Talk:Banbhore

Latest comment: 5 years ago by Kautilya3 in topic Banbhore and Debal

Banbhore and Debal

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It is unclear from this article and the article on Debal what the relation of the two cities might be. It is clear that there is mention of a city named Debal in historical records. Is the name Banbhore also found in historical records? Or is this a more modern place name used to describe the discovery of the ruins of a medieval port? Ahassan05 (talk) 06:50, 15 February 2013 (UTC)ahassan05Reply

Quoting from Andre Wink's Al-Hind:

Among the shifting channels of the Indus delta the very site of Debal or 'Daybal' has long remained uncertain but is now usually identified with Banbhore, an excavated site among desolate salt flats on a former mouth of the Indus, 60 km from Karachi and 40 km from the present‐day coast, which answers the descriptions of the sources. Archaeological research revealed that many of the ruins were built by the Arabs; it remains possible however that there were successive places which were called Debal. The town, in any case, which was known as Debal in the period of Sasanid and Rāi rule and under the Arabs, appears to have changed its name to 'Banbhore' in the early eighteenth century only and was not known as such except as an archaeological site. Excavations also show that it was an extensive entrepot in pre-Islamic times, and that the site was already occupied in the first century B.C. and the first few centuries A.D.[1]

Sinubin's Ancient Earthquakes:

The location of Debal in modern-day Pakistan has not been positively identified, but some scholars have argued that a location near Karachi and possibly Banbhore itself is not unlikely. Regardless of its location, however, the archaeological evidence for repeated damage and reconstruction at Banbhore lends credence to its past vulnerability to earthquakes.[2]

Newsreport from 2016:

Experts are more cautious: people everywhere in Sindh make such claims, says Ibrahim. ... “No one knows its date of origin or who first bastioned it as the water table [below the site] prevents us from reaching the virgin soil [for further exploration], just as it had prevented Khan,” Piacentini explains.[3]

Based on these, I conclude that it is not yet known whether Banbhore is Debal or not. So the two pages must remain separate, but refer to each other.
But this page needs to be restructured as an archaeological site, not as a "city". -- Kautilya3 (talk) 09:57, 5 June 2019 (UTC)Reply

References

  1. ^ Wink, Al-Hind, Volume 1 1996, pp. 181–182.
  2. ^ Sintubin, M. (2010), Ancient Earthquakes, Geological Society of America, pp. 123–124, ISBN 978-0-8137-2471-3
  3. ^ Sama Faruqi, Resolving the mystery of an ancient site in Sindh, Herald, 23 September 2016.