The South Asian subcontinent is bordered by the Himalayas to the north, the Hindu Kush and Suleiman Mountains to the northwest, and all other directions are the sea, and there is only one Khyber Pass in the section of the Hindu Kush Mountain near the Himalayas, which runs northwest-southeast, with a total length of 53 km, no more than 600 m at its narrowest point, and 60-90 m high on both sides. However, for thousands of years, the invaders of ancient India all entered North India from here, and successive North Indian dynasties have not been able to defend this mountain pass! Why?
We want to talk about ancient India, mainly in northern South Asia (including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and parts of Afghanistan), and the south-central part of the South Asian subcontinent is slightly mentioned.
Let's take a quick look:
In the third or fourth millennium BC, the Indus River Basin civilization (Indus River in Pakistan, Ganges in India) appeared in the Indus Valley, which is an agrarian city-state civilization, with farming, trade, writing, and famous sites such as Mohenzodaro and Harappa. Later, due to the change in the hydrological conditions of the Indus River, it became weak and almost died, and at this time, foreign enemies from the Khyber Pass also rushed to arrive, and this civilization died out, and the individual migration may have continued for a period of time in the south-central region.
The foreign enemy was the Aryans, who entered northern India around 1700 BC and established a number of tribal states, which developed into the northern Indian states that later became known as the Sixteen Kingdoms, and the caste system was formed around this time.
The Moon Protector of the Sixteen Kingdoms of Magadha drove out the Greek invasion of North India and occupied Afghanistan. At its peak in the third century BC during the reign of Ashoka, its territory encompassed almost the entire region of South Asia except southern India, which was the Peacock Dynasty of ancient India. At the time of Ashoka Buddhism was the state religion. After the last king was killed in 187 BC, the regime fell by the wayside, and the new dynasty was only a small court in Magadha and the surrounding area, and the whole was fragmented.
The Peacock Dynasty was followed by the Kushan Empire established by the Daetsuki people who migrated from Gansu to Afghanistan in China, which influenced northern India. The Kushan Empire ruled from Khwarrazm to the middle reaches of the Ganges from the first to the third century AD. Later, it was constantly invaded and attacked by the Persian Sassanid Dynasty and the White Huns (The Great Wall) from the north, leaving only a small number of small principalities in the Indian part, and the rise of the Gupta Dynasty in India completely destroyed it.
When the Kushan Empire was nearly collapsing, a small state in the Ganges Began to grow and develop, and the Gupta Dynasty was established in the early fourth century. During this period, Mahayana Buddhism flourished, and the three major sects of Hindu belief in the three main gods, such as Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, were widely popular, and at the peak of Sanskrit, the Mahabharata and Ramayana that we are familiar with were born during this period. It was effectively ended around 500 AD by internal rebellions, economic collapse, and constant invasions by the White Huns, and was again divided into several small states, with remnants continuing until the early 8th century. The White Huns, who invaded the Gupta Dynasty, were destroyed in 567 under the combined blows of the Sassanids and turks of Persia.
By the 7th century, after several invasions and the collapse of the regime, the military chiefs who had divided the various parts of the north became chatilists under the pretext of the approval of the Baltic Gate, and even many claimed to be kings, and these people claimed that Rajpu was deliberately a descendant of the royal family. Rajput was originally a military leader Shangwu was its main feature, a believer and protector of Hinduism, and was a big force until the British colonial period.
Since the Turkic people began to enter North India in the 10th century AD, Islam has followed.
At the beginning of the 13th century, it was remarkable that Hua lazimo was in a period of rise, but it was not yet a rival to the suzerainty of the Western Liao. In the process of expansion, it was defeated in the confrontation with the new power of the Afghan region, the Gur Dynasty, so in 1204 it invited the suzerainty of the Western Liao to help defeat the Gur Dynasty, and both the Western Liao and the Gur Dynasty were seriously injured, and soon the Gur Dynasty was overthrown by the Huaraz Mold. The last king of Gul was assassinated in 1206, without heirs, and his subordinate Kutbuddin succeeded to the throne, calling himself the Sultan of Delhi and later moving to Delhi, since then the Delhi Sultanate was born, after five unrelated dynasties for a total of 320 years. The Delhi Sultanate, an Islamic state founded by Afghans and Turks, ruled almost most of the South Asian subcontinent except for the southernmost region at its peak, before being destroyed by the Mughal Empire in 1526.
Babur, a descendant of the Timurid Empire in Central Asia, established a small kingdom in Kabul, Afghanistan, with the intention of conquering Central Asia to restore the Timurid Empire, but after several iterations, he was driven out of Central Asia and could only return to Kabul, so he set his sights on India and defeated the Delhi Sultanate to establish the Mughal Empire, which had almost unified the entire South Asian subcontinent, but only almost, the southernmost part was not taken. Moreover, the Rajputs, the Marathas, were not fully obedient. By the end of the empire, the Marathas had the military power to almost wipe out the Mughal Empire, but the invasion of the Afghan nomadic legions in the northwest forced the Marathas to deal with, and the Afghan nomads defeated the Marathas. The so-called Mughal Empire was actually fragmented, and the British came, whether you were Afghan or Maratha, or Iran or India, who had become colonized and destroyed one by one.
Returning to the opening question, only the Khyber Pass can enter the South Asian subcontinent, and the other locations are either mountains or seas, why has ancient India always been unable to prevent it, and waves of foreign enemies have entered from the mountain passes for thousands of years?
This terrain could not form a powerful centralized dynasty in the entire region, and occasionally formed a strong centralized dynasty that could not be controlled for ten or eight years, and the regional differences in religious ethnic groups within the later period were more contradictory. Besides, that mountain pass is often not within their territory, that is, it is also a frontier in their territory, and when the strength is strong, it is okay to prevent it, and if the strength is weak, the frontier will be beyond their reach, and this is their fate.
If it were not for a new era in which hot weapons replaced cold weapons, the once-powerful Afghan nomadic legions would have defeated the Mughal Empire and various forces in South Asia, and would have changed dynasties for the region again, and what had happened in history would have to happen again.