Pre-Islamic Period

c. 600 B.C.

Zoroaster (Zarathustra) is born in Bactria (Northern Afghanistan), founds a monotheistic religion, which still survives today (that of the Parsis).  

c. 500 B.C.

Afghanistan is part of the Achaemenid Persian empire of Darius the Great and Xerxes.  

329-326 B.C.

Afghanistan invaded by Alexander the Great on his way to India. Beginning of the historic record. According to Greek and Roman historians, in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan the Macedonian army met fierce resistance from a people known as the Paktues or Paktuike who had also fought in the Persian army at Thermopylae 150 years earlier, and who are widely identified with the modern Pakhtuns/Pushtuns. In eastern Afghanistan, Alexander’s troops adopted the local flat felt hat which they wore as a badge of honor from their Indian campaign, as shown in Hellenistic sculptures; This appears to be the same flat cap that has today become the badge of the Afghan Resistance

Alexander founded or enlarged a number of cities both north and south of the Hindu Kush, naming most of them for himself.  I.E. Alexandria (Sikandra); one of these, Kandahar, still remains his name in variant form. Alexander also left behind satrapies that developed into various Graeco-Bactrain empires in the countries that followed.  

323 B.C. c 125 A.D.

During the millennium between Alexander’s campaign and the coming of Islam, the historical record is full of gaps and confusions. For several centuries after Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., Greaco-Bactrain Seleucid satrapies and kingdoms ruled north of the Hindu Kush, while south of the mountains lay the kingdom of Grandhara, part of the Maurya empire of India. Half a century after Alexander, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka proclaimed Buddhism as the official religion of his Empire, bringing Buddhism into contact with Hellenistic art in Afghanistan; as a result of this contact, Buddhist iconography, previously abstract, developed the full panoply of art forms and symbols.  From Afghanistan Buddhism spread across central and northern Asia to China and Korea. Major known surviving Buddhist sites in Afghanistan including Bamian, where the worlds largest Buddhas were carved into the face of cliffs, and Hadda; were destroyed by the Taliban (Date?). Other sites continue to be unearthed. 

2nd-7th centuries A.D.

At various times parts of Afghanistan are invaded or ruled by the Scythians, the Kushans, the Parthians, the Suren kings, the Yueh-Chih, the Huns, the Sassiands, and other Persian and Indian empires, while local Afghan kingdoms at other times expand to conquer northern and western India. During the 500-year reign of the Kushans, which began c. 50 A.D., and particularly under the great Kushan king Kanishka, the Graeco-Buddhist Grandharan culture reached its zenith. Afghanistan was a renowned center of religious, art, and scholarship and a magnet for pilgrims from all over the Asia, as well as the crossroads of trade between Roman Empire, India, Persia, and China, until invasion of the White Huns (450-475 A.D.)