History
Further information: History of Afghanistan and History of PakistanSince the 2nd millennium BC, the region now inhabited by the native Pashtun people have been influenced by Ancient Iranian peoples, the Medes, Achaemenids, Greeks, Mauryas, Kushans, Hephthalites, Sassanids, Arab Muslims, Turks, and others. In recent age, people of the Western world have nominally explored the area.
Arab Muslims arrived in the 7th century and began introducing Islam to the native Pashtun people, some of the Arabs settled in the Sulaiman Mountains and slowly became Pashtunized over time. The Pashtunistan area later fell to the Turkish Ghaznavids whose main capital was at Ghazni, with Lahore serving as the second power house. The Ghaznavid Empire was then taken over by the Ghorids from today's Ghor, Afghanistan. The army of Genghis Khan arrived in the 13th century and began destroying cities in the nearby regions, mostly Persian cities in the north. In the 14th and 15th century, the Timurid dynasty were in control of the nearby cities and towns, until Babur captured Kabul in 1504.
Read more about this topic: Pashtunistan
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“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)