Shina

The Shina, or Gilgitis, are the Indo-Aryan people of the upper Indus and its tributaries, dominant in Gilgit in a country they call Shinaki. They began spreading from Shinkari in Kohistan into the Gilgit valley around the sixth or seventh century. Shina chiefs were among the early rulers of Ladakh before the Tibetan advance.

In the seventh century Chinese records knew Gilgit as Lesser Bolü, a Buddhist kingdom of the Patola Shahi dynasty, and for long the Shina themselves followed Hindu and Buddhist customs, holding the cow unclean and practising sati in Gilgit, Hunza and Nagar until before 1740.

Islam first reached them in the twelfth century, with waves of conversion in the fourteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the Trakhan dynasty, claiming descent from a Persian prince, ruled Gilgit itself until the early nineteenth century.