Cultured Killers - The History of Afghanistan
CLScott101
Afghanistan: 330 BC-1773
Cultured killers
Aristotle thought the eastern edge of the world could be seen from the top of
the Hindu Kush, and when Alexander the Great marched into what is now
Afghanistan in 330BC, during his great campaign against the Persian Achaemenian
Empire, he could be forgiven for believing that he had reached the outer limits
of existence.
The mountains rose with seeming infiniteness, and his uncomplaining soldiers
died in their hundreds, of frostbite, snowblindness and starvation.
Alexander’s horse slithered along in leather snowboots. But in the arid
semi-desert on the other side of the range, the Macedonian army was victorious,
capturing and then executing, the renegade satrap Bessus, once his nose and
ears had been cut off. The great general founded one Alexandria after another,
taking Bactria, crossing the mighty Oxus on rafts held afloat by leather bags
filled with straw, then seizing Samarkand.
But at every step he was harried by the ferocious local tribesmen, wounded
twice and stricken with dysentery. Some 20,000 locals were put to the sword in
a single act of retribution, but as others would discover in later centuries,
reprisal did not deter these warriors. Alexander marched on to India, leaving
the outpost of “Alexandria-at-the-end-of-the-world”, having overthrown the
Achaemenians and conquered most of the Afghan satrapies. But Greek control, if
such it could be called, was transitory; after Alexander’s death, part of the
area came under Seleucid control, and part under the Mauryan Empire of northern
India.
The great city of Ai Khanum remained, for a time, a flourishing outpost of
Greek civilisation at the end of the Earth, until it, too, was sacked and burnt
by nomad invaders at the end of the 2nd century BC, leaving behind the
shattered ruins of a grand theatre and marbled halls. “Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair.”
With the great migrations out of central Asia, the patchwork of Afghanistan
grew in ethnic and religious complexity: here came the marauding White Huns,
and before them the Kushans, a loose confederation of nomads who were patrons
of the arts and religion, whose power reached its zenith in the 2nd century AD
under King Kanishka. Along the Silk Road travelled Buddhism, forging the great
images of Buddha at Bamiyan that lasted from the third and fifth centuries
until this year, when the fanatic iconoclasm of the Taleban blasted them into
dust. Hindu influence entered by way of the Sassanians and the Hephthalites. By
the 9th century, during the rule of the Saffarids, Islam had reached as far as
Kabul. A bitter jihad against fundamentalist Zoroastrianism, the ancient cult
of fire worship, claimed the life of the Prophet’s own cousin at Samarkand in
697.
Fifteen centuries after Alexander, in 1219, came the attacker whose very name
means destruction: Genghis Khan, orphan, supreme politician, leader of the
Mongol horde, descended from the north, sacking and pillaging on a scale never
seen before. The Afghan highlanders were rallied, and inflicted a serious, if
temporary, defeat on the Mongols near Kabul.
Genghis Khan’s vengeance was terrible, the more so when his own grandson was
killed. Bamiyan was utterly destroyed. When the Taoist seer Chang Chun arrived
in Balkh after Genghis had passed through, destroying the celebrated mosque en
route, he recorded that he “could still hear dogs barking in its streets”.
All its human inhabitants, however, were dead.
The dissolution of the Mongol Empire broke Afghanistan into numerous, warring
principalities. In the century after emerged Tamerlane, a TurkoMongol warlord
who claimed, probably falsely, to be descended from Genghis. He had, however,
inherited his techniques, and forged his own empire, which included Afghanistan
and India. Tamerlane destroyed, but he also built: pyramids of skulls, and
walls embedded with the heads of the slain.
By destroying the irrigation system from the Helmand river, he turned what had
been fertile fields into arid desert. Tamerlane, like Alexander, and other
subsequent rulers of Afghanistan, combined extreme brutality with artistic
sensitivity. Samarkand, under Tamerlane and his dynasty, flourished as a centre
for art and music. Tamerlane was a cultured killer, as was his descendant at
the turn of the 16th century, Mohammed Zahir-ud-Din, the founder of the Mogul
dysnasty, known as Baber. A warlord with a love of botany, he captured Kabul,
made it an independent principality, constructed a great garden there and wrote
beautiful poetry and memoirs. He also brought in a Turkish gunner, the better
to hack down enemies with newly acquired artillery. Baber captured Kandahar in
1522, marched on Delhi in 1526, defeated the last of the Afghan Lodi kings of
India and established the Mogul empire.
In the early 1700s the Persian leader Nader Shah took control of Afghanistan
from the Moguls, and was succeeded by his bodyguard, Ahmed Shah Durrani, an
ethnic Pashtun elected king by a tribal council. Consolidating his rule in
Afghanistan, he forged another empire, stretching from Balkh in the north to
Karachi in the south, and almost to Delhi in the east, while simultaneously
fighting continual wars with the other Afghan tribes. Ahmed Shah’s
achievement was to found an Afghan royal dynasty that would rule, through a
variety of branches and offshoots, until the 1970s. A poet in Pashto, Shah was
also a man of a horticultural bent: “Whatever countries I conquer in the
world, I would never forget your beautiful gardens,” he said in an ode to his
own land. “When I remember the summits of your beautiful mountains I forget
the greatness of the Delhi throne.”
In 1783 the doughty British traveller George Forster was awed by the sheer
lawlessness of the people: “The Afghans are a rude, unlettered people and
their chiefs have little propensity to the refinements of life, which indeed,
their country is ill-equipped to supply . . . Being generally addicted to a
state of predatory warfare, their manners largely partake of a barbarous
insolence, and they avow a fierce contempt for the occupations of civil
life.”
The history of war was embedded in the Afghan identity. In 1994 the descendants
of these warriors, the Taleban, cheered as their leader, the one-eyed Mullah
Muhammad Omar, celebrated the capture of Kandahar by waving above his head part
of a cloak said to have been worn by Muhammad, and presented to Ahmed Shah by
the Emir of Bukhara two centuries earlier.
330 BC
Alexander the Great takes his army over the Hindu Kush. Those who survive the
cold face the broiling desert on the other side, the mighty Oxus river and
countless hostile tribsemen.
3rd-5th century AD
The two massive Buddha statues (180ft and 120ft tall) are built at Bamiyan on
the Silk Road, which snaked between China and the West.
652
The Arabs introduce Islam, leading to ferocious conflict with Zoroastrianism,
the ancient cult of fire worship, for spiritual dominance.
1219
Genghis Khan sweeps savagely through the land. His Mongol Horde lays waste to
the country, turning fertile fields into desert.
1370-1404
The reign of Tamerlane, warlord, aesthete and self-styled descendant of
Genghis, who forges an empire from his power base of Samarkand.
1747-1773
The rule of Ahmed Shah Durrani and the creation of his empire. His dynasty,
despite countless rebellions, interruptions and power shifts, rules until the
1970s.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2001344192,00.html
Sharon C. Smith
Thanks for sharing these interesting articles, Connie.
Does anyone remember reading James Michner's book, "Caravan"? I think
it was printed late 50s or early 60s.
Sharon