Ancient history of Afghanistan

The ancient history of Afghanistan, also referred to as the pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan, dates back to the Helmand Civilization around 3300–2350 BCE and the Oxus Civilization around 2400–1950 BCE. Archaeological exploration began in Afghanistan in earnest after World War II and proceeded until the late 1970s during the Soviet–Afghan War. Archaeologists and historians suggest that humans were living in Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, and that farming communities of the region were among the earliest in the world. Urbanized culture has existed in the land from between 3000 and 2000 BC. Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages have been found inside Afghanistan.

Inhabited by Iranian peoples and controlled by the Medes until c. 500 BCE when Darius the Great (Darius I) marched with his Persian army to make it part of the Achaemenid Empire. In 330 BC, Alexander the Great of Macedonia invaded the land after defeating Darius III of Persia in the Battle of Gaugamela. Much of Afghanistan became part of the Seleucid Empire followed by the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Seleucus I Nicator was defeated by Chandragupta Maurya and gave his daughter in peace treaty. The land was inhabited by various tribes and ruled by many different kingdoms for the next two millenniums. Before the Arab arrival of Islam in the 7th century, there were a number of religions practiced in modern day Afghanistan, including Zoroastrianism, Ancient Iranian religions, Buddhism and Hinduism. The Kafiristan (present-day Nuristan) region, in the Hindu Kush mountain range, was not converted until the 19th century.

The Stone Age
Louis Dupree, the University of Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian Institution and others suggest that humans were living in Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, and that farming communities of the region were among the earliest in the world. "Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation in Afghanistan from as far back as 50,000 BC. The artifacts indicate that the indigenous people were small farmers and herdsmen, as they are today, very probably grouped into tribes, with small local kingdoms rising and falling through the ages."

The Bronze Age
Archaeological finds indicate the possible beginnings of the Bronze Age in Afghanistan, which would ultimately spread throughout the ancient world. It is also believed that the region had early trade contacts with Mesopotamia.

Helmand Civilization (c. 3300–2350 BCE)
The Helmand Civilization was a Bronze Age culture that flourished mainly in the middle and lower valley of the Helmand River, in southern Afghanistan (Kandahar, Helmand and Nimruz provinces) and eastern Iran (Sistan and Baluchestan Province), predominantly in the third millennium BCE.

Oxus Civilization (c. 2400–1950 BCE)


The Oxus Civilization was a Middle Bronze Age civilization of southern Central Asia, also known as the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). The civilization's urban phase or Integration Era, was dated in 2010 by Sandro Salvatori to c. 2400–1950 BC.

The inhabitants of the Oxus Civilization were sedentary people who practised irrigation farming of wheat and barley. With their impressive material culture including monumental architecture, bronze tools, ceramics, and jewellery of semiprecious stones, the complex exhibits many of the hallmarks of civilization. The complex can be compared to proto-urban settlements in the Helmand basin at Mundigak in western Afghanistan and Shahr-e Sukhteh in eastern Iran.

Aryan Expansion


The Avesta was composed in Ariana, the earliest name of Afghanistan in the first half of the second millennium BCE (c. 2000-1500 BCE). The five Old Avestan Gathas (Gāthās), “songs,” are part of a collection of liturgical texts written in Old Avestan and not the later edition known as "New Avestan." Neither Old Avestan nor New Avestan mention the Medes who are known to have ruled Afghanistan starting around 700 BC. This suggests an early time-frame for the Avesta that has yet to be exactly determined as most academics believe it was written over the course of centuries if not millennia. Much of the archaeological data comes from the Oxus Civilization that played a key role in early Iranian or Aryanic civilization in Afghanistan.

Zoroastrianism spread to become one of the world's most influential religions and became the main faith of the old Aryan people for centuries. Dominated by Iranians, Zoroastrianism became the official religion upon the Iranian Plateau until the defeat of the Sassanian ruler Yazdegerd III c. 2,000 years after the founding of the Iranian religion.

The Indus Valley Civilization had a trading post in Shortugai and material in part of ceramic figurines of snakes, humped bulls, and other items in Mundigak. Indic languages are spoken in much of the Indian subcontinent. According to recent studies, the Oxus Civilization was not a primary contributor to Indo-Aryan genetics.

Medes Era (680–550 BCE)


The Medes, an Iranian people, arrived sometime around the 700s BCE and came to dominate most of ancient Afghanistan. They were an early tribe that forged the first empire on the present Iranian plateau and sister-nations with the Persians whom they initially dominated in the province of Fars to the south. Median control of parts of far off Afghanistan would last until Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Achaemenid Era (550 BC–331 BCE)


In what is today southern Iran, the Persians emerged to challenge Median supremacy on the Iranian plateau. By 550 BC, the Persians had replaced Median rule with their own dominion and even began to expand past previous Median imperial borders.

Balkh had a special position in old Afghanistan, being the capital of a vice-kingdom. By the 4th century BC, Persian control of outlying areas and the internal cohesion of the empire had become somewhat tenuous. Although distant provinces like Balkh had often been restless under Achaemenid rule, Bactrian troops from Balkh fought in the decisive Battle of Gaugamela in 330 BCE against the advancing armies of the Ancient Macedonians.

Macedonian Invasion & Seleucid Empire (330–250 BCE)


The Achaemenids were decisively defeated by Alexander and retreated from his advancing army of Greco-Macedonians and their allies. Darius III, the last Achaemenid ruler, tried to flee to Balkh but was assassinated by a subordinate lord, the Bactrian-born Bessus, who proclaimed himself the new ruler of Persia as Artaxerxes (V). Bessus was unable to mount a successful resistance to the growing military might of Alexander's army so he fled to his native Balkh, where he attempted to rally local tribes to his side but was instead turned over to Alexander who proceeded to have him tortured and executed for having committed regicide.

Moving thousands of kilometers eastward from recently subdued Persia, the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great, encountered fierce resistance from the local tribes of Aria, Drangiana, Arachosia (South and Eastern Afghanistan, North-West Pakistan) and Balkh (North and Central Afghanistan). One of the fiercest battles that he faced was in Herat. One of his top commanding officers was killed by the rebels and he had to go there himself. He couldn't defeat them in time and he ended up burning down the forest to finish the rebellion. Upon Alexander's death at the age of 32 in 323 BC, his empire, which had never been politically consolidated, broke apart as his companions began to divide it amongst themselves.

Alexander's cavalry commander, Seleucus, took nominal control of the eastern lands and founded the Seleucid dynasty. The majority of Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great wanted to leave the east and return home to Greece. Later, Seleucus sought to guard his eastern frontier and moved Ionian Greeks to many local groups) to Balkh in the 3rd century BC.

Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (c. 250–150 BCE)


In the middle of the 3rd century BC, an independent, Hellenistic state was declared in Bactria and eventually the control of the Seleucids and Mauryans was overthrown in western and southern Afghanistan. Graeco-Bactrian rule spread until it included a large territory which stretched from Turkmenistan in the west to the Punjab in India in the east by about 170 BC. Greek rule was eventually defeated by continual conflict with Iranian nomadic tribes (first the Scythians-Sakas, then the Tocharians, also known as the Yuezhi) but also the Parthians in the middle of the 2nd century BC.

Parthian & Kushan Empire (150 BC–300 CE)
In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, the Parthians, a nomadic Iranian-speaking group, arrived in Western Asia. While they made large inroads into the modern-day territory of Afghanistan, about 100 years later another Iranian-speaking group from the north—called the Yuezhi by the Chinese—entered the region of Afghanistan and established an empire lasting almost four centuries, which would dominate most of the Afghanistan region.

Kushans - one of the five aristocratic Iranian     tribes Yuezhi,    which created the Kushan Kingdom. Ethnically, they are believed to be related to the Tokhars and Bactrians. The Kushan Empire spread from the Kabul River valley to defeat other Central Asian tribes that had previously conquered parts of the northern central Iranian Plateau once ruled by the Parthians. By the middle of the 1st century BC, the Kushans' base of control became Afghanistan and their empire spanned from the north of the Pamir mountains to the Ganges river valley in India. During rule of Kanishka, they had 2 seasonal capital cities which were Kabul in Spring and Summer then moving to Peshawr for Fall and Winter. Early in the 2nd century under Kanishka, the most powerful of the Kushan rulers, the empire reached its greatest geographic and cultural breadth to become a center of literature and art. Kanishka extended Kushan control to the mouth of the Indus River on the Arabian Sea, into Kashmir, and into what is today the Chinese-controlled area north of Tibet. Kanishka was a patron of religion and the arts. It was during his reign that Buddhism, which was promoted in northern India earlier by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (c. 260 BC–232 BCE), reached its zenith in Central Asia. Though the Kushanas supported the worship of various local deities.

Sasanian Era (300–650 CE)
In the 3rd century, Kushan control fragmented into semi-independent kingdoms that became easy targets for conquest by the rising Iranian dynasty, the Sasanians (c. 224–561) which annexed Afghanistan by 300 AD. In these far off easternmost territories, they established vassal kings as rulers, known as the Kushanshahs. Sasanian control was tenuous at times as numerous challenges from Central Asian tribes led to instability and constant warfare in the region.

The disunited Kushan and Sasanian kingdoms were in a poor position to meet the threat several waves of Xionite/Huna invaders from the north from the 4th century onwards. In particular, the Hephthalites (or Ebodalo; Bactrian script ηβοδαλο) swept out of Central Asia during the 5th century into Bactria and Iran, overwhelming the last of the Kushan kingdoms. Historians believe that Hephthalite control continued for a century and was marked by constant warfare with the Sassanians to the west who exerted nominal control over the region. By the middle of the 6th century the Hephthalites were defeated in the territories north of the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of antiquity) by another group of Central Asian nomads, the Göktürks, and by the resurgent Sassanians in the lands south of the Amu Darya. It was the ruler of western Göktürks, Sijin (a.k.a. Sinjibu, Silzibul and Yandu Muchu Khan) who led the forces against the Hepthalites who were defeated at the Battle of Chach (Tashkent) and at the Battle of Bukhara.

Other


The Shahi dynasties ruled portions of the Kabul Valley (in eastern Afghanistan) and the old province of Gandhara (northern Pakistan and Kashmir) from the decline of the Kushan Empire in the 3rd century to the early 9th century. They are split into two eras the Buddhist Turk Shahis with the change-over occurring around 870, and ruled up until the Arab Islamic conquest of Afghanistan.

When Xuanzang visited the region early in the 7th century, the Kabul region was ruled by a Kshatriya king, who is identified as the Shahi Khingal, and whose name has been found in an inscription found in Gardez.

Archaeological remnants


Most of the indigenous Zoroastrian and non-indigenous Greek, Hellenistic, Buddhist, Hindu and other cultures were replaced by the coming of Islam and little influence remains in Afghanistan today. Along ancient trade routes, however, stone monuments of the once flourishing Buddhist culture did exist as reminders of the past. The two massive sandstone Buddhas of Bamyan, 35 and 53 meters high, overlooked the ancient route through Bamyan to Balkh and dated from the 3rd and 5th centuries. They survived until 2001, when they were destroyed by the Taliban. In this and other key places in Afghanistan, archaeologists have located frescoes, stucco decorations, statuary, and rare objects from as far away as China, Phoenicia, and Rome, which were crafted as early as the 2nd century and bear witness to the influence of these ancient civilizations upon Afghanistan.

One of the early Buddhist schools, the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravāda, were known to be prominent in the area of Bamiyan. The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang visited a Lokottaravāda monastery in the 7th century CE, at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and this monastery site has since been rediscovered by archaeologists. Birchbark and palm leaf manuscripts of texts in this monastery's collection, including Mahāyāna sūtras, have been discovered at the site, and these are now located in the Schøyen Collection. Some manuscripts are in the Gāndhārī language and Kharoṣṭhī script, while others are in Sanskrit and written in forms of the Gupta script. Manuscripts and fragments that have survived from this monastery's collection include well-known Buddhist texts such as the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (from the Āgamas), the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā), the Medicine Buddha Sūtra, and the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra.

In 2010, reports stated that about 42 Buddhist relics have been discovered in the Logar Province of Afghanistan, which is south of Kabul. Some of these items date back to the 2nd century according to Archaeologists. The items included two Buddhist temples (Stupas), Buddha statues, frescos, silver and gold coins and precious beads.

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