Arch of Bost

The Arch of Bost stands at Qala-e Bost, near the modern city of Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan, where the Helmand and Arghandab rivers meet. Bost was a major city of the Ghaznavid sultans, the Turkic dynasty that ruled from Ghazni in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and of the Ghurids who followed them. The arch is generally dated to that era, though its exact date and function are uncertain.

It is a single tall pointed arch of fired brick, set in a broad rectangular frame and standing free on a rise above the old city. The inner faces were decorated with patterned brickwork and bands of carved ornament, parts of which survive. Scholars have suggested it was the entrance to a mosque or the gateway to a palace precinct; the buildings around it have vanished, leaving the arch alone against the sky.

Nearby, along the Helmand, lie the ruins of Lashkari Bazar, a complex of Ghaznavid palaces whose excavated halls produced wall paintings of the sultan's Turkic guards. Bost was sacked in the twelfth century by the Ghurid Ala al-Din, known as Jahan-suz, “world-burner”, and never fully recovered. The arch has become one of the best-known images of Afghanistan's heritage, a single shape that stands for a whole vanished city.