If we look at the data afghan Pashtun population is around 15 to 16 million approx 42 percent of the Afghanistan population and Pakistani Pashtun population is around 35 to 40 million approx of 15 to 18 percent of Pakistan's population.
And need context regarding their historical roots whether they were always a part of great Indus region group or not?
In the village of Khiwa,Pakistan in the Sial clan territories of central punjab, there lived a young woman named Sahiban. Her family had betrothed her to a man from the Chaddhar clan. She didn't want him.
What she wanted was Mirza Khan of the Kharal clan, from the village of Danabad They'd grown up together sent to the same village school as children and fallen for each other before either family realised what was happening.
By adulthood, Mirza was known throughout central punjab as the finest archer of his generation the qissa tradition is unanimous on this h could split arrows he could ride bareback while shooting he could hit targets at distances other archers couldn't see.
When Sahiban's wedding was announced, she sent word to Mirza that come for me before the ceremony or I will be married to a stranger.
He came.
On the eve of the wedding he rode into Khiwa swept Sahiban onto his horse and rode hard for Danabad her brothers and the groom's clan gave chase the math should have worked and Mirza could have killed half the pursuing party from horseback before they reached him.
So
They stopped at a jand tree to rest. Mirza fell asleep with his bow and quiver beside him and Sahiban the girl kept watch.
When she saw the dust of her brothers horses on the horizon she didn't wake him the Mirza our guy.
She picked up his arrows she broke them in half one by one and threw them into the branches of the jand tree.
Her reasoning as the qissa story gives it in her own voic her brothers seeing Mirza unarmed would spare him and they could take her back so Mirza he would live the romance was lost the lives could be saved.
She was wrong.
Her brothers arrived Mirza woke he reached for arrows that were no longer there. They killed him under the jand tree most versions which I have found online and have heard suggests that Sahiban killed herself on the spot some say she was taken back to Khiwa and died of grief either way both lovers dead:/
❚ The 400-year argument we are seeing or hearing from our elders..
This is the qissa that punjabi audiences have never stopped fighting about the argument splits roughly into three readings.
Reading one. Sahiban is a tragic miscalculation shee loved Mirza. She gambled that disarming him would force mercy and she was wrong about her brothers her hope killed her lover this is probably the dominant reading in punjabi village storytelling Sahiban as a victim of her own good faith.
Reading two sahiban chose family over love She loved Mirza but she also loved her brothers and when the moment came she saved one set of lives at the cost of another this is the reading invoked in punjabi family honour frameworks she did what a sister should do.
Third reading that Sahiban had no clean choice the society she lived in gave her no way to love without being possessed no way to choose without betraying someone. whatever she did would destroy her she broke the arrows because the world had already broken her options this is the reading favoured by recent feminist scholarship on punjabi qissa (story) literature.
The fact that she's been reframed across four centuries of punjabi poetry and that families still take sides is itself the strongest evidence of how morally unresolved this story remains.
❚ I come across this poet version's aswell and it's a interesting read.
Peelu composed the surviving literary version in the late 16th or early 17th century, possibly during Akbar's reign almost nothing is known about Peelu himself no court patronage records no biographical tradition o Tomb, He exists entirely through the poem. His rendering includes the single most famous passage in the entire qissa canon. *Mirza's dying lament under the jand tree, addressed directly to Sahiban asking her why these lines are quoted in punjabi households today the way Shakespeare is quoted in English cultural furniture absorbed so deeply that people who've never read the full poem know the words.
Hafiz Barkhurdar totally different poet produced another major version in the 17th century his Sahiban is colder, more calculating closer to the second reading the shift between Peelu's sympathetic Sahiban and Barkhurdarss harder one tells you how early the argument started.
❚ The clan that was real and some background for anyone if you scroll this far.
The Kharal clan mirza's clan in the story were a real punjabi tribal confederation active in jhang and sahiwal districts of Pakistan. During the 1857 rebellion against the British, the Kharals rose up under their chief Ahmad Khan Kharal, who was martyred fighting the colonial army of british near Gogera.
The British burned Kharal villages in retaliation so Mirza's clan has its own separate history of resistance and in local memory the archery and horsemanship attributed to Mirza in the qissa tracks with the martial reputation the Kharals actually held.
❚ Uncommon Details on JandTree
The jand tree (Prosopis cineraria probably) isn't a randomly detailed it's one of the most drought resistant trees in the subcontinent. It can survive on almost no rainfall and its roots reach 30 metres underground. In punjabi folk tradition, the jand is associated with endurance solitude, and desert survival etc that the lovers' story ends under a jand...
The tree that survives everything, while the lovers themselves do not is almost certainly deliberate poetic symbolism on Peelu's part if you have read in the previous section of this post in his version it plays a significant part.
The tomb of Mirza is locally venerated in jhang and its not on any tourist map most visitors are jhang locals Kharal clan members or qissa enthusiasts who make the trip specifically several villages in jhang and sahiwal claim the actual jand tree. None can prove it but everyone's believe it.
❚ The argument you can hear in music regarding this story qissa..
The great punjabi folk singers Asa Singh Mastana Kuldip Manak I love this guy Reshma the famous names each interpreted Sahiban differently in their renderings you can hear the moral argument continuing in the music itself Mastana's Sahiban is devastated manak's is defiant reshma's is heartbroken beyond language If you want to understand what the story means to punjab, listen before you finish the read)
There's one more thing that sets mirza and Sahiban apart from the other six canonical qissas every other great punjabi romance has been absorbed into Sufi allegory heer becomes the soul Ranjha becomes God the separation becomes the mystic's longing for union no major Sufi commentator has convincingly turned Sahiban's broken arrows into a metaphor for divine love the story stays stubbornly painfully human.. It's about a woman a man a family, and a decision made under a tree in the heat of a punjab afternoon that's why it generates argument instead of devotion that's why it's still alive.
Heer is a victim sahiban is a decision maker.
If you grew up punjabi-speaking you already know which side your family stands on or you might have heard about it from elders or during conversation or on social media etc it's up to you which version of qissas goes or pick side but the argument itself never stopped it has been 400 years countless discussions debate have already happened on this qissa, thank you for reading tho.
Most of us picture the indus valley civilization as a single moment in time.
The reality is a long arc.
Cities don't appear overnight and they don't disappear overnight either. Together these two maps cover roughly 1,700 years of continuous human civilization on the same ground. Almost the same stretch of time that separates us from the fall of rome.
❚ Map 1. The early harappan / kot diji phase (c. 3200 to 2500 BCE)
The shaded core area on the first map shows the kot diji culture. The immediate ancestor of the great urban indus valley civilization named after the type site of kot diji in khairpur district, sindh, pakistan this is the period when south asia's first proto-cities started to emerge.
The kot dijian phase shows what archaeologists call the early harappan transition. Fortified settlements with thick mud-brick walls. Standardized brick sizes. Distinctive pottery painted in black on buff designs.
The map shows three things at once. The kot diji core area (shaded), the original heartland in upper sindh and southern punjab. The kot diji maximum extent (stars), how far the culture spread at its peak. And the mughal 1990 upper mehrgarh sites (star markers) added by pakistani archaeologist Dr. Rafique Mughal whose cholistan survey work in the 1970s and 80s redrew the map of early harappan settlements.
Look at where the core sits. Almost entirely inside pakistan. sindh, punjab, cholistan, parts of balochistan and KP. This is where the foundations were laid for what would become one of the largest civilizations of the bronze age world.
❚ Map 2. The late harappan period (c. 2000 to 1500 BCE)
The second map shows what happened after the great cities started to decline. Around 1900 BCE, mohenjo-daro and harappa were gradually abandoned. The reasons are still debated climate change. The drying up of the ghaggar-hakra river system, Shifts in monsoon patterns. Possibly outbreaks of disease and the breakdown of long distance trade with mesopotamia.
But the people didn't vanish.
The civilization fragmented into regional cultures each one is shown on the map with different shading.
cemetery H culture in northern punjab, including harappa itself in its final phase. jhukar and late kulli in sindh and balochistan, marking the post-urban indus survival. rangpur IIB-IIC in gujarat next to Pakistani border, the eastward continuation. And broader scattered late harappan survivals across the region.
The shaded zones contracted and broke apart. The standardized weights, the seals, the script, the planned cities..
All of it faded.
What remained were villages and smaller towns holding onto fragments of the old material culture but no longer organized as a single civilization.
This is what civilizational decline actually looks like. Not a sudden collapse,Not an invasion myth. A slow regional fragmentation across centuries.
❚ Read side by side these maps tell you something pakistani history textbooks rarely do.
The indus valley civilization wasn't a single moment. It was a continuous urban tradition stretching from at least 3200 BCE to 1500 BCE. 1,700 years of bronze age life on the same Pakistani land. Add the deeper neolithic foundations at mehrgarh (c. 7000 BCE) and you're looking at nearly 5,500 years of unbroken cultural continuity in this region before the vedic period even began.
The geography of both maps centres on the same river system. The indus and its tributaries. The cities rose where the water was they fell where the water failed And throughout.
The pakistani archaeologist Dr. Rafique Mughal, whose name appears on both maps as a primary source, wrote in Ancient Cholistan:
>The continuity of cultural development from the Early Harappan through the Mature and into the Late Harappan periods is most clearly demonstrated in the Greater Indus Valley itself the region that today comprises Pakistan.
The story doesn't break at 1900 BCE. The cities ended. The people didn't.
After a lot of thought and conversation within the mod team, we're excited to announce the launch of our new companion subreddit: r/PakistaniHistory.
Before anything else, the most important thing to say: **r/Ancient_pak is not going anywhere.** This sub remains exactly what it has always been a community for the ancient and pre-modern history of the region. The Indus Valley Civilization, Gandhara, Taxila, the early Islamic period, and everything before the medieval era. Nothing about this sub is changing. If ancient history is what brought you here, your experience stays the same.
What's changing is that we're opening a second door one built for the conversations this sub was never designed to hold.
**Why we created r/PakistaniHistory**
Over the years, r/Ancient_pak has grown to nearly 19,000 members, and along the way something became impossible to ignore that people want to discuss all of Pakistani history, not just the ancient chapters. Posts about the all different eras, the colonial era, Partition, the wars, and the modern political and cultural history of Pakistan have steadily found their way here and while we love that energy, it stretches the sub far beyond what its name suggests.
There's also a more practical reason.
When someone new to Reddit searches for Pakistani history, they don't find us. The name "Ancient_pak" doesn't match what people actually type when they're looking for a community like ours, and the underscore makes the handle awkward to share, link, and remember. We've watched countless people interested in our history fail to discover this sub simply because the name doesn't reflect the breadth of what gets discussed here.
Rather than force a rename or fragment the community, we decided the cleaner solution was to build a second sub..
One with a name that clearly says what it is, that anyone can find with the most obvious search term, and that has room for the full sweep of Pakistani history without anything feeling out of place.
**What r/Pakistanihistory will cover**
Everything. Genuinely everything related to Pakistani history.
From Iron age to ancient classical Medieval era or colonial periods, the freedom movement, the Lahore Resolution, Partition, wars, the political history of Pakistan, military history, cultural and intellectual history, religious history, regional histories, biographies of historical figures, archaeological discoveries, historical photographs, primary sources, book recommendations, academic discussions, and the ongoing story of the country up everything possible.
If it's Pakistani history, it belongs there. There's no era cutoff, no narrow focus just one space for all of it.
**How the two subs relate**
Same mod team. Two genuinely separate communities.
Posts on r/Pakistanihistory will be original to that sub not crossposts from here, not recycled content, not duplicates.
If you join both, you'll see two distinct feeds with no overlap.
You're welcome to join one, the other, or both. There's no migration, no pressure, and no winding down of r/Ancient_pak. This sub keeps its purpose and its identity.
**A note on what this means for the community**
We've put a lot of thought into how to grow without losing what makes this place work.
The answer wasn't to change r/Ancient_pak into something it isn't, or to abandon 19k members for a fresh start somewhere else. It was to keep this sub focused on what it does well, and to give the rest of Pakistani history a proper home of its own.
To everyone who's been part of r/Ancient_pak
Thank you. The conversations, the contributions, the curiosity people bring to this sub is what made any of this worth doing.
We're not asking you to follow us anywhere. We're just letting you know there's now a second place to go if your interest in our history runs broader than the ancient era.
Join us at r/Pakistanihistory if you'd like to be part of building a community covering the full sweep of Pakistani history from any era It's brand new, and the early members will shape what it becomes and we working on it improve it more from flairs to everything related to subreddit to give yall better experience and quality content
The Mod Team — r/Ancient_pak
When archaeologists first started piecing together the indus valley civilization in the 1920s, they were looking at something nobody knew existed.
John marshall's 1924 announcement in the illustrated london news declaring that a civilization equal in age to sumer and egypt had been discovered in South East Asia, sent a shockwave through the academic world. Until that moment the consensus held that south asian civilization began with the aryans and the vedas. marshall's discovery pushed the timeline back by more than a thousand years and relocated the cradle of the subcontinent to the banks of a single river system.
That river system is the indus and it flows through pakistan.
This map shows the settlements at the civilization's peak, around 2600 to 1900 BCE.
The dots cluster heavily in the indus basin. sindh, punjab, balochistan, khyber pakhtunkhwa.
❚ The two great cities
Both of the civilization's largest cities sit inside modern pakistan.
mohenjo-daro in larkana district, sindh, covered roughly 250 hectares at its peak with a population estimated between 35,000 and 60,000.
Its planned grid streets, covered drainage system, and the great bath are unmatched in the bronze age world.
harappa in sahiwal district, punjab is slightly smaller but home to the largest worker quarters and grain storage facilities yet found from the era.
The third great city, ganweriwala, sits in cholistan in southern punjab discovered by the pakistani archaeologist Dr. Rafique Mughal during his cholistan survey in the 1970s it has barely been excavated. And yet even from surface surveys it appears to be roughly the same size as mohenjo-daro itself.
As Dr. Mughal wrote in his landmark 1997 work:
>The Cholistan desert holds one of the densest concentrations of Harappan settlements anywhere in the Greater Indus region the equivalent of an entire lost province of the civilization.
Mughal, Ancient Cholistan: Archaeology and Architecture (1997)
❚ The Deep Roots
The story doesn't start with the cities. It starts thousands of years earlier at mehrgarh in balochistan.
The small neolithic farming village whose discovery in 1974 by the french archaeologist jean-françois jarrige rewrote the prehistory of south asia.
mehrgarh's earliest layers date to around 7000 BCE that's older than sumer, unification of Egypt or stonehenge.
At mehrgarh archaeologists found the earliest evidence in south asia of wheat and barley cultivation domesticated cattle sheep and goats mud-brick architecture pottery and figurines and dentistry drilled molars from around 7000 to 5500 BCE.
The earliest known examples in human history.
mehrgarh shows an unbroken cultural continuity from neolithic farming villages in balochistan through to the great urban cities of the mature harappan period.
The american archaeologist jonathan mark kenoyer, who has spent over 40 years working at harappa alongside pakistani scholars..
>The Indus Civilization developed indigenously from local Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures of the Greater Indus Valley. It was not the result of migration or external influence. The roots are in Mehrgarh and the surrounding regional cultures.
The branches reached east and west. But the tree itself grew here.
The indus is not just where the civilization happened to settle It is the reason the civilization existed.
The annual flooding of the indus deposited fertile silt across thousands of square kilometres, allowing the agricultural surplus that made urban life possible the river also served as a highway. connecting mohenjo-daro in the south to harappa in the north, and linking the inland cities to the coastal port of sutkagan dor on the makran coast in balochistan from there indus traders crossed the arabian sea to mesopotamia.
The five tributaries of the indus give punjab its name. Sanskrit panca-ap, five waters. The jhelum, chenab, ravi, sutlej, and beas. Look at any settlement map of the indus valley civilization and you'll see the dots tracing exactly these rivers cuz that's where the civilization lived where the water was the cities were.
She stands roughly 10.5 cm tall. Barely the size of a hand. Yet she has captivated archaeologists for nearly a century.
Cast in bronze using the lost-wax technique (cire perdue), she was excavated in 1926 from a small house in the HR area of mohenjo-daro, sindh, pakistan by archaeologist D.R. Sahni working under the archaeological survey during british colonial rule.
The technical achievement alone is staggering. Lost-wax casting at this level of refinement in 2500 BCE places the metallurgists of mohenjo-daro at the absolute frontier of bronze age technology.
It's a Bronze sculpture. Copper-tin alloy, lost-wax cast. Left arm covered with bangles, nearly two dozen of them from shoulder to wrist, a style of stacked bangles still worn across sindh and punjab today.
Right hand resting on the hip. Relaxed. Almost defiant. A short necklace with three large pendants. And an attitude of total self-possession. Head tilted back, leg extended, weight on one hip.
The british archaeologist mortimer wheeler, who excavated extensively at mohenjo-daro and harappa, said of her:
>She is about fifteen years old, I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world.
The figure's facial features and proportions have led some scholars to suggest she represents a tribal or non-elite woman. Possibly from the baloch or sindhi populations whose descendants still inhabit the region.
The pakistani archaeologist Dr. Asma Ibrahim, director of the state bank museum in karachi and one of the foremost living experts on indus heritage, has emphasized that the dancing girl reflects a society where women's representation in art was confident, independent and central not marginalized.
The original is held at the national museum of india in new delhi, pakistan has been requesting her return for decades.
Each layer of soil here represents a generation of life on this exact spot.
Running from the earliest settlement at harappa down through to the start of the early indus period around 2800 BCE.
In the foreground you can see the edge of a storage pit dug by the very first settlers.
This is what archaeology actually looks like before the museum displays. Every flag marks a find. Every shift in soil colour marks a moment in time. The standing figure at the top gives you a sense of just how deep half a millennium of human life accumulates underground.
Harappa sits in sahiwal district, punjab. Alongside mohenjo-daro it's one of the two great cities that gave the indus valley civilization its name. Both of them are in Pakistan.
Photo credit: harappa archaeological research project, courtesy department of archaeology and museums, government of pakistan.
​
In March 1895 a succession crisis in the mountain kingdom of chitral, today's khyber pakhtunkhwa, triggered one of the most dramatic episodes of the great game.
A small british-indian garrison of around 500 men, mostly sikh and kashmiri troops under a handful of british officers, found themselves besieged inside chitral fort by thousands of chitrali and pashtun fighters..
for 46 days straight.
The besiegers tunnelled under the walls set towers on fire kept up constant sniper fire from positions sometimes just 25 yards away the garrison held.
Two relief columns were sent one crossing the 12,000 foot shandur pass through waist-deep snow dragging artillery on sledges the other storming the malakand pass against 12,000 defenders.
when kelly's relief force finally entered chitral on 20 april they found the surviving garrison described as walking skeletons.
46days. five hundred men
One of the wildest sieges fought on pakistani lands and almost nobody at home knows about it.
Coming from a verified account of Indian Embassy.
Allocated to india in 1947. three words doing the work of an entire colonial era cover up.
The dancing girl was dug out of Mohenjo jo-Daro sindh, in 1926. by british archaeologist ernest Mackay, she was sent to the lahore museum. she sat in lahore. she was of lahore. then in 1946, one year before partition mortimer wheeler moved her to delhi for a temporary exhibition. she never came back.
That is not allocation.
That is a colonial-era removal that got laundered through a partition pakistan didn't write the rules for
When Pakistan (Indus basin) got independence in 47 the new government formally requested the return of the mohenjo-daro artefacts india refused after years of pressure they agreed to split 12,000 plus objects. in some cases literally separating beads from the same necklace into two piles. pakistan got the priest-king. india kept the dancing girl.
In 1972 at simla, bhutto raised it again. indira gandhi told him he could pick one of the two iconic figures so he ended up picking the priest-king india kept the dancing girl forcefully.
in 2014 the sindh government formally demanded her return.
in 2016 a pakistani barrister filed a petition in the lahore high court citing the UNESCO 1970 convention. which is unambiguous. cultural property belongs to the country it was excavated from.
For 79 years pakistan has formally protested this the indian embassy account knows that. they typed allocated to india anyway.
Cuz the alternative taken from pakistan one year before Pakistan's independence and then refused on demand is harder to fit on a graphic.
two things the embassy is hoping you don't notice.
The dancing girl is 4,500 years old she predates republic of India by 45 centuries. the civilisation that made her the indus valley civilisation is named after Pakistani river its two largest cities, mohenjo-daro and harappa, are both in pakistan. india inherited the name in 1947 from a greek word for our river. Pakistan Indus inherited the actual land the name describes republic of india's claim on her runs through a museum pakistan's claim runs through the ground she came out of.
two crafted in the indus valley civilisation city of mohenjo daro note the careful phrasing the embassy will name the city but not the country or Indus region because naming the country gives the game away. mohenjo-daro is in larkana district, sindh, pakistan. it always has been. there is no version of this where she is from anywhere else.
She is a pakistani artefact. made on pakistani lands by a civilisation centred on a river inside pakistan by ancestors of the Indus region smuggled out of lahore one year before independence held in delhi against 79 years of formal pakistani protest. in violation of the UNESCO principle that india itself is a signatory to.
Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) is one of those figures everyone has heard of and Pakistani textbook treatment usually flattens him into "He raided Somnath. Seventeen times he came." Indian textbook treatment usually flattens him into "He looted temples and was a destroyer." Both versions skip the part of his career that matters most for Pakistani lands..
The important part where the ghaznavid empire spent twenty years conquering the Indus basin before Mahmud's armies ever reached the Ganges. Lahore, Multan, Peshawar, and Hund were not waystations on the road to hindustan. They were the campaign.
The standard count of seventeen campaigns into the subcontinent comes ultimately from Mahmud's court historian al-utbi's
Tarikh-i-Yamini and the later compilations of Firishta (16th-17th c.) and Juzjanis
Tabaqat-i-Nasiri (13th c.). Modern scholars including the Cambridge historian Bosworth the canonical English-language authority on the Ghaznavids and author of the standard reference the Later ghaznavids Splendour and Decay (Columbia, 1977) have shown that the campaigns clustered geographically, not chronologically. Mahmud spent the first decade of his eastern career almost entirely inside ancient Pakistan.
>The ghaznavids inherited and developed the rich Perso Islamic cultural heritage of the Samanids, transmitting it eastwards into the subcontinent through their conquests in the Punjab, where Lahore became after Mahmud's death the centre of an essentially Indus-Muslim cultural florescence.
— C E Bosworth paraphrased from his entry ghaznavids in Encyclopaedia Iranica (2001) and Later Ghaznavids monograph.
❚ Campaigns and Geographical Order
The dates and targets, drawn from the Persian chronicles and modern scholarly reconstructions are following
1001 — Battle of Peshawar.
Defeat of Jayapala, the Hindu Shahi king, on the banks of the Bara river outside Peshawar. The first major engagement. Pakistani lands.
1004 — Bhera.Annexation of the Salt Range fortress town. Pakistani Punjab.
1005-6 — Multan. The Ismaili emirate under the Karmati ruler Daud was subdued. Pakistani Punjab.
(Religiously significant multan was a Shia-Ismaili stronghold and Mahmud's campaigns there were as much sectarian Sunni-Shia conflict as anti-Hindu raid.)
1008 — Battle of Waihind (Hund or Chach). Near modern attock on the Indus the decisive engagement against Anandapala, son of Jayapala, that broke Hindu Shahi political power forever pakistani KP.
1009 — Narayanapura/Kangra first foray into modern day Indian Himachal territory Anandapala's vassal state.
1014 — Nandana, Trilochanapala, the Salt Range -_ Mahmud sieged the Hindu Shahi fortress of Nandana near Chakwal district, Pakistan and destroyed the last organized Hindu Shahi field army in Pakistani Punjab.
1014-15 — Thanesar. Modern Indian Haryana.
1018-19 — Mathura, Kannauj. Modern Indian UP the famous deep raid that brought Mahmud to the Yamuna.
1021 — Lahore. annexation of the city. Mahmud's appointed governor, the slave soldier Malik Ayaz, would rebuild Lahore between 1037 and 1040 and turn it into the administrative anchor of ghaznavid governance in the subcontinent.
1025-26 — Somnath. Modern Gujarat. The famous one the same place where Indian current prime Minister modi butchered Muslims.
1027 — Jat campaign on the lower Indus. Sindh, Pakistan mahmud's last campaign, after which he contracted the malaria that killed him three years later.
By any honest count, eight of the seventeen major campaigns targeted the today's Pakistan, and the conquests of Multan, Hund, Lahore, and Nandana between 1005 and 1021 were the foundation that enabled every deeper raid east.
You cannot get to Mathura without first taking Multan Hund and Lahore. The Hindu Shahi dynasty based at Hund on the Indus, then at Lahore was Mahmud's primary opponent for the first decade of his subcontinental career. Their last king, Trilochanapala, was killed in 1021.the defenders of Pakistani land against the ghaznavid invasion were themselves a Pakistani dynasty.
❚ What Lahore Actually Was Under the ghaznavids
Here is where popular accounts get the chronology wrong mahmud himself ruled from Ghazni he is buried there lahore became a ghaznavid administrative centre under his appointed governor malik ayaz, who walled and repopulated the city between 1037 and 1040 the year a hindu confederacy unsuccessfully besieged it. For the next century, Lahore was the principal ghaznavid base for raids into subcontinent but the imperial capital remained at ghazni.
The shift came in two stages. In 1152 under sultan khusrau shah, Lahore was formally made the eastern capital of the empire alongside ghazni. Then in 1163 after the oghuz Turk seizure of hhazni and the ghurid sack under Ala al Din Husayn *Jahansoz means the world-burner , Lahore became the sole ghaznavid capital the dynasty held it for another 23 years as a Lahore-based successor state until Muhammad of Ghor besieged the city in 1186, captured the last Ghaznavid sultan khusrau malik, and executed him at Firuzkuh in 1191.
> Khusrau Malik, the last Sultan, retreated to Lahore which became his new capital from there he made incursions into subcontinent, expanding his rule as far as southern Kashmir.
— Bosworth, Encyclopaedia Iranica ghaznavids entry 2001
Lahore was a sovereign Muslim capital first regional, then sole for over thirty years before the Delhi Sultanate even existed. ghaznavid Lahore minted its own coinage (billon jitals featuring the bull-and-horseman motif inherited from Hindu Shahi conventions, with Sanskrit and Devanagari legends alongside Persian ( i will try to link the image) a the visual proof of cultural synthesis on the city's currency. It hosted scholars including the Lahori-Ghaznavid polymath Fakhr i Mudabbir, whose adab al-harb means (Etiquette of War and Bravery) is a major source for medieval South Asian military theory. And it became the easternmost outpost of the Persianate cultural complex, transmitting an entire literary, administrative, and aesthetic tradition into the subcontinent for the first time.
❚The Scholar Mahmud Captured
The cultural consequence of Mahmud's campaigns is sometimes told as a story of destruction It is also a story of scholarly transplantation, and the central figure is one almost no Pakistani Reddit post mentions: Abu Rayhān / Al-Biruni (973–1048).
In 1017, Mahmud conquered Khwarezm — modern Uzbekistan and forcibly relocated Al-Biruni and a circle of brilliant Khwarezmian scientists to Ghazni.
Al-Biruni was already perhaps the greatest scientific mind of the Islamic world a Persian polymath fluent in Khwarezmian, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and conversant in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac. Mahmud made him court astrologer, and Al-Biruni accompanied his armies into the Indus basin (Pakistan) He spent years living in the Punjab. He learned Sanskrit he read the original subcontinental texts he measured the latitude of Multan and Lahore with his own instruments and around 1030, the year Mahmud died, he completed Taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind (The Book Confirming What Pertains to subcontinent) the first serious ethnographic and philosophical study of the subcontinent ever written by an outsider. It was composed at Ghazni and in the Punjab.
Most of his subcontinental observations come from time spent on Pakistani lands.
>I have found it very hard to work my way into the subject, although I have a great liking for it... I shall place before the reader the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are.
— Al-Biruni, Tahqiq al hind, 1030, trans. Edward Sachau (1888)
This is the figure modern scholars have called the founder of Indology.
The book is a Pakistani document in everything but name written from a ghaznavid administrative base, by a Khwarezmian polymath who only saw the subcontinent because Mahmud's armies brought him.
❚The Sufi Wave That Followed
In the wake of Mahmud's conquests suif mystics from the Persianate east began arriving in the Punjab the most famous and the foundational figure for the religious history of Pakistani Punjab was Ali al-Hujwiri, known to every Pakistani as Data Ganj Bakhsh. Born around 990 CE near ghazni trained in Sufism across the ghaznavid empire and beyond, he was instructed in a vision (Kashf al-Mahjub his own book reference) to leave Ghazni for Lahore which he did around 1039-40 CE under the reign of Mahmud's son Masud I.
He died in Lahore in 1077. His shrine, the Data Darbar, is today the largest Sufi shrine in South Asia by annual visitors.
His Kashf al-Mahjub (Unveiling the Veiled), completed in Lahore, is the earliest treatise on Sufism written in Persian and one of the foundational texts of Islamic mysticism worldwide three centuries later, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti the founder of the Chishti Sufi order in the Indus subcontinent would visit Hujwiri's shrine first before going on to Ajmer the entire genealogy of South Asian Sufism passes through Lahore of Pakistan.
The Persian ate punjabi synthesis that defines the cultural history of Lahore from the 11th century onward begins here the arrival of the Sufis the Persian language the architectural vocabulary the literary forms none of it is incidental it is the long aftermath of Mahmud's eastward campaigns.
For those who just want summary to begin with pakistan is an ancient nation with its own history but in this we discussed the following reasons lahore, Multan, Peshawar, Hund, and Nandana were Mahmud's primary targets between 1001 and 1021 the Hindu Shahi dynasty he fought was based at Hund on the Indus and then at Lahore itself a Pakistani polity the Ghaznavid dynasty that absorbed those territories was by 1163, a Lahore based successor state the conventional periodization of Muslim rule in the subcontinent begins with the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 the actual administrative and cultural beginning is Ghaznavid Lahore at least 1021, definitely 1037-40, formally 1152-1186 two hundred years before Delhi.
The second part of the posts discuss the Persianate inheritance which flow into Pakistan lands first persian as a courtly and literary language Persian Islamic architectural conventions sufi spiritual genealogies and the chancery administrative tradition all of these enter the subcontinent through the ancient Pakistan and settle first at Lahore - Al-Biruni writes from Ghazni and Punjab baba ali hujwiri writes from Lahore Fakhr-i Mudabbir writes from Lahore the cultural complex that later flowers under the Mughals at Lahore Delhi, and Agra has its earliest South Asian roots on Pakistani lands, in the cities Mahmud and his successors took mahmud was a complicated figure he was a patron of Persian literature on a scale not seen since the Sasanians Firdawsi composed the shahnameh under his patronage even if their relationship was famously stormy he was also a brutal military commander whose campaigns destroyed temples, monasteries, and cities including the Buddhist sites of the upper Indus and the Hindu temples at Mathura, Thanesar, and Somnath. Both things are true and neither cancels the other.
What matters for Pakistani history specifically is that Mahmud is the figure who made Lahore a capital city of Muslim rule a status it held with interruptions for the next thousand years through the ghaznavids, ghurid dehli Sultanate mughals and into the modern republic so the next time some bewaqof tells you that "Indian Muslim rule" began in Delhi in 1206 ask them about Lahore in 1186 or 1163 or 1152 or 1037 the answers run a hundred and 80 years deep and they are all on Pakistani lands also...
Thanks for reading.
Pakistan is the literal birth place of "Indian" subcontinent