Development of Kabul under Mughals 1504-1738 AD

Kabul was a bridge between Indian Mughal Empire and Central Asia, the ancestral homeland of the founder of the Mughal Empire. Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, carries about 3,500 years old historical records mentioning Kabul with different names like, Kubha, Gandahara, Kabura, Ortospana, Kapul, Zavul, and Zabul etc. Many great warriors and conquerors from Central Asia used Kabul as their route to India. It was also known as a gateway to India and Central Asia. Kabul became the foundation stone for the Mughal Empire in India. During the Mughal era Kabul entered into a new phase and with the invasion of Babur the area got the position of the capital of the Mughals. The early Mughal rulers paid much attention to the affairs of Kabul, because their existence to a greater extent was dependent on their strong hold over Kabul. The research work is focused on development of Kabul under Mughal kings particularly Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.  The later Mughal kings after Aurangzeb were not able to end political disturbances in Kabul which not only displeased the people of Kabul but also encouraged the neighbouring powers to invade the valley. Historical and analytical methods are used in this research and Pashtu, Dari, Urdu and English sources have been utilized to gauge development of Kabul during that point in time. No research work has been carried out on this aspect of Kabul so far. The analysis of the development of Kabul under Mughals brings to limelight the geostrategic and politico-economic worth of Kabul as an important Caravanserai on the trade route between Central and South Asia.

Exploratory Functional Flood Frequency Analysis and Outlier Detection in Pakistan

The flood risk prevention and the effective water resources management and planning require flows of a river to be recorded continuously and analysed at considered barrages or dams. For a given barrage and dam the flow temporal variation over a certain span of time can graphically be represented by a hydrograph. The hydrograph provides information which is essential for determining the frequencies and severity of flood events. The major characteristics of flood hydrograph are duration (d), peak (p) and volume (v) which are obtained from the components of the hydrograph. Traditional approaches for frequency analysis of hydrology considered these features individually in a context of the univariate study. These features were considered jointly in a multivariate study so that the structure of their dependency could be encountered. Hence, the univariate approaches are not reliable enough to represent the phenomenon and cause reducing the accuracy of risk estimation whereas multivariate approaches contribute in improving the accuracy of risk estimation by considering joint features and dependency structure between characteristics of a flood. However, all the preceding approaches carried the aim of analysing the number of flood characteristics and ignored the comprehensive information provided by the hydrograph. Present research carries an object which contains a framework to introduce the hydrographs as a functional data curve for frequency analysis. This context uses the whole hydrograph as an infinite dimensional observation so that more efficient and effective estimates regarding the risk of associated extreme events can be obtained. The contribution of the proposed approach is to address the problem usually encountered in hydrology regarding incomplete data by exhaustively employing complete information produced by the hydrographs. A number of tools for the analysis of functional data (AFD) are introduced and applied to frequency analysis of flood (FAF) in order to execute exploratory analysis which is an initial step towards comprehensive functional FAF. The methods employed as a first step of exploratory analysis are a visualization of data, measures of location and scale, principal component analysis and detection of outliers are illustrated using real-world flood data of barrages and dams on the River Indus of Pakistan.