Mardan

About Mardan

Mardān is a city in the Mardan District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Located in the Valley of Peshawar, Mardan is the second largest city of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (only after Peshawar). It is a fast growing city that experienced a population boom in the latter half of the 20th century.

Around 1800 BCE, the area around Mardan was part of the homeland of the Gandhara grave culture. Rock edicts of the ancient Indian King Ashoka in the nearby Shahbaz Garhi, written in the right-to-left Kharosthi script, dates from the Mauryan period (mid-200s BCE) and represent the earliest irrefutable evidence of writing in South Asia. The nearby Takht-i-Bahi has remains of an ancient Buddhist monastery was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.

Mardan is located in a region which is rich in archaeological sites. In 1962, the Sanghao Caves were discovered outside of Mardan, which yielded artefacts from the Middle Paleolithic period, over 30,000 years ago. Other sites in the immediate area have yielded evidences of human activity from the Upper Paleolithic period. Further excavations in the area around Jamal Garhi near Mardan recovered artefacts from the Mesolithic period...

Overview adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.