Long before Kandahar or Balkh appear in written records, people in what is now Afghanistan were farming, herding and trading. Archaeologists have pieced this story together from cave deposits in the north, village mounds in the south and a few remarkable chance finds. Among these sites, Mundigak, north-west of Kandahar, stands out as one of the region’s earliest towns.
From caves to villages
Some of the oldest evidence comes from Aq Kupruk in Balkh province, excavated by the American archaeologist Louis Dupree in the 1960s. Its layers run from about 18,000 BCE into the Iron Age. The Neolithic levels held sickle blades, stone hoes, grinding stones and simple pottery, tools associated with harvesting and grinding plants.
In the Kandahar region, Dupree also dug the small mound of Deh Morasi Ghundai in 1951, the first Bronze Age site excavated in Afghanistan. It was a semi-settled village whose busiest phase fell around 2500 BCE. Finds included a shrine with a female figurine, a painted goblet, a stone seal, and domesticated and wild grains pressed into its mud bricks.
Mundigak, a town near Kandahar
Mundigak lies about 55 km north-west of Kandahar, on the upper course of the Kushk-i Nakhud river. The French archaeologist Jean-Marie Casal excavated it between 1951 and 1958 and uncovered a long sequence of occupation, from a small village to a walled town covering about 21 hectares.
Its peak came in the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE. On the central hill stood a large building with white-plastered pilasters that the excavators called a palace; some distance away stood a temple with buttressed walls, and the town was enclosed by a defensive wall with houses inside.
Finds include painted pottery with geometric and animal designs, clay figurines, bronze mirrors and knives, necklaces of semi-precious stones and a carved limestone head of a man. Many of these objects are now in the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul and the Musée Guimet in Paris.
A web of exchange
Pottery and other objects from Mundigak show contact with Baluchistan, southern Turkmenistan and the early Indus region. The town belonged to the wider Helmand culture, whose largest centre was Shahr-i Sokhta in Sistan, and settlement there declined markedly after about 2400 BCE.
Similar networks reached the north. At Shortughai near Ai-Khanoum in Takhar, French excavations in the 1970s found a farming settlement of about 2200–1600 BCE with Harappan pottery and a seal, suggesting a trading post linked to the Indus civilisation. In 1966 a hoard of gold and silver cups came to light by chance at Khosh Tepe near Fullol in Baghlan; their raised designs recall Mesopotamian, Iranian, Indus and Central Asian art. In the Bactrian plain, Bronze Age oasis communities grouped around fortresses such as Dashli irrigated their fields and traded bronze and lapis lazuli with India and Mesopotamia.
Why it matters
Together these sites show that the lands of today’s Afghanistan were a crossroads in the Bronze Age, linking the Iranian plateau, Central Asia and the Indus valley. Most of this picture comes from French, American and joint Afghan-Soviet excavations between the 1950s and the 1970s, and many of the finds are kept in the National Museum in Kabul.
