Lashkari Bazar

Lashkari Bazar is the name given to the ruins of a palace city that stretches along the east bank of the Helmand river, a few kilometres north of the citadel of Bost, close to the modern city of Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan. The name, “the soldiers' market”, is a later one: in its day this was a winter residence of the Ghaznavid sultans, the Turkic dynasty that ruled from Ghazni over much of eastern Iran and northern India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and whose court was Persian in language and culture.

The largest of the palaces, the South Palace, is attributed to Mahmud of Ghazni, who reigned from 998 to 1030. Built of mud brick and fired brick, it was laid out around a great courtyard with an iwan, a vaulted hall open on one side, in the middle of each face, and its audience hall looked out over the river. Smaller palaces, houses, gardens and a mosque lay along the bank to the north, and the whole site runs for several kilometres.

French archaeologists of the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan excavated Lashkari Bazar between 1949 and 1951, under Daniel Schlumberger. Their most celebrated find was in the South Palace: a painted frieze along the walls of a hall showing a procession of guards in rich patterned robes, one of the rare surviving examples of Ghaznavid figurative painting.

In the mid-twelfth century the Ghurid ruler Ala al-Din Husayn, remembered as Jahan-suz, “the world-burner”, sacked Ghazni and Bost, and the palaces were burned. The Ghurids later rebuilt parts of them, but the site declined after the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Its brick walls, worn by wind and river, still line the Helmand for a long way, together with the great arch of Bost to the south.