Ghazni

• 1. Introduction

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  Ghazni sits on a plateau more than two thousand meters above sea level in southeastern Afghanistan, and its name carries the weight of that altitude. Derived from the Persian word ganj, meaning "treasure," the city has spent more than two millennia accumulating layers of empire, scholarship, and ruin. Today it holds an estimated population of around 205,000 people and serves as the capital of Ghazni Province. But the streets running past its bazaars and hospitals trace paths that once connected Kabul to Kandahar, paths that armies, pilgrims, and merchants have walked for thousands of years.

  How did a market town in the Afghan highlands become one of the most important cities in the medieval Islamic world? What drew Moroccan travelers, Chinese pilgrims, and Central Asian conquerors to this cold, windswept plateau? And how did a place once described as the capital of a dazzling empire come to be called, by one of its own rulers, merely a mean place? The answers lie in geography, in ambition, and in the long, turbulent history of a city that has been destroyed, rebuilt, and claimed by nearly every regional power that has ever risen in this part of the world.

• 2. Ancient Crossroads

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  Cyrus II incorporated Ghazni into the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BCE, recognizing something that every subsequent ruler would also come to understand: whoever held this plateau controlled the movement of people and goods between India, Iran, and Central Asia. Alexander the Great seized it in 329 BCE and gave it a Greek name, Alexandria in Opiana. Ptolemy, writing in the 2nd century, may have noted it as Gazaca.

  After the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms fell, the region became the heart of Zabulistan, a prosperous kingdom whose rulers, the Nezak Huns, are remembered today partly through their gold coins, which depicted them wearing a distinctive bull's head crown. From the 5th to the 7th centuries, Zabulistan became a major center of Buddhism alongside Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang arrived in 644 CE and recorded an account that captures the city's vitality with unusual precision. He called it Jaguda and described its capital, Hexina, as strongly fortified and set in a land rich with winter wheat, turmeric, and a valley herb called hingu, known in the West as Ferula asafoetida. He wrote that the climate was "severely cold with much frost and snow," a description still accurate today. The population even then was divided between two cities, with Hesaluo serving as an alternate capital, its gushing springs feeding irrigation channels across the surrounding fields.

  Arab armies arrived in 683 CE and brought Islam to the region. The Zunbils held sway from 680 to 870, sometimes governing from Ghazni itself, until Yaqub Saffari from Zaranj conquered them in the late 9th century. The Saffarids then reduced the local Lawik dynasty to tributary status, one more shift in the long sequence of powers that passed through this strategically irreplaceable city.

• 3. The Ghaznavid Golden Age

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  In 962, a Turkic slave commander named Alp-Tegin, serving the Samanid Empire, attacked Ghazni and besieged its citadel for four months before wresting control from Abu Bakr Lawik. The struggle did not end there. Around 965, Abu Bakr Lawik recaptured the city from Alp-Tegin's son, Abu Ishaq Ibrahim, forcing him to flee to Bukhara. But Abu Ishaq Ibrahim returned with Samanid military support and retook control, setting in motion the dynasty that would define the city for generations.

  For nearly two hundred years, from 977 to 1163, Ghazni was the capital of the Ghaznavid Empire, a realm that encompassed much of present-day Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, eastern Iran, and Rajasthan. The Ghaznavids carried Islam into Hindustan and returned bearing the riches stripped from Hindu temples. The period that made Ghazni famous as a center of culture was the reign of Sultan Mahmud from 998 to 1030. He assembled around his throne a circle of scholars, philosophers, and poets whose work positioned Ghazni as the foremost center of Persian literature in the first decades of the 11th century. The scholars Al-Biruni, an Iranian polymath, and Abu Nasr Mansur, a mathematician and astronomer known for his work in geometry and trigonometry and his close collaboration with Al-Biruni, both worked at the Ghaznavid court. Poets including Farrukhi Sistani, Unsuri Balkhi, Asjadi, and Manuchehri Damghani composed verse under Mahmud's patronage. Farrukhi Sistani spent most of his life in the city and died there.

  Two towers, each roughly 43 meters high and standing 365 meters apart, were built by Sultan Mahmud and his son as monuments to military victory. Their terra-cotta tile decoration still catches the eye of visitors today. The minarets of Ghazni, built on a stellar plan and dating from the middle of the 12th century, were the surviving elements of the mosque of Bahramshah, their sides covered in intricate geometric patterns. The mausoleum of Sultan Mahmud remains the most important tomb in the city; others nearby mark the graves of scholars such as Al-Biruni.

• 4. Ruin and Revival

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  In 1151, the Ghorid ruler Ala'uddin sacked Ghazni. Yet the city proved difficult to kill. By 1173 it had become the Ghurid secondary capital and began to flourish again. Between 1215 and 1221, the Khwarezmid Empire controlled the city before Ghazni was destroyed once more, this time by Genghis Khan's son Ogedei Khan.

  The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta arrived in 1333 and found a city still carrying the scars of that destruction. He wrote that the greater part of the town was in ruins and that only a fraction of it remained, though he acknowledged it had once been a large city. He noted that the inhabitants relocated to Kandahar during the cold season, which he described as three nights' journey away. He visited the grave of Sultan Mahmud, surmounted at that time by a hospice, and called Mahmud "one of the greatest of rulers."

  Tamerlane's grandson Pir Muhammad bin Djinhangir became governor of Ghazni, along with Kabul and Kandahar, in 1401. Babur conquered the region in 1504 and recorded his personal opinion that Ghazni was "a mean place," puzzling openly over why any regional prince would choose it as a seat of government. Ghazni remained under Mughal control until 1738, when the Persian ruler Nader Shah invaded. After Nader Shah's death, it passed into the Durrani Empire, the political ancestor of modern Afghanistan.

  Benjamin of Tudela reported, in 1170, that the city held 80,000 Jews, a figure that stands as a striking marker of the city's cosmopolitan medieval character. That diversity was chipped away by centuries of invasion. During the First Anglo-Afghan War, British Indian forces partially demolished the city's fortifications on the 23rd of July 1839 in the Battle of Ghazni.

• 5. Sacred Ground and Its Losses

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  Tapa-e Sardar, the Buddhist site at Ghazni, consists of a stupa on a hilltop surrounded by smaller stupas. Excavations carried out between the late 1960s and early 1970s uncovered an 18-meter-long reclining Buddha, a Parinirvana figure believed to have been built in the 8th century CE as part of a monastery complex. A mud brick shelter was built in the 1980s to protect the sculpture, but the wood supports were stolen for firewood and the shelter partially collapsed.

  In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Buddha, declaring it idolatrous. The decision echoed across the world. The site had survived more than twelve centuries, outlasting the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids, the Mongols, Babur, and the British, only to be lost in the opening months of the 21st century.

  The 1990s civil war and the conflict between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance had already placed the relics of Ghazni in jeopardy, and the 2001 attack on Tapa-e Sardar was one of the starkest expressions of what was at stake. After the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, American forces established a base in Ghazni and undertook rebuilding projects alongside the training of Afghan police and army units. In 2010, the United States opened the Lincoln Learning Center in Ghazni, designed to offer English classes, library access, internet connectivity, and counseling, with a stated goal of serving at least 4,000 Afghan citizens per month per location. In 2013, ISESCO declared Ghazni the Islamic capital of culture for that year, a recognition of the heritage that still survived.

• 6. A City Still Contested

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  On the 10th of August 2018, Taliban forces attacked Ghazni in a major offensive. Dozens of airstrikes were launched in support of Afghan police and government units. Hundreds of Afghan soldiers, police, and Taliban fighters were killed, along with dozens of civilians. The Taliban also set fire to many buildings during the assault.

  On the 18th of May 2020, a suicide bombing carried out by a Taliban-affiliated attacker using a Humvee killed nine Afghan intelligence personnel and injured 40 others at the National Directorate of Security unit in the city. Then, on the 12th of August 2021, Taliban forces swept in as part of their national offensive. Ghazni became the tenth provincial capital to fall to the Taliban during that campaign.

  Through all of this, the physical fabric of the city has continued to serve its residents. In 2015, Ghazni held 15,931 dwelling units. Agriculture accounts for 28% of land use, and the city draws irrigation water from the Sultan Dam to the north and the Sarda Dam to the southeast, supplemented by roughly 39 check dams in and around the city. In April 2012, the governor of Ghazni laid the foundation stone of Ghazni Airport, with work supervised by engineer Ahmad Wali Tawakuli, the managing director of Ghazni Province.

  The city's sports clubs offer a different kind of continuity. Band-e-Amir Dragons, founded in 2013, play in the Shpageeza Cricket League. Oqaban Hindukush F.C., founded in 2012, compete in the Afghan Premier League. Jahan Maleeka School, an all-girls institution, enrolls over 5,000 students with 150 teachers. Naswan Shaher Kohna School, another all-girls school, has over 3,000 students. The name of the city, after all, still means treasure.