Alexander founded Old Kandahar as Alexandria Arachosia
Southern Afghanistan's largest city sits between the Arghandab and Tarnak rivers at about 1,010 metres elevation, with roughly 733,000 settled residents across 273 square kilometres. Archaeology and empire history stretch from Bronze Age villages to Alexander's 330 BC foundation.
Kandahar is the capital of Kandahar Province, split into fifteen municipal nahias covering 273 square kilometres between two rivers at roughly 1,010 metres above sea level. Estimates put settled residents near 732,629. The Ayno Maina township sits northeast beside the Kabul–Kandahar Highway. The surrounding Loy Kandahar cultural region is famed for grapes and pomegranates, with canning and packing plants inside the city. Scholars debate the name: Warwick Ball and C. E. Bosworth link it to Gandhara; others derive it from Iskandar via Scandar; Abdur Rahman glosses Sanskrit gandha plus -hara as "land of fragrance." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names finds the Alexander etymology less plausible.
Prehistory is thick on the ground. Louis Dupree and others dug Deh Morasi Ghundai about 27 kilometres southwest—Afghanistan's first excavated prehistoric site—alongside Said Qala mud-brick mounds and Shamshir Ghar cave finds of second-millennium bronze gear. Early farming villages in the region appear around 5000 BC. British digs in the 1970s showed a large fortified city by roughly 1000–750 BC, later an Achaemenid outpost in Arachosia. Nearby Mundigak, founded around 3000 BC, served as a provincial capital before Alexander founded Old Kandahar in 330 BC as Alexandria Arachosia near that older site.
Strategic trade routes made the city a prize. After Alexander, Seleucus I ceded Arachosia and related lands to Chandragupta Maurya around 305 BC; Ashokan edicts in Greek and Aramaic survive locally, rendering dharma as eusebeia. Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek rule gave way to Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, and later Zunbils. Arab campaigns under Abbad ibn Ziyad reached the area in the late seventh century; Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari defeated the Zunbils in 870. Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Mongols, Timurids, and Mughals and Safavids traded control—Babur took the city in 1508; Humayun traded it to Shah Tahmasp for twelve thousand soldiers; Akbar regained it by diplomacy in 1595; Abbas II seized it in the 1648–49 siege. In 1709 Mirwais Hotak made it capital of an independent Hotak kingdom; in 1747 Ahmad Shah Durrani made it capital of the Durrani Empire.
Source: Kandahar
