The Hindu Kush

The Avestan name of the Hindu Kush, Upāiri.saēna, appearing in the Zamyād Yašt’s catalogue of the world’s eminent mountains, whose summits stand closest to the heavens, and again in the Hōm Yašt, both times paired with Mount Iškata in a dual compound, iškata upāiri.saēna. The name is conventionally interpreted as “higher than the eagle,” the range so tall that even the highest-flying bird passes below its peaks, and it continued in Zoroastrian tradition as the Middle Persian Abarsēn, the great mountain wall of the Iranian world’s eastern books.

This is the headwater of the page’s paropamisos family: the Greek Paropámisos that Alexander’s geographers carried west reflects the Old Persian shape of this same Iranian name, garbled in transmission until its eagle was no longer visible inside it. The page thus runs the full arc of the range’s naming: an Avestan hymn measures the mountains against a bird’s flight, Greek administration flattens the phrase into a label, and the eventual winner, Hindu Kush, names the range from the opposite direction entirely, for what lies beyond it rather than what flies beneath it. Of all the ways to say a mountain is high, the oldest name on this page chose the most vivid: too high for eagles.

The Greek name of the range, Paropámisos, taken from an Iranian name for the mountains between Bactria and India. It enters Greek geography with Alexander, who crossed the range twice and founded an Alexandria at its foot; the satrapy on its southern flank was the Paropamisadae. But Alexander’s geographers, eager to assimilate the new world to the old, more often called the range the Kaúkasos Indikós, the “Indian Caucasus,” transferring to it the name of the great western range and so claiming that Prometheus’s mountains stretched all the way to India.

Paropámisos and Kaúkasos Indikós are thus two Greek names for one range, a genuine Iranian borrowing and a geographer’s fiction side by side. The fiction had consequences: by stretching the Caucasus to India, Alexander’s historians flattered his conquests as reaching the edge of the world the myths described. The honest name, Paropámisos, survived in the geographers, but it was the later, grimmer Hindū Kush that finally replaced both, the learned Greek labels giving way to a traveler’s name for a killing mountain.

The Latin name of the range, Paropamisus, taken from the Greek, with the same doubling: the Roman geographers knew it both as the Paropamisus and as the eastern arm of the Caucasus, inheriting Alexander’s geographers’ identification of it with the western range. Pliny lists the peoples of its slopes and the cities founded among them, at the far eastern limit of the world Rome had any knowledge of.

The Latin carried the learned Greek names into the Western tradition, where Paropamisus and Indian Caucasus survived in scholarship long after the range itself had passed out of European knowledge. Both eventually yielded to the Persian Hindū Kush; of the mountain’s several names, the geographers’ inventions faded and the travelers’ name endured. The wall between Bactria and India is known today by neither the Iranian Paropamisus nor the borrowed Caucasus but by the name that recorded what the crossing cost.

The name Hindū Kush, in Persian and Arabic usage, which the traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, crossing the range in the fourteenth century, explains as “the Hindu-killer”: so many of the Indian slaves driven north over its high passes died of the cold, he says, that the mountains took their name from the dying. Whether this grim folk-etymology is the true origin or a later gloss on an older Iranian name, it is the explanation the medieval travelers gave and the name that prevailed.

Hindū Kush displaced the Greek and Latin Paropamisus and the borrowed Indian Caucasus entirely, and it is the name the range still bears. The contrast with its earlier names is stark: where Alexander’s geographers had dignified the mountains by folding them into the myth of the Caucasus, the later name fixed on the human cost of the passes, the slave-caravans frozen on the road between India and the north. The same wall of rock that the Greeks made a continuation of Prometheus’s crag the medieval world named for the people it killed.