Roof of the World

The Roof of the World or Top of the World is a metaphoric epithet or phrase used to describe some of the highest regions in the world. The term usually refers to all or part of High-mountain Asia, the continent's mountainous interior, including the Pamirs, the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, the Hindu Kush, the Tian Shan, the country of Nepal, and the Altai Mountains.

Attested usage

The British explorer John Wood, writing in 1838, described Bam-i-Duniah as a "native expression", 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. : "PAMIRS, a mountainous region of central Asia...the Bam-i-Dunya ".
The Columbia Encyclopedia, 1942 edition: "the Pamirs ".
Hachette, 1890: "Le Toit du monde ", French for "Roof of the World ".
Der Große Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, Leipzig 1928–1935: "Dach der Welt, Bezeichnung für das Hochland von Pamir", and : "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", went out of the limelight and the description "Roof of the World" has been increasingly applied to Tibet and the Tibetan Plateau, and occasionally, especially in French, even to Mount Everest, but the traditional use is still alive.