GHAZNI, a famous city in Afghanistan, the seat of an exten sive empire under two mediaeval dynasties, and interesting in the modern history of British India. Ghazni stands on the high table land of central Afghanistan, in 68° 18' E. 44' N., at a height of 7,280 ft., and on the direct road between Kandahar and Kabul, 221 m. by road N.E. from the former, and 92 M. S.W.
from the latter. A very considerable trade in fruit, wool, skins, etc., is carried on between Ghazni and India by the povindah merchants. Ghazni, long in decay, is reviving since the opening of the Kabul road for motors. It stands at the base of the ter minal spur of a ridge of hills, an offshoot from the Gul-Koh, which forms the watershed between the Arghandab, and Tarnak rivers. The castle stands at the northern angle of the town next the hills, and is about 150 ft. above the plain. The town walls are on an elevation, partly artificial, and form an irregular square, partly of stone or brick laid in mud, and partly of clay built in courses, flanked by numerous towers with three gates. The plain in the direction of Kandahar is bare except near the river, where villages and gardens are tolerably numerous. Abundant crops of wheat and barley are grown, as well as of madder, besides minor products. Snow lies 2 or 3 ft. deep for about three months, and tradition speaks of the city as having been more than once over whelmed by snowdrift. Fuel consists chiefly of prickly shrubs. In summer the heat is not like that of Kandahar or Kabul, but the radiation from the bare heights renders the nights oppressive, and constant dust-storms occur. Probably the existing site formed the citadel only of the city of Mahmud. The remarks of Ibn Batuta (c. 1332) already suggest the present state of things, viz., a small town occupied, a large space of ruin ; for a considerable area to the north-east is covered with ruins, or rather with a vast extent of mounds, spoken of as Old Ghazni. The only remains retaining architectural character are two remarkable towers rising to the height of about 140 ft., and some 400 yd. apart belonging, on a smaller scale, to the same class as the Kutb Minar at Delhi (q.v.). Arabic inscriptions in Cufic characters show the most northerly to have been the work of Mahmud himself, the other that of his son Masa`ud. On the Kabul road, a mile beyond the Minaret of Mahmud, is a village called Rauzah. Here, in a poor garden, stands the tomb of the famous conqueror. The village stands among luxuriant gardens and orchards, watered by a copious aqueduct.
History.—The city is not positively mentioned by any ancient author but it is possibly the Gazaca which Ptolemy places among the Paropamisadae, and this may not be inconsistent with Sir H. Rawlinson's identification of it with Gazos, an Indian city spoken of by two obscure Greek poets as an impregnable place of war. We seem to have definite evidence of the existence of the city before Mohammedan times (644) in the travels of the Chinese pilgrim, Hsiian Tsang, who speaks of Ho-si-na (i.e., probably Ghazni) as one of the capitals of Tsaukuta or Arachosia, a place of great strength. In early Mohammedan times the country ad joining Ghazni was called Zeibul. When the Mohammedans first invaded that region Ghazni was a wealthy entrepot of the Indian trade. Of the extent of this trade some idea is given by Ibn Haukal, who states that at Kabul, then a mart of the same trade, there was sold yearly indigo to the value of two million dinars (LI,000,000). The provinces on the Helmund and about Ghazni were invaded as early as the caliphate of Moawiya (662-680). The arms of Yaqub b. Laith swept over Kabul and Arachosia (Al Rukhaj) about 871, and the people of the latter country were forcibly converted. Though the Hindu dynasty of Kabul held a part of the valley of Kabul river till the time of Mahmud, it is probably to the period just mentioned that we must refer the per manent Mohammedan occupation of Ghazni. In the latter part of the 9th century the family of the Samanid, sprung from Samar kand, reigned in splendour at Bokhara. Alptagin, originally a Turkish slave, and high in the service of the dynasty, about the. middle of the loth century, losing the favour of the court, wrested Ghazni from its chief (who is styled Abu Bakr Lawik, wali of Ghazni), and established himself there. His government was recognized from Bokhara and held till his death. In 977 another Turk slave, Sabuktagin, who had married the daughter of his master Alptagin, obtained rule in Ghazni. He made himself lord of nearly all the present territory of Afghanistan and of the Pun jab. In 997 Mahmud, son of Sabuktagin, succeeded to the govern ment, and with his name Ghazni and the Ghaznevid dynasty have become perpetually associated. Issuing forth year after year from that capital, Mahmud (q.v.) carried fully 17 expeditions of devastation through northern India and Gujarat, as well as others to the north and west. The wealth brought back to Ghazni was enormous, and contemporary historians give glowing descrip tions of the magnificence of the capital as well as of the con queror's munificent support of literature. Mahmud died in Io3o, and some 14 kings of his house came after him; but though there was some revival of importance under Ibrahim , the empire never reached anything like the same splendour and power. It was overshadowed by the Seljuks of Persia and by the rising rivalry of Ghor (q.v.), the hostility of which it had repeat edly provoked. Bahram Shah (111 8-5 2) put to death Kutbuddin, one of the princes of Ghor, called king of the Jibal or hill coun try, who had withdrawn to Ghazni. This prince's brother, Saifud din Suri, came to take vengeance and drove out Bahram. But the latter, recapturing the place (1149), paraded Saifuddin and his vizier ignominiously about the city and then hanged them on the bridge. Ala-uddin of Ghor, younger brother of the two slain princes, then gathered a great host and came against Bahram, who met him on the Helmund. The Ghori prince, after repeated victories, stormed Ghazni and gave it over to fire and sword. The dead kings of the house of Mahmud, except the conqueror himself and two others, were torn from their graves and burnt, whilst the bodies of the princes of Ghor were solemnly disinterred and car ried to the distant tombs of their ancestors. It seems certain that Ghazni never recovered the splendour that perished then (1152). Ala-uddin, who from this deed became known in history as Jahan soz (Burn-all), returned to Ghor, and Bahram reoccupied Ghazni; he died in 1157. In the time of his son Khusru Shah, Ghazni was taken by the Turkish tribes called Ghuzz (generally believed to have been what are now called Turkomans). The king fled to Lahore, and the dynasty ended with his son. In 1173 the Ghuzz were expelled by Ghiyasuddin, sultan of Ghor (nephew of Ala uddin Jahansoz), who made Ghazni over to his brother Muiz uddin. This famous prince, whom the later historians call Mo hammed Ghori, shortly afterwards 5) invaded India, taking Multan and Uchh. This was the first of many successive inroads on western and northern India, in one of which Lahore was wrested from Khusru Malik, the last of Mahmud's house, who died a captive in the hills of Ghor. In 1192, the king of Ajmere being defeated and slain near Thanewar, the whole coun try from the Himalayas to Ajmere became subject to the Ghori king of Ghazni. On the death of his brother Ghiyasuddin, with whose power he had been constantly associated and of whose con quests he had been the chief instrument, Muizuddin became sole sovereign over Ghor and Ghazni, and the latter place was then again for a brief period the seat of an empire nearly as extensive as that of Mahmud the son of Sabuktagin. Muizuddin crossed the Indus once more to put down a rebellion of the Khokhars in the Punjab, and on his way back was murdered by a band of them, or, as some say, by one of the Mulahidah or Assassins. The slave lieutenants of Muizuddin carried on the conquest of India, and as the rapidly succeeding events relieved their dependence on any master they established at Delhi that monarchy of which the shadow was still surviving in 1857. The death of Muizuddin was followed by struggle and anarchy, ending for a time in the annexation of Ghazni to the empire of Khwarizm by Mohammed Shah, who conferred it on his famous son, Jelaluddin, and Ghazni became the headquarters of the latter. After Jenghiz Khan had extinguished the power of his family in Turkestan, Jelaluddin de feated the army sent against him by the Mongol at Parwan, north of Kabul. Jenghiz then advanced and drove Jelaluddin across the Indus, after which he sent Ogdai, his son, to besiege Ghazni. Henceforward Ghazni is much less prominent in Asiatic history. It continued subject to the Mongols, sometimes to the house of Hulagu in Persia, and sometimes to that of Jagatai in Turkestan.
Ibn Batuta (c. 1332) says the greater part of the city was in ruins, and only a small part continued to be a town. Timur seems never to have visited Ghazni, but we find him in 140I bestowing the government of Kabul, Kandahar, and Ghazni on Pir Moham med, the son of his son Jahangir. At the end of the century it was still in the hands of a descendant of Timur, Ulugh Beg Mirza, who was king of Kabul and Ghazni. The illustrious nephew of this prince, Baber, got peaceful possession of both cities in 1504, and has left notes on both in his own inimitable Memoirs. "It is," he says, "but a poor mean place, and I have always won dered how its princes, who possessed also Hindustan and Khor asan, could have chosen such a wretched country for the seat of their government, in preference to Khorasan." He commends the fruit of its gardens, which still contribute largely to the mar kets of Kabul. Ghazni remained in the hands of Baber's descend ants, reigning at Delhi and Agra, till the invasion of Nadir Shah (1738), and became after Nadir's death a part of the new kingdom of the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durani. The historical name of Ghazni was brought back from the dead, as it were, by the news of its capture by the British army under Sir John Keane, July 23, 1839, at the cost of 182 killed and wounded. Two years and a half later the Afghan outbreak against the British occupa tion found Ghazni garrisoned by a Bengal regiment of sepoys, but neither repaired nor provisioned. They held out under great hardships from Dec. 16, 1841, to Mar. 6, 1842, when they sur rendered. In the autumn of the same year General Nott, advanc ing from Kandahar upon Kabul, reoccupied Ghazni, destroyed the defences of the castle and part of the town, and carried away the famous gates of Somnath (q.v.).