Balti

The Balti are a Tibetic people of the high Indus valley in Baltistan, which they call Balti-yul and Persian writers named Little Tibet, centred on Skardu and Shigar. They formed from Khampa settlers mingling with older Dardic tribes; the land lay in the Zhangzhung sphere before passing under the Tibetan Empire in 686, its people following Bön and then Tibetan Buddhism. Their archaic speech resembles Classical Tibetan.

Medieval Baltistan was a patchwork of valley kingdoms. The Maqpon dynasty, traditionally founded at Skardu in the twelfth century, ruled some seven hundred years and peaked under Ali Sher Khan Anchan around 1600, when its arms reached Gilgit and Ladakh.

From the fourteenth century Sufi missionaries such as Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani brought Islam to the valleys, spread by Noorbakhshia; by the late seventeenth century most had converted, though Bön and Buddhist customs survived.