History of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa - Geography

Geography

The province was created during the colonial rule of the British empire and was a province of British India. As a province of British India it had an area of 38,665 square miles (100,140 km2), of which only 13,193 was under direct control of the British, the remainder occupied by the tribes under the political control of the Agent to the Governor-General.

It was bounded by the Hindu Kush to the north by Baluchistan and Dera Ghazi Khan District to the south, to the east by the princely state of Kashmir and Punjab; to the west by Afghanistan.

The tract between the Indus and the hills comprises four minor natural divisions, each of which formed a separate district. The most northern is the Peshawar valley, a lacustrine basin encircled by hills. To the south of Peshawar lies Kohat, a rugged table-land broken by low ranges of hills and separated from Peshawar by the Jowaki range. South of Kohat again is Bannu, in the broad basin of the Kurram river and completely surrounded by low ranges. The District of Dera Ismail Khan (later Dera Ismail Khan Division) stretched south of Bannu, a vast expanse of barren plain enclosed between the Sulaiman range on the west and the Indus on the east, and tapering to a blunt point at its southern extremity.

In the north the vast territories between the Hindu Kush and the border of Peshawar District formed the Political Agency of Dir, Swat, and Chitral. In the south-west the Wazir hills were divided into two political agencies: Northern Waziristan, with its headquarters in the Tochi valley; and Southern Waziristan, with its headquarters at Wana. In the latter agency the Wazir hills merge into the Sulaiman range, the highest point of which is the Takht-i-Sulaiman in the lower Shirani country, a political dependency of Dera Ismail Khan District. The precipitous Takht presents the grandest scenery on the frontier, and formed an impassable barrier between the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan.