Jowzjan lies in the far north of Afghanistan, where foothills give way to wide plains running towards the Turkmenistan border. Its capital, Sheberghan, is an old oasis town, and the province carries a name with a long history: Jowzjan is the Arabicised form of the Persian Gowzgan, which the scholar Vladimir Minorsky suggested meant ‘land of walnuts’. Near Sheberghan rises Tillya Tepe, the ‘Hill of Gold’, whose graves gave the world the Bactrian gold.
Plains, foothills and oases
The province covers about 11,800 square kilometres. Roughly two-thirds of it is flat land, and the rest is hill and mountain country rising towards the south. Jowzjan borders Turkmenistan to the north, Balkh to the east, Sar-e Pol to the south and Faryab to the west.
Life gathers in irrigated oases such as Sheberghan and Aqcha and the villages around them. Beneath the plains lie deposits of petroleum and natural gas, and mining stands beside agriculture as one of the province’s main activities.
Gowzgan in history
Medieval geographers describe Gowzgan as a populous and fertile land stretching from the borders of Balkh towards the Morghab river. Its towns included Shaburqan, today’s Sheberghan, as well as Anbar, Maymana and Andkhoy. Arab armies conquered the region in 653–54, and by the 10th century it was ruled by the Farighunids, a local dynasty that served as vassals of the Samanids.
It was for a Farighunid prince that the Hudud al-Alam (‘The Regions of the World’) was written, a late-10th-century Persian geography that lists Gowzgan’s products as horses, felts and saddle-bags. In the early 11th century the region passed to the Ghaznavids, and in the 13th century it gave its name to Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, the historian of the Ghurids. The old name later faded, until it was revived in 1964 for a new province with Sheberghan as its centre.
The Hill of Gold
In 1978 a Soviet-Afghan team led by the archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi opened six graves at Tillya Tepe. They held a warrior and five women, buried in the 1st century CE with 20,578 objects, many of them of gold. For years the treasure was feared lost, until in 2003 it was found intact in a vault in Kabul; it has since been shown in museums around the world.
People and crafts
Jowzjan is home mainly to Uzbeks and Turkmen, alongside Pashtun and Tajik communities, and Uzbek, Turkmen, Dari and Pashto are all spoken. The National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA) estimated the population at about 613,000 in 2021–22.
The province’s Turkmen families belong to the wider Ersari weaving world of north-western Afghanistan, whose hand-knotted carpets are known for deep madder reds and repeating octagonal medallions called gul, a Persian word for ‘flower’.