Afghanistan - Early History
Afghanistan has an ancient and complex history. The true Afghans, according to their own traditions, trace their descent from Afghana, the son of Jeremiah, the son of Saul. Afghana, it is said, was Solomon's commander-in chief. They were transported from Syria to Persia by Nebuchadnezzar, and thence emigrated to the mountains of Ghor, and what is now the country of the Hazaras. They were converted to Islam by a party of their own tribe who had gone to Arabia, under a leader named Wais, and had there fought for the prophet Mahomet.
Archaeological exploration began in Afghanistan in earnest after World War II and proceeded promisingly until the Soviet invasion disrupted it in December of 1979. Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages were found. It is not yet clear, however, to what extent these periods were contemporaneous with similar stages of development in other geographic regions. The area that is now Afghanistan seems in prehistory -- as well as ancient and modern times -- to have been closely connected by culture and trade with the neighboring regions to the east, west, and north. Urban civilization in the Iranian plateau, which includes most of Iran and Afghanistan, may have begun as early as 3000 to 2000 BC. About the middle of the second millennium BC people speaking an Indo-European language may have entered the eastern part of the Iranian Plateau, but little is known about the area until the middle of the first millennium BC, when its history began to be recorded during the Achaemenid Empire.
Bactria is the name given in ancient times to a province or country in Central Asia extending northward from the Hindu-Kush Mountains as far as the river Oxus (Amu or Jihon), and called also Bactriana by classical writers. The exact extent of this land in early times cannot now be determined, but it must have been considerable; and, although barren to the north, its southern regions were rich in pasture lands, which made Bactria famous in antiquity, among other things, for its fine breed of horses. In history it has been the seat of a number of powerful rulers, who are best known as the successors of Alexander the Great in the East. In the Kushan period the name Bactria fell out of use. What was formerly Bactria is now included in parts of Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The name of the province or country appears in the Old Persian Inscriptions as Bakhtri. The capital city, Balkh, or earlier Bactra, was situated on the Dargidus or Bactrus (now Dehas). This city seems also to be known in the classics as Zariaspa. In the Avesta (Vendldad 1.7), and elsewhere, it receives the title "beautiful" (Av. srlra), to which the attribute "with banners on high" is appended. This additional designation of the capital of Bactria in ancient times was apparently due to the custom, mentioned by Masudi and Yakut, of pious pilgrims hanging green silk banners from the walls of the temple Naubehar. This latter name has been supposed to refer to a Buddhist "New Cloister" (nava-viMra), as Balkh, in the province of Bactria, was a flourishing seat of Buddhism in the early Christian centuries.
Around the time that the BMAC civilization disintegrated in Central Asia (northern Afghanistan, southern Turkmenistan, southern Uzbekistan), in the wake of the Bronze Age Collapse, two major groups of Iranians suddenly appeared in Mesopotamian cuneiform sources — the Medes and the Persians. Of the two, the Medes were the more widespread and important group.
The area that is present-day Afghanistan comprised several satrapies (provinces) of the Achaemenid Empire when it was at its most extensive, under Darius the Great (ca. 500 BC). Bactriana, with its capital at Bactria (which later became Balkh), was reputedly the home of Zoroaster, who founded the religion that bears his name. By the fourth century B.C., Iranian control of outlying areas and the internal cohesion of the empire had become tenuous. Although outlying areas like Bactriana had always been restless under Achaemenid rule, Bactrian troops nevertheless fought on the Iranian side in the decisive Battle of Gaugamela (330 BC). They were defeated by Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great conquered the area that is now Afghanistan, and married Roxana, a Bactrian princess. Alexander’s empire died with him, and control of Afghanistan was disputed by the Seleucids, the Greco-Bactrians, the Parthians and Indo-Greeks of the Mauryan dynasty. The Kushan Empire, from 130 BC to 500 AD, merged Central Asian, Hellenic and Indian elements into the Graeco-Buddhist or Gandharan civilization that created the Bamiyan Buddhas.
It took Alexander only three years (from about 330-327 BC) to subdue the area that is now Afghanistan and the adjacent regions of the former Soviet Union. Moving eastward from the area of Herat, the Macedonian leader encountered fierce resistance from local rulers of what had been Iranian satraps. Although his expedition through Afghanistan was brief, he left behind a Hellenic cultural influence that lasted several centuries.
Upon Alexander's death in 323 BC, his empire, which had never been politically consolidated, broke apart. His cavalry commander, Seleucus, took nominal control of the eastern lands and founded the Seleucid dynasty. Under the Seleucids, as under Alexander, Greek colonists and soldiers entered the region of the Hindu Kush, and many are believed to have remained. At the same time, the Mauryan Empire was developing in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. It took control, thirty years after Alexander's death, of the southeasternmost areas of the Seleucid domains, including parts of present-day Afghanistan. The Mauryans introduced Indian culture, including Buddhism, to the area. With the Seleucids on one side and the Mauryans on the other, the people of the Hindu Kush were in what would become a familiar quandary in ancient as well as modern history--that is, caught between two empires.
In the middle of the third century BC, an independent, Greek-ruled state was declared in Bactria. Graeco-Bactrian rule spread until it included most of the territory from the Iranian deserts to the Ganges River and from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea by about 170 BC. Graeco-Bactrian rule was eventually defeated by a combination of the internecine disputes that plagued Greek rulers to the west, the ambitious attempts to extend control into northern India, and the pressure of two groups of nomadic invaders from Central Asia--the Parthians and Sakas (perhaps the Scythians).
In the third and second centuries BC, the Parthians, a nomadic people speaking Indo-European languages, arrived on the Iranian Plateau. The Parthians established control in most of what is Iran as early as the middle of the third century B.C.; about 100 years later another Indo-European group from the north--the Kushans (a subgroup of the tribe called the Yuezhi by the Chinese)--entered Afghanistan and established an empire lasting almost four centuries.
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 first century B.C., the Kushans' control stretched from the Indus Valley to the Gobi Desert and as far west as the central Iranian Plateau. Early in the second century AD 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 Mahayana Buddhism, imported to northern India earlier by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (ca. 260-232 B.C.), reached its zenith in Central Asia.
In the third century AD, Kushan control fragmented into semi-independent kingdoms that became easy targets for conquest by the rising Iranian dynasty, the Sassanians (ca. 224-561 AD). These small kingdoms were pressed by both the Sassanians from the west and by the growing strength of the Guptas, an Indian dynasty established at the beginning of the fourth century.
The disunited Kushan and Sassanian kingdoms were in a poor position to meet the threat of a new wave of nomadic, Indo-European invaders from the north. The Hepthalites (or White Huns) swept out of Central Asia around the fourth century into Bactria and to the south, overwhelming the last of the Kushan and Sassanian kingdoms. Historians believe that their control continued for a century and was marked by constant warfare with the Sassanians to the west.
By the middle of the sixth century the Hepthalites were defeated in the territories north of the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of antiquity) by another group of Central Asian nomads, the Western Turks, and by the resurgent Sassanians in the lands south of the Amu Darya.
Up until the advent of Islam, the lands of the Hindu Kush were dominated up to the Amu Darya by small kingdoms under Sassanian control but with local rulers who were Kushans or Hepthalites. Of this great Buddhist culture and earlier Zoroastrian influence there remain few, if any, traces in the life of Afghan people today. Along ancient trade routes, however, stone monuments of Buddhist culture exist as reminders of the past. The two great sandstone Buddhas, thirty-five and fifty-three meters high overlook the ancient route through Bamian to Balkh and date from the third and fifth centuries AD. In this and other key places in Afghanistan, archaeologists have located frescoes, stucco decorations, statuary, and rare objects from China, Phoenicia, and Rome crafted as early as the second century A.D. that bear witness to the influence of these ancient civilizations on the arts in Afghanistan.
After the campaigns against India of the Scythians and Saks, there occurred in Central and Western Asia, a series of wars, so that what had at one time been one large sovereignty, was often split up into several small independent States, and this saved rich India from foreign invasions. But in the 6th century AD, there succeeded to the throne of Persia a great politician and army leader, Naushirwan. He reigned from 531 to 579 AD, and during that period obtained considerable successes over the Roman Empire, until, at last, a portion of Arabia and of Syria, Bactria, the whole of the Oxus basin, a portion of the basin of the Jaxartes, including the country now known as the Province of Farghana, and the whole of modern Afghanistan came under his sway.
Naushirwan subsequently conquered all the countries to the west of the rivers Indus, and also certain of the Upper Provinces of India. His military successes were surprising, and that to the end of his life he knew how to preserve intact the great empire which he had founded. In his day the limits of Persia stretched far beyond the ancient Persian monarchy, to which modern braggart Persians set pretensions. But Naushirwan's son was not able to preserve the integrity of his father's empire; for in the VII century, we find in Kabulistan a group of small weak principalities, which served, , however, as a guarantee for the independence of India. But at the time of which we are now speaking, a small portion of the North-West of India was in a state of vassalship to the warlike ruler of Capissa or (Kabul-Kohistan), but in the VII century AD, this vassalship passed to Kashmir.
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