Kandahar.net

History of Kandahar

Few cities have decided a country's fate as often as Kandahar. Empires from the Achaemenids to the Mughals fought over it, and the modern Afghan state was born here in 1747.

Ancient Arachosia

The Kandahar oasis has been settled for millennia; nearby Mundigak was a Bronze Age urban center trading with the Indus world. Under the Achaemenid Persians the region was the satrapy of Arachosia. Alexander the Great passed through in 330–329 BCE, and a settlement known to classical writers as Alexandria in Arachosia grew at Old Kandahar, west of today's city. Rock edicts of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, written in Greek and Aramaic, were found at Chil Zena — evidence of a remarkably cosmopolitan ancient city.

Islamic and medieval eras

Arab armies brought Islam in the 7th–8th centuries, and Kandahar passed through Saffarid, Ghaznavid, Ghurid and Timurid hands. Its position on routes linking Persia, Central Asia and India made it a permanent prize: for nearly two centuries the Safavids of Persia and the Mughals of India traded the city back and forth, with Babur himself carving victory inscriptions into the rock at Chil Zena.

The Hotak revolt, 1709

Mirwais Hotak, a Ghilzai Pashtun notable, rose against the Safavid governor Gurgin Khan in 1709 and made Kandahar the seat of an independent Hotak dynasty — one whose armies went on to topple the Safavid capital of Isfahan itself in 1722. Persia's answer came with Nader Shah, who besieged and razed Old Kandahar in 1738.

1747: The Durrani Empire

After Nader Shah's assassination in 1747, a jirga at Sher Surkh near Kandahar chose a young cavalry commander, Ahmad Shah Durrani, as king. He laid out a new walled city — today's Kandahar — and built an empire stretching from Khorasan to Delhi and from the Amu Darya to the Arabian Sea. Kandahar served as the first capital of this Afghan state until Timur Shah moved the court to Kabul in the 1770s. Ahmad Shah's octagonal mausoleum and the adjacent Shrine of the Cloak remain the city's spiritual core.

The 19th and 20th centuries

Kandahar was occupied in both the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars; the 1880 Battle of Maiwand, fought west of the city, became a defining story of Afghan resistance and of the folk heroine Malalai. The 20th century brought slow modernization — an airport built with American assistance in the 1950s–60s, fruit-export industries, and growth as the south's commercial hub — followed by the upheavals of the Soviet war, the civil war, and the rise of the Taliban movement, which emerged from the Kandahar area in 1994.

Kandahar today

The city remains Afghanistan's second city and the political center of gravity of the south. Reconstruction, trade through Spin Boldak, and the revival of orchard agriculture in the Arghandab Valley shape its present.

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