The history of Afghaniston begins at 330 BC with the rise of Alexander the Great to modern times. Afghanistan is a territory whose current boundaries were mostly determined in the 19th Century. The word Afghanistan is used to refer to that territory, even though, and especially because, it has been known by many other names throughout history.

Afghanistan’s history, internal political development, foreign relations, and very existence as an independent state have largely been determined by its geographic location at the crossroads of Central, West, and South Asia. Over the centuries, waves of migrating peoples passed through the region–described by historian Arnold Toynbee as a “roundabout of the ancient world”–leaving behind a mosaic of ethnic and linguistic groups. In modern times, as well as in antiquity, vast armies of the world passed through this region of Asia, temporarily establishing local control and often dominating.

Invariably, most of Afghanistan’s history was spent as part of the larger events that took place upon the Iranian plateau as a whole. The Aryan peoples who arrived in Afghanistan left their languages, (Pashto, Persian, etc.) and culture as a legacy.

It is perhaps not surprising that it is the Middle Eastern influence (Iranic past and Arab invasions) that has defined modern Afghanistan, while its Greek, Central Asian nomadic, and Zoroastrian/Pagan/Hindu/Buddhist past have long since vanished. Although it was the scene of great empires and flourishing trade for over two millennia, the area’s heterogeneous groups, with Turkic groups predominant in the extreme northwest and showing some connection to the mixed Hazaras of the central regions, were not bound into a single political entity until the reign of Ahmed Shah Durrani, who in 1747 founded the monarchy that ruled the country until 1973. In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan lay between the expanding might of the Russian and British empires. In 1900, Abdur Rahman Khan (the “Iron Amir”), after twenty years of rule, looked at the events of the past century and wondered how his country, which stood “like a goat between these lions (Britain and Tsarist Russia) or a grain of wheat between two strong millstones of the grinding mill, [could] stand in the midway of the stones without being ground to dust?”

Islam played perhaps the key role in the formation of Afghanistan’s society. Despite the early thirteenth century Mongol invasion of what is today Afghanistan–which has been described as resembling “more some brute cataclysm of the blind forces of nature than a phenomenon of human history,” even a warrior as formidable as Genghis Khan did not uproot Islamic civilization; within two generations, his heirs had become Muslims. Later, native Afghan empire builders such as the Ghorids, would continue to make Afghanistan a major medieval power as well as a center of learning that produced Ferdowsi, and Al-Biruni among countless other academics and literary iconic figures.