Place · Durrani capital · Afghanistan

Kābul

Also known as Kābul — the Durrani interlude

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.555, 69.207

Worth knowing

Shah Shuja's queen is said to have kept the stone hidden in a wall of the Lahore fort where they were held, and Ranjit Singh extracted it in 1813 as the price of the refuge he had already given. Shuja was later put back on the Kabul throne by the British and murdered there in 1842.

Connections (5)

• Journey legKhyber Pass

  The stone crossed the Khyber twice in sixty years — west with Ahmad Shah Durrani after Nader's assassination in 1747, and back east with the exiled Shah Shuja to Punjab in 1812. The pass carried almost every invasion of India and, in this case, the same object in both directions, which is a fair summary of what the Kabul–Lahore relationship was in those decades.

• Route adjacencyTorkham & the Durand Line

  Kabul and the Indus are one road, and Torkham is the gate on it. The Khyber drops from the Afghan plateau into the Peshawar valley, and every army, embassy and caravan between the two has used it: Bābur going down, the Durrānis coming down, three British armies going up and one of them destroyed on the way back in 1842. The Durand Line of 1893 put a boundary across the middle of that road, and the traffic — trucks, refugees, transit trade to Central Asia — has continued over it ever since.

• Contemporary capital withJalālābād

  Kabul and Jalālābād are a summer capital and a winter one, ninety miles and about fifteen hundred metres apart. Kabul at eighteen hundred metres closes with snow; Jalālābād in the Kabul river valley does not, so the Durrānī and later Barakzai courts moved down for the winter and back up in spring. The road between them through the Khyber gorges is the same one the British army took in 1841 and did not complete: the garrison at Jalālābād held while the Kabul force was destroyed above it.

• Route adjacencyMes Aynak

  Mes Aynak lies forty kilometres south-east of Kabul, on the Logar road toward Gardez and Ghazni, and its Buddhist and industrial phases belong to the centuries when Kabul was a stage on the route between India and Central Asia rather than a capital. The copper went out along the same roads the monasteries were endowed by. When the traffic shifted and the region turned Muslim, both the mining and the monasteries stopped, and the site was left until a mining lease found it again in 2007.

• Ruled fromZahiruddin Babur

  Babur took Kabul in 1504 at the age of twenty-one after losing his Ferghana patrimony as a teenager, and ruled from Kabul for the next twenty-two years before his Indian conquests. His raids across the Hindu Kush into Hindustan — in 1519, 1520, 1524 and finally 1526 — were all launched from Kabul, and on his explicit instruction his body was taken back from Agra after death and reburied at the Bagh-i-Babur there.

On these journeys

• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• Uttarāpatha — the Great Northern Road
• Overland corridors
• Journey of Koh-i-Noor

Sources

Wikipedia, “Kabul”. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (2017); the Treaty of Lahore, 1849.

• Wikipedia — Kabul