Old Kandahar (Zorr Shar)
A few kilometres west of the modern city lie the ramparts of Old Kandahar, known in Pashto as Zorr Shar, "the old city." Its mudbrick walls trace an urban site that endured for more than two thousand years before being destroyed in the eighteenth century.
An ancient citadel
Old Kandahar sits at the foot of a rocky ridge overlooking the Arghandab plain, a natural stronghold guarding routes between the Iranian plateau, Central Asia and the Indus valley. Archaeologists have traced occupation back to at least the first millennium BCE, when the region formed the Achaemenid Persian satrapy of Arachosia. The site's massive fortifications — walls of packed earth and mudbrick raised on a high mound — were rebuilt many times, each new city rising on the ruins of the last.
Alexandria in Arachosia
Many scholars identify Old Kandahar with the settlement that Greek and Roman writers called Alexandria in Arachosia, one of the cities associated with Alexander the Great, who passed through the region around 330 BCE. The identification is widely accepted but not beyond debate, and the name "Kandahar" itself has sometimes been linked — uncertainly — to "Alexander" or to "Gandhara." Under the Mauryan empire the city was cosmopolitan enough that the emperor Ashoka left bilingual rock edicts in Greek and Aramaic nearby; one such inscription associated with the area is among the most famous finds from Afghan antiquity. Over later centuries the city passed through Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, Sasanian, Islamic, Ghaznavid, Ghurid, Timurid, Safavid and Mughal hands.
| Pashto name | Zorr Shar ("old city") |
|---|---|
| Location | West of the modern city, on the Arghandab plain |
| Classical identity | Often identified with Alexandria in Arachosia |
| Destroyed | 1738, by Nader Shah |
| Status today | Archaeological site; ruined walls and mound |
Destruction in 1738
The city's long life came to a violent end during the campaigns of Nader Shah, the Persian conqueror who set out to break the power of the Ghilzai Hotaks who had ruled Kandahar since Mirwais Hotak's revolt of 1709. After a prolonged siege, Nader Shah took Old Kandahar in 1738 and ordered it destroyed. He founded a new settlement nearby, sometimes called Naderabad. The old citadel was never fully reoccupied. When Ahmad Shah Durrani established his kingdom in 1747, he laid out an entirely new walled city on the site of the present Kandahar, leaving Zorr Shar to decay.
Excavations and what survives
Old Kandahar has attracted archaeologists precisely because it was abandoned rather than built over. In the 1970s a British team associated with the Society for South Asian Studies carried out excavations that clarified the site's long stratigraphy, from the Achaemenid period through the Islamic centuries, before political upheaval halted fieldwork. Their results remain a key reference for the region's early history. Today the visible remains include the great earthen ramparts, the citadel mound, and traces of gates and streets. Nearby on the ridge, the rock-cut chamber and inscriptions of Chil Zena — the "forty steps," partly the work of the Mughal emperor Babur — overlook the plain. The Kandahar Museum and other collections hold objects connected with the area's antiquity.
For visitors and readers, Old Kandahar is the deep foundation beneath everything that followed: the place where Arachosia, Alexander, Ashoka and the Hotaks all left their mark before the modern city was born.
A crossroads of trade and empire
The endurance of the site over more than two millennia owes much to geography. Old Kandahar commanded the approaches between the Iranian plateau, the passes toward the Indus and the routes north toward Central Asia, and it sat close to the well-watered lands of the Arghandab valley, whose orchards and fields could feed a substantial population. Whoever held the citadel could tax and control the caravan traffic passing through Arachosia, and so successive empires took pains to garrison and rebuild it. This same combination of fertile land and strategic position explains why the region was worth fighting over from Achaemenid times through to the eighteenth-century contests between Safavids, Mughals and the emerging Afghan states.
The Ashoka edicts
Among the most celebrated discoveries connected with the area are inscriptions of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who ruled in the third century BCE and promoted Buddhist ideas of righteous conduct across his empire. A bilingual edict in Greek and Aramaic found near Old Kandahar shows that these two languages were current among the population, a reminder of how deeply Hellenistic and Near Eastern influences had penetrated the region after Alexander's campaigns. Fragments of further Ashokan inscriptions in Greek have also been associated with the site. Together they count among the most important epigraphic finds from ancient Afghanistan and confirm the city's role as a genuinely cosmopolitan centre in antiquity.
Naderabad and the shift eastward
Nader Shah's destruction of the old citadel in 1738 did not immediately empty the district. He founded a replacement settlement nearby, sometimes called Naderabad, intended to serve the region's needs under Persian control. It proved short-lived. When Ahmad Shah Durrani came to power in 1747 he chose to build an entirely new, planned walled city a few kilometres to the east — the core of the modern city, laid out on a grid around a central bazaar. The population and commercial life of the area gradually shifted to this new foundation, and the ancient mound was left to erosion and reuse as a quarry for building material, which is one reason so much of its fabric has been lost.
Visiting and preservation today
The ruins lie within reach of the modern city, and the great ramparts and citadel mound remain the dominant features of the landscape there, with the Chil Zena rock-cut chamber on the ridge above. As an unbuilt-over archaeological site, Old Kandahar is significant for what still lies beneath the surface, but like many heritage sites in Afghanistan it is exposed to erosion, encroachment and the long interruption of scientific fieldwork caused by decades of conflict. Its stratigraphy, first clarified by the excavations of the 1970s, continues to inform how scholars reconstruct the deep history of the region. For the full chronological picture, see the Kandahar timeline.
Related pages
- Kandahar timelineFrom Bronze Age Mundigak to the present.
- Chil ZenaThe rock-cut chamber and inscriptions above the old city.
- Ahmad Shah DurraniFounder of the new walled city after 1747.
- Mirwais HotakThe Hotak ruler whose dynasty Nader Shah came to crush.
- Kandahar MuseumWhere finds from the region's antiquity are kept.