Place · Ghaznavid capital · Afghanistan
Ghazni
Also known as Ghazni, Ghazna, Ghaznavid capital
Maḥmūd's capital, from which seventeen campaigns went into India, and the city al-Bīrūnī worked in for most of his life — brought there from Khwarezm after Maḥmūd annexed it, and kept as a court scholar rather than as a guest.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.553, 68.423
Worth knowing
He learned Sanskrit and wrote the Tārīkh al-Hind, the fairest account of Indian learning any outsider produced before the nineteenth century, while attached to the army that was sacking the places he wanted to study. He says so himself, and the discomfort is on the page.
Connections (4)
- Imperial administration ofNandana, the Salt Range
Ghazni is where he was kept and Nandana is where he did the one piece of fieldwork the Tarikh al-Hind's reputation rests on. A Ghaznavid frontier fort in the Salt Range is therefore the site of the most accurate pre-modern measurement of the size of the earth, made by a man travelling with an invading army because he had no choice about where he was.
- CampaignSomnāth / Prabhāsa
Seventeen campaigns went from Ghazni into India, the Somnath raid of 1025–26 among them, and al-Biruni was attached to that court throughout. His account of the shrine is a scholar's description of a place his own patron had just destroyed, and he explains its wealth by pilgrimage and tide rather than by the treasure the campaign was mounted for.
- Route adjacencyGomal Pass
The Gomal rises in the uplands behind Ghazni and comes out at the Indus, which makes it the direct line between the Ghaznavid heartland and the Punjab plains. Mahmūd's raids into India used the northern passes, but the commercial traffic between Ghazni and the Indus ran down this valley for centuries afterwards, and the Povindah caravans that still used it in the nineteenth century were the surviving end of that system — the same route, the same goods, long after the empire that made it profitable had gone.
- Adjacent ghaznavid capitalLashkari Bazar
Lashkari Bazar on the Helmand and Ghazni in the eastern mountains are the two great Ghaznavid capital complexes, built by Mahmud of Ghazni and his successors through the eleventh century. Ghazni was the summer capital, Lashkari Bazar the winter — the court moved annually between them. Both were destroyed by Genghis Khan's armies in 1221; what remains at Lashkari is the audience hall with its surviving royal portrait frescoes, which are the richest physical evidence we have of eleventh-century Afghan court painting.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ghazni”. Al-Bīrūnī, Tārīkh al-Hind, trans. Edward Sachau as Alberuni's India (1888); C.E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids (1963).
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