Kandahar: an oasis city and its long history

A city by the Arghandab

Kandahar stands in an irrigated oasis south of Afghanistan's central mountains, where the Arghandab river and its tributary the Tarnak build a broad alluvial cone. The climate is semi-arid, with about 164 mm of rain a year at Kandahar, so the oasis depends on surface canals and underground channels (karez). It extends about 70 km east to west, is about 30 km wide at its broadest and covers over 1,000 square kilometres. In 1979 the oasis held about 260,000 people, the densest rural population in southern Afghanistan. [1] The site controls the grain fields, orchards and irrigation of the oasis and sits on a natural crossroads, with a road running east past the Registan sands towards Quetta and, beyond it, over easy passes of the Sulaiman mountains to the lower Indus basin. Xavier de Planhol writes that this has long been one of the main routes of access to the Indian subcontinent, avoiding the very dry coastal route. [1]

The old city and its ancient layers

The earliest Kandahar lay about 4 km southeast of the modern city, along the Qaytul ridge, in a field of ruins known today as Shahr-e Kohna, the Old City (Pashto Zor Shar). It was the site of Kandahar until the eighteenth century. [1] Gerard Fussman reports that British excavations, which had to stop in 1978 because of the insurrection against the new communist government, found evidence of settlement there since around 700 BCE. The man-made citadel dates at least to the sixth century BCE and is probably an early Achaemenid construction. [2]

Kandahar became a city of the wider ancient world. A bilingual Greek and Aramaic rock inscription of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, from the third century BCE, was found near the northern part of the Qaytul in 1958, and other Greek inscriptions have been found in the ruins. The Greek city of Alexandria in Arachosia is often placed here, but De Planhol notes that the tradition of an Alexandrian foundation is recent and the identification not proved. [1] [2] On top of the ridge, a Buddhist stupa and monastery survive, probably from the third to sixth centuries CE, overlooking the city; a hoard of more than a hundred coins found in the monastery, mostly Hunnish, with one Umayyad and one Chinese coin, suggests it was hidden between the late seventh and early eighth centuries. [2]

Where the name Kandahar comes from is still debated. One idea derives it from Gandhara; another from a hypothetical Greek town named after the Indo-Parthian ruler Gondophares; De Planhol advises ignoring the popular derivation from Eskandar, Alexander the Great. [1]

From the Arab raid to the Mongols

The ninth-century historian al-Baladhuri reports that the Umayyad governor of Sistan, Abbad ibn Ziyad, attacked and took a city called Qandahar during the reign of the caliph Muawiya (661–80). [3] From then on, for reasons that are not known, the name Kandahar almost disappears from the sources for the tenth to twelfth centuries, when the area was called Rukhkhaj, from Arachosia, and two cities, Panjwai and Teginabad, are named. Minoru Inaba notes that the excavator Svend Helms suggests Teginabad was the name of the city in the early Islamic period. [3] The name returns in the thirteenth century. [1]

In 1221 a Mongol contingent besieged Kandahar and was defeated by Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah, according to a single source, al-Nasawi. Timur captured the city in 1383, and Timurid princes were appointed to govern it in the following decades. [4] Writing about 1504, Babur observed that Kandahar and Kabul were trading centres on the land route between Khorasan and India. [4]

Between Persia and India

Babur took Kandahar in 1522 after an earlier failed siege, and after his death the city became a prize in a long contest between the Safavids of Persia and the Mughals of India, with intermittent conflict lasting into the mid-seventeenth century. [4] Shah Abbas I took it in 1622 after a siege of five to six weeks. [4] Matthee and Mashita note that in the seventeenth century Kandahar was a major transit market: India exported cloth, cotton textiles, sugar and large quantities of indigo to Iran through it, and warhorses came the other way. [4]

In 1704 the Safavids appointed the Georgian Gorgin Khan governor. The Ghilzai revolt of 1709 under Mir Wais Hotak overthrew Persian rule, as told in the article on the Hotak dynasty. [4] Nader Shah besieged Kandahar from 1737, had a new city built a few miles to the southeast, which he named Naderabad, and took the old city in 1738 after a siege of more than a year. He moved Abdali families back to replace the Ghilzai. [4] [2] The old city was emptied of its population in 1738. [2]

Ahmad Shah's capital

After Nader Shah's death in 1747 the Abdali leader Ahmad Khan was chosen king, perhaps at Naderabad, and, as De Planhol describes, received a symbolic investiture as Shah of the Afghans in Kandahar's grand mosque. He planned a new capital north of Naderabad and named it Ahmadshahi, with the epithet Ashraf al-Belad, noblest of cities, on its coins. [1] Sources disagree on when it was built: Matthee and Mashita report that the building of the new city was ordered in early 1756, though Elphinstone placed it in 1753 or 1754. [4] The city was laid out on a roughly square plan, divided into four quarters by two main streets that crossed at a domed covered bazaar near the grand mosque, with the royal palace at the north. The Persian-speaking Shia population lived in the north-western quarter by the palace, while the Pashtuns settled by tribe in other quarters. A nine-metre wall with six gates surrounded the city. [1]

Ahmad Shah, who died in 1772 and was buried in Kandahar, also had an irrigation canal dug from the Arghandab. His successor Timur Shah moved the capital to Kabul: the date is 1773 in De Planhol, 1774 in Shah Mahmoud Hanifi and 1775 in Matthee and Mashita. [1] [4] [5] His octagonal mausoleum, crowned by a blue-tiled dome, stands on a basalt platform, behind the Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet (Da Kherqa Sharifa Ziarat), which he built about 1770. According to local belief it holds a cloak worn by the Prophet Muhammad. [2] [6]

The nineteenth century

Hanifi writes that even after the capital moved to Kabul, Kandahar kept its political weight during the nineteenth century. Tension between Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns, he says, is a key dynamic of Afghan politics, and Kandahar has been a primary arena for it. [5] British forces occupied Kandahar during the First Anglo-Afghan War, from April 1839 to August 1842, and again from 8 January 1879 to 21 April 1881. Maiwand, on 27 July 1880, and Roberts's march from Kabul in August 1880 are the best-known events of that second occupation. [5] Visitors in the early nineteenth century described a large, prosperous city with a prominent community of Hindu merchants, but decades of fighting among princes left many houses abandoned. Estimates of the population ranged from 15,500 to 100,000, and the highest, De Planhol says, was too high. [1] [5] A British census of 1891 counted 31,514 people. [6]

The twentieth century

Under Amir Abdur Rahman the centre of political and economic life moved decisively to Kabul. [5] Kandahar remained the symbolic home of the Durrani and the Western Ghilzai: the tomb of Ahmad Shah is in the city and that of Mir Wais Hotak is nearby at Kokaran, alongside the shrine of Baba Wali, a local Abdali saint. [6] When King Amanullah abdicated in January 1929 he went to Kandahar and tried to rally the Durrani by displaying the Cloak of the Prophet in public, but their leaders did not fully support him, and he left for India in late April. [6]

In the early twentieth century the economy recovered and Kandahar again became a major producer of wool and fruit: pomegranates, apricots, figs and grapes were produced for local use and export to South Asia. The city's population was estimated at 60,000 in 1939 and about 160,000 in the early 1970s. [6] A Pashto literary society based in Kandahar was taken over by the government in the early 1930s and became the Pashto Society, whose members worked to promote Pashto in the state and in civil society. [6] The 2006 population estimate cited in the Iranica entry is 450,300. [1]