the United Nations in 2019; Rina Saeed Khan, who visited for the Express Tribune, says the World Wide Fund for Nature began working with the forest-owning communities in 1991 against their first reluctance, that the villagers learned to pick cones in early September, since picking earlier damaged the trees, and that the people came to see that a tree's nuts were worth more than its timber. [8]

Mandokhail writes that cones are cut by hand from tall trees with hooked poles in September and October and taken to the Zhob market, and that the nuts go mostly to Lahore for export, with China the main buyer of Pakistan's pine nuts. [7] The Food and Agriculture Organization, as Dawn reports it, puts the pure pine forest of the range at about 26,000 hectares and calls it the largest pure stand in the world. [5, 7] Its survey of late 2023 found output down to 98 tonnes from 675 in 2020. [7] A fire that began on 9 May 2022 near Dahana Sar, Darazinda, burned for about fifteen days; Suparco satellite images showed about 11,000 acres affected. [5] Mandokhail's later article puts the loss from the 2022 fires in the Sherani, Musa Khel and Dera Ismail Khan forests at 3.2 million mature, fruit-bearing trees. [7] In 2025 traders in Zhob said the price had fallen from about 7,000 rupees a kilogram to about 2,000, which they put down to Afghan border closures, a poor harvest and a lack of cold storage. [7]