Who ruled Balkh?

Balkh is a small town in northern Afghanistan, about 24 kilometres north-west of Mazar-i-Sharif, set among the vast ruins of one of the oldest cities in Central Asia. Known to the Greeks as Bactra, it was the capital of ancient Bactria, a centre of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and before the Mongol invasion one of the richest cities of Khorasan. It is often called "the mother of all cities".

Excavations by French archaeologists in the citadel mound, the Bala Hissar, have found a settlement dating to the Early Iron Age, from roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, which continued into the period before Persian rule. Persian legend credits the city's founding to the first mythical king, Keyumars, and the poet Firdowsi placed the death of the prophet Zoroaster within its walls; these are traditions rather than history. Under the Achaemenid Persians, Bactria was a province with Bactra as its chief town, and the city spread considerably in that period.

Alexander the Great came over the Hindu Kush in 329 BCE and placed a garrison at Bactra. After his death the region passed to the Seleucids and then, in the third century BCE, to the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, with Bactra among its main cities. Around 210 BCE the Greco-Bactrian king Euthydemus withstood a three-year siege there by the Seleucid Antiochus III, who in the end recognised him. Later the Yuezhi nomads overran Bactria; the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian described its capital as a market town where all kinds of goods were traded.

Buddhist tradition holds that two merchants from Balkh were among the Buddha's first followers. The city certainly became a major Buddhist centre. The Chinese monk Xuanzang, who visited in 630, counted about a hundred monasteries and 3,000 monks, and the great monastery of Nava Vihara stood nearby.

During the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, the last Sasanian emperor, Yazdegerd III, took refuge at Balkh. Arab forces attacked in 645 and forced the city to pay tribute in 653, and the Umayyad Caliphate took the area again in 663, but control remained insecure. The general Qutayba ibn Muslim defeated the local prince Nezak Tarkhan in 715. In 726 the governor Asad ibn Abdallah rebuilt the city with an Arab garrison, and later made it the capital of Khorasan. The Barmakid family, who became powerful ministers of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, descended from a priest of a Buddhist monastery at Balkh. In 747 Abu Muslim took the city for the Abbasids.

From the ninth century Balkh changed hands many times. The Saffarids took it, then lost it after the Samanid ruler Ismail Samani defeated them at the Battle of Balkh in 900. The Samanid Empire, whose founding family came from the Balkh region, held it until the Ghaznavids captured it in 997. The Seljuks took it in 1059, and in the twelfth century it was fought over by the Khwarazm-shahs, the Kara Khitans and the Ghurids.

Genghis Khan plundered Balkh in 1220, amid the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire, slaughtering its inhabitants and levelling its defences. Ibn Battuta, visiting around 1333, found it ruined and empty, though its mosques and colleges still looked intact from outside. Rebuilding began in 1338. Timur captured the city in 1389 and destroyed its citadel, which his son Shah Rukh rebuilt in 1407.

The Uzbeks under Muhammad Shaybani took Balkh in 1506. Babur held it briefly as a vassal of the Safavids in 1511 and 1512, after which it was ruled mostly from Bukhara. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan made it a province of the Mughal Empire in 1646 but lost it the next year, and Nader Shah conquered it in 1736. After his death local Uzbek rulers held the area, until the Afghan emir Dost Mohammad Khan conquered it in 1850.

A malaria outbreak in 1866 led the authorities to move the regional capital to Mazar-i-Sharif, and a British visitor in 1885 described Balkh as little more than a vast ruin with some 500 houses. A modern town was laid out in 1934. Surviving monuments include the Green Mosque and the remains of Buddhist stupas such as Takht-e Rustam. The site and its museum suffered looting during the civil war of the 1990s and again after 2001. The town now has an estimated 149,000 people, most of them Tajiks.