The British explorerJohn Wood, writing in 1838, describedBam-i-Duniah (Roof of the World) as a "native expression" (presumablyWakhi),[1] and it was generally used for the Pamirs inVictorian times: In 1876, another British traveler, SirThomas Edward Gordon, employed it as the title of a book[2] and wrote in Chapter IX:
We were now about to cross the famous "Bam-i-Dunya", "The Roof of the World" under which name the elevated region of the hitherto comparatively unknown Pamir tracts had long appeared in our maps. [...] Wood, in 1838, was the first European traveler of modern times to visit the Great Pamir.[check quotation syntax][3]
Older encyclopedias also used "Roof of the World" to describe the Pamirs:
Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911): "PAMIRS, a mountainous region of central Asia...the Bam-i-Dunya ('The Roof of the World')".[4]
Hachette, 1890:"Le Toit du monde (Pamir)",French for "Roof of the World (Pamir)".[6]
Der GroßeBrockhaus, Leipzig 1928–1935:"Dach der Welt, Bezeichnung für das Hochland von Pamir" (German: "roof of the world, term describing the Pamir highlands"),[7] and (in translation): "Pamir highlands, the nodal point of the mountain systems ofTien-Shan,Kun-lun,Karakoram, theHimalayas andHindukush, and therefore called the roof of the world."[8]
With the awakening of public interest in Tibet, the Pamirs, "since 1875 ... probably the best explored region in High Asia",[4] went out of the limelight and the description "Roof of the World" has been increasingly applied to Tibet[9][10] and theTibetan Plateau, and occasionally, especially in French (toit du monde), even toMount Everest,[11][full citation needed] but the traditional use is still alive.[12][full citation needed]
^Sir Thomas Edward Gordon,The Roof of the World: being a narrative of a journey over the high plateau of Tibet to the Russian frontier and the Oxus sources on Pamir, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1876
^Le Sueur, Alec (2003-01-01).The Hotel on the Roof of the World: from Miss Tibet to Shangri-La. Oakland, California: RDR Books.ISBN1571431012.OCLC845721671.
