Even after Kashmiri-British rule was imposed a century ago, the Indus Valley west of Chilas was a hornet’s nest of tiny republics; there was one in almost every side valley, each loosely guided by a jirga but effectively leaderless, all at war with one another and feuding internally. Though administratively lumped with Gilgit, Chilas and its neighbours are temperamentally more like Indus Kohistan, probably owing to a similarly hostile environment and the same Sunni Muslim orthodoxy. Their ancestors were reverted to Islam by a Sufi Muslim, he was from the Kaghan valley, Syed Noor Shah, known as Ghazi Baba, was the first man who started preaching Islam in Thak and built the first mosque which is still there. Ghazi Baba belonged to the Syed family of Kaghan. In Tangir and Darel, Islam came from the Swat direction. (, whereas hardly anyone north of Chilas in the Gilgit-Baltistan province is Sunni. The large Chilas Fort was first garrisoned to protect British supply lines over the Babusar Pass, and beefed up after local tribes nearly overran it in 1893. Now a police post, it has put a lid on Chilas, though not on the Darel and Tangir Valleys to the west. Chilasis are Shina speakers, with some Pashtun settlers speaking Pashto. Urdu and some English are also spoken.
There are more than 50,000 pieces of Buddhist rock art and inscriptions all along the Karakoram Highway in Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan that are concentrated at ten major sites between Hunza and Shatial, more have been found in the area of Skardu and Shigar. The carvings were left by various invaders, traders and pilgrims who passed along the trade route, as well as by locals. The earliest date back to between 5000 and 1000 BC, showing single animals, triangular men and hunting scenes in which the animals sometimes are larger than the hunters. These carvings were pecked into the rocks with stone tools and are covered with a thick patina that proves their age. Later — mostly Buddhist — carvings were sometimes executed with a sharp chisel. The ethnologist Karl Jettmar has tried to piece together the history of the area from various inscriptions and recorded his findings in "Rockcarvings and Inscriptions in the Northern Areas of Pakistan" and the later released "Between Gandhara and the Silk Roads: Rock carvings along the Karakoram Highway". The Kharoshthi term "Kaboa" appears in a short commemorative Kharosthiinscription found from Chilas as reported by the Archaeological Department of Pakistan. The inscription has been transcribed, translated and interpreted by Ahmad Hasan Dani, a Pakistani archaeologist, historian, and linguist, who was among the foremost authorities on South Asian archaeology and history. According to Dani, Kaboa or Kamboa of the inscription is a Kharoshthised form of Sanskrit Kamboja. Thus, it seems likely that Chilas also formed part of an ancient Kamboja kingdom.
