Mingora

關於Mingora

Mingora is a city in the Swat District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Located on the Swat River, it is the third largest city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the 26th largest in Pakistan. Mingora is the largest city and the epicenter of social, cultural, and economic activities in Malakand Division, and also the largest in the northern part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The area around Mingora has long been inhabited. At Loe Banr, Butkara II and Matalai, Italian archaeologists unearthed 475 Indo-Aryan graves dated between 1520 and 170 BC and two horse skeletons. On the opposite side of the River Swat at Aligrama, near the Saidu Sharif airport, a site of Gandhara grave culture was discovered by the Italian archaeologists and dated to 1000 BC.

Buddhism arose in the region with the arrival of monks from the Gangetic plains. Under emperor Ashoka, Buddhism, specifically the Gandharan variant, became firmly established in the region which became a launching ground for Ashoka's transmission of Buddhist missionaries to the western regions from the Mediterranean and West Asia. Many Buddhist remains and carvings have been discovered near Mingora in the Jambil River Valley. At Panr, a stupa...

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