Before the sultans
Ghazni lies on the road between Kabul and Kandahar, on a high plain at over 2,000 metres. Before Islam it was part of the region of Zabulistan, and Buddhist remains, including a monastery at Tapa Sardar with a large reclining Buddha, have been excavated nearby. Xuanzang passed through the region in the seventh century.
The Ghaznavid capital
In 962 Alp-Tegin, a Turkic slave commander of the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, took Ghazni and made it his base. His former slave and successor, Sebuktigin (r. 977–997), founded the Ghaznavid dynasty. Under Sebuktigin's son Mahmud (r. 998–1030) Ghazni became the capital of an empire stretching from Iran to the Punjab. Mahmud's raids into India brought vast quantities of treasure, slaves and captured images to the city, and contemporary writers describe the wealth displayed there.
Mahmud also gathered scholars and poets, by persuasion or by force. Firdawsi completed the Shahnameh, the Persian epic of the kings of Iran, around 1010 and presented it to Mahmud; the story that the sultan underpaid him became a famous legend. The scholar al-Biruni, brought to Ghazni from Khwarazm after Mahmud conquered it in 1017, accompanied the sultan's campaigns and wrote his great study of Indian religion, science and society, the Kitab al-Hind. The court poets Unsuri and Farrukhi and, later, the historian Bayhaqi made Ghazni a centre of the new Persian literature.
Ghazni after Mahmud
After the Seljuqs defeated Mahmud's son Mas'ud at Dandanqan in 1040, the Ghaznavids lost their western lands, but they kept Ghazni and the Punjab for another century. Their buildings of this period include two decorated brick minarets, of Mas'ud III and Bahram Shah, whose lower parts survive, and the palace of Mas'ud III, excavated by an Italian mission from 1957, with a carved marble dado bearing a Persian poem.
In about 1150 Ala al-Din Husayn, ruler of Ghur, defeated Bahram Shah and burned Ghazni for seven days in revenge for the killing of his brothers, earning the name Jahansuz, "world burner". The Ghurids later took the city, and Mu'izz al-Din Muhammad ruled from it while conquering northern India. The Mongols sacked it in 1221.
Later history
Ghazni declined into a provincial town. Mahmud's tomb, at Rauza outside the city, was venerated, and in 1842 the British governor-general Lord Ellenborough ordered its wooden gates brought to India as the gates of Somnath, a claim soon shown to be false. In 1839, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, the British stormed Ghazni's citadel. The city has suffered in the wars since 1979, and its monuments have been damaged.
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
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
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.
- Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan — The Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan were a succession of polities in Gandhara, Bactria, and the Kabul valley — including the Kushan Empire and the later Kabul Shahi and Hindu Shahi dynasties — that governed the region before its Islamization was completed in the 11th century CE.
- 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.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.