Origins
The dynasty grew out of the Turkic slave soldiers who served the Samanid rulers of Bukhara. Alp-Tegin, a Samanid commander, seized Ghazni in 962, and in 977 his former slave Sebuktigin became ruler there. Sebuktigin fought the Hindu Shahi king Jayapala, who ruled from the Kabul valley to the Punjab, and defeated him, taking the country around Kabul and Peshawar.
Mahmud
Sebuktigin's son Mahmud took power in 998 and ruled for over thirty years. The Abbasid caliph recognised him with the title Yamin al-Dawla, from which the dynasty is sometimes called Yamini. He conquered much of Iran and Central Asia, including Khwarazm, and led a long series of raids into India, traditionally numbered at seventeen. He defeated the Shahis again at Peshawar in 1001 and later destroyed their kingdom; sacked Nagarkot (Kangra) in 1009, Thanesar, Mathura and Kannauj in 1018, and Somnath in 1026. The raids brought enormous plunder to Ghazni and were celebrated by his court writers as holy war. He annexed the Punjab but made no attempt to rule the Ganges plain.
Historians debate the motives and effects of the raids. Contemporary Persian and Arabic sources stress religious zeal; modern historians also point to the need to pay a large professional army and the wealth of Indian temples. Al-Biruni, who served Mahmud, wrote that the raids had ruined the country's prosperity and left Hindus with an aversion to all Muslims.
The Persian court
The Ghaznavids, though Turkic in origin, ruled through Persian administrators and were great patrons of Persian literature. Firdawsi's Shahnameh, the poets Unsuri and Farrukhi, al-Biruni's study of India, and the historian Bayhaqi's history of Mas'ud's reign are products of their court.
Decline
Mahmud's son Mas'ud I faced the Seljuq Turks in Khurasan and was decisively defeated at Dandanqan in 1040. The Ghaznavids lost Iran and Central Asia and became a regional power based on Ghazni and the Punjab. Lahore became their second capital and a centre of Persian culture in India. Under Ibrahim (r. 1059–1099) and Mas'ud III they raided further into India.
In the twelfth century the Ghaznavids were caught between the Seljuqs and the rising Ghurids. In about 1150 Ala al-Din Husayn of Ghur burned Ghazni, and later the Ghaznavids lost it altogether. The last sultan, Khusrau Malik, held only the Punjab, and in 1186 Mu'izz al-Din of Ghur took Lahore and imprisoned him. The Ghurids inherited the Ghaznavids' Indian position and used it to conquer the north.
Further reading
- Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
See also
- Mahmud of Ghazni — Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030 CE) was the ruler of the Ghaznavid empire, centered in present-day Afghanistan, remembered chiefly for seventeen military campaigns into northern India between 1000 and 1027 CE, including the destruction of the Somnath temple.
- Hindu Shahi dynasty — A Hindu dynasty that ruled Kabul, Gandhara, and the Punjab from the mid-9th to the early 11th century CE, remembered chiefly for its sustained military resistance to the Ghaznavid conquest of the northwestern subcontinent.
- Jayapala — Jayapala (r. c. 964–1001 CE) was a Hindu Shahi king of Kabul and Punjab whose decades-long resistance to the Ghaznavids ended in defeat, capture, and self-immolation.
- Punjab — Punjab, the "Land of Five Rivers" straddling the India-Pakistan border in the northwestern subcontinent, has been a corridor of invasion, empire, and religious innovation from the Indus Valley Civilization through the founding of Sikhism to the 1947 Partition.
- Delhi Sultanate — The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 CE) was a series of five Turkic and Afghan Muslim dynasties that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent from Delhi, beginning with the Mamluk dynasty founded by Qutb-ud-din Aibak.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.