Roof of the World

Attested usage

The British explorer John Wood, writing in 1838, described Bam-i-Duniah (Roof of the World) as a "native expression" (presumably Wakhi), and it was generally used for the Pamirs in Victorian times: In 1876, another British traveler, Sir Thomas Edward Gordon, employed it as the title of a book and wrote in Chapter IX:

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')".
• The Columbia Encyclopedia, 1942 edition: "the Pamirs (Persian = roof of the world)".
• Hachette, 1890: "Le Toit du monde (Pamir)", French for "Roof of the World (Pamir)".Guillaume Capus (1890), Le Toit du Monde (Pamir), voyage extrême orient. Illustré de 31 Vignettes et d'une Carte, Paris: Hachette et Cie. = Bibliographia Marmotarum. Ramousse R., International Marmot Network, Lyon, 1997. Guillaume Capus
• Der Große Brockhaus, Leipzig 1928–1935: "Dach der Welt, Bezeichnung für das Hochland von Pamir" (German: "roof of the world, term describing the Pamir highlands"), and (in translation): "Pamir highlands, the nodal point of the mountain systems of Tien-Shan, Kun-lun, Karakoram, the Himalayas and Hindukush, and therefore called the roof of the world."

With the awakening of public interest in Tibet, the Pamirs, "since 1875 ... probably the best explored region in High Asia", and the Tibetan Plateau, and occasionally, especially in French (toit du monde), even to Mount Everest, but the traditional use is still alive.

References

References

1. Keay, John (1983) ''When Men and Mountains Meet'' {{ISBN. 0-7126-0196-1; p. 153
2. [https://archive.org/stream/roworldanarrati00gordgoog/roworldanarrati00gordgoog_djvu.txt 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
3. Gordon, p. 121f.
4. {{Cite EB1911. Thomas Hungerford. Holdich
5. ''The Columbia Encyclopedia''; 1942 edition, p. 1335
6. {{lang. de. Der Große Brockhaus, 15th ed., Leipzig 1928–1935, vol. 4 (1929), p. 319.
7. {{lang. de. Der Große Brockhaus, vol. 14 (1933), p. 96.
8. Le Sueur, Alec. (2003-01-01). "The Hotel on the Roof of the World: from Miss Tibet to Shangri-La". RDR Books.
9. "Tibet: Climate Action for the Roof of the World". Central Tibetan Administration.
10. {{lang. fr. [http://www.larousse.fr/LaroussePortail/encyclo/XHTML/EUL.Online/explorer.aspx#recherche/Toit%20du%20monde Encyclopédie et Dictionnaires Larousse].
11. [http://www.pamirs.org/ The Pamirs], a region known to locals as Pomir – "the roof of the world".