Place · Afghan imperial capital · Afghanistan
Kandahar
Also known as Kandahar — the Durrānī capital
Ahmad Shāh Durrānī was chosen king at Kandahar in 1747 and made it the capital of the empire he built out of Nādir Shāh's wreckage — an empire that at its height ran from Mashhad to Delhi and Kashmir to the Arabian Sea, and from which modern Afghanistan descends. His octagonal tomb stands beside the Kherqa Sharīf, the shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet, which he had brought from Bukhara and which is produced only at moments of crisis. The city sits where the roads from Herat, Kabul and Quetta meet.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 31.620, 65.716
Worth knowing
Old Kandahar, a few kilometres from the modern town, carries Ashoka's bilingual Greek and Aramaic edict — so the same site holds the westernmost Mauryan inscription and the tomb of the man who founded Afghanistan.
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyKandahar (Old Kandahar edict)
Old Kandahar and the Durrānī city are effectively the same place, and between them they hold the two ends of Afghan history. The mound of the old city produced Ashoka's bilingual edict in Greek and Aramaic — the westernmost Mauryan inscription known, addressing a Hellenistic population in its own languages in the third century BCE. A few kilometres away stands the tomb of Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, who was elected king here in 1747 and from whom the modern Afghan state descends.
- Samadhi atAhmad Shāh Abdālī
Ahmad Shāh was chosen king at Kandahar in 1747 by an assembly of Pashtun chiefs after Nādir Shāh's murder, made the city his capital, and is buried there under an octagonal dome beside the shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet, which he brought from Bukhara. The empire he built ran at its greatest extent from Mashhad to Delhi and from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea, and it is the political ancestor of Afghanistan — which is why his tomb, not any battlefield, is the state's founding monument.
- Route adjacencyKhojak Pass & the Chaman line
Kandahar and Quetta are one road with a border on it, and the Khojak is the mountain in between. The British tunnelled under it in 1888–91 and laid rail to Chaman precisely so that an army could be at Kandahar in days rather than weeks, which is what the Second Afghan War had shown they could not do. The line stopped at the frontier and was never extended. The road still carries the transit trade, and the fruit that comes down it is why Quetta became a fruit market.
- CampaignPanipat
The road from Kandahar ended at Panipat. Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, elected king at Kandahar in 1747, invaded India repeatedly over the following fourteen years and on 14 January 1761 destroyed the Maratha army on the old battlefield north of Delhi — the heaviest single defeat any Indian power suffered in the eighteenth century, with Baloch levies from Kalat in his line. He then went home. The victory settled nothing for Afghanistan and broke Maratha paramountcy, which left the field to the Company.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kandahar” and “Ahmad Shah Durrani”. Ganda Singh, Ahmad Shah Durrani (1959); Nile Green on the Kherqa Sharīf.
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