Laghman — known in older sources as Lamghan or Lamghanat — is a province of river valleys in eastern Afghanistan, lying between the mountains of Nuristan to the north and Nangarhar to the south. Two rivers, the Alingar and the Alishing, run through it, and the Alingar is counted among the main tributaries of the Kabul River. The province is known for its lushness, and its capital is Mehtarlam.
Mountains, forests and fields
Most of Laghman is mountainous, with the Kashmund range to the south-east and the Kohistan ranges to the north. Forests survive in the upper districts of Alingar, Alishing and Dawlat Shah, while the valley floors below are intensively cultivated. The province’s districts are Mehtarlam, Qarghayi, Alishing, Alingar, Dawlat Shah and Badpash.
With so much irrigated land, Laghman sends fruit and vegetables to Kabul’s markets. Rice, wheat and cotton are among its main crops, and many people make their living from farming and from the trade in agricultural produce.
History and heritage
In antiquity the region was known as Lampaka. When the Seleucid king ceded the lands south of the Hindu Kush to the Mauryan empire of India in 305 or 304 BCE, the new frontier is thought to have run through Laghman, and two short rock inscriptions in Aramaic, from the time of the emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, were found here. They seem to have served as a kind of milestone, and one appears to name Termez on the Oxus, hinting at roads that linked these valleys with Central Asia.
The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited in the 7th century and found Mahayana Buddhists and many Hindus, and the 10th-century Persian geography Hudud al-Alam described Lamghan as a trading place of Hindustan. In the late 10th century the valley passed from the Hindu Shahi kings of Kabul to the Ghaznavids. In the early 16th century the Mughal founder Babur spent much time in Laghman, and in his memoirs, the Baburnama, he praised the forested hillsides and fertile valley floors.
People and languages
Laghman is a mostly rural, multi-ethnic province. Pashtuns form about half of the population, with Pashai, Tajik and Nuristani communities making up the rest. Pashto is spoken in more than half of the villages, the Pashai languages by about a third of the people, and Dari by somewhat less than a tenth.
In winter, Kuchi herders bring their flocks to Laghman’s valleys, and their numbers rise and fall with the seasons. The province’s very name has been explained through Pashai, in which lam means village, so that Lamghan would mean the land of village dwellers.