Afghan

The Afghans, known in later usage as the Pashtuns, are an Eastern Iranian people speaking Pashto, organized in a tribal confederation between the Sulayman Mountains and the Indus valley, where their earliest written mention places them in 982. Afghan warriors marched with Mahmud of Ghazni into northern India, and the Afghan Khalji and then Lodi dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate held Delhi until Sultan Ibrahim was defeated by Babur in 1526.

Tribal life was governed by the jirga council and the Pashtunwali code of honour, celebrated in the seventeenth-century poetry of Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba.

In 1722 the Hotak clan rose against Safavid rule and briefly held much of Persia, and in 1747 Ahmad Shah Durrani united the tribes from Kandahar into an empire stretching from Khorasan to the Punjab. After the Durrani decline, the Mohammadzai branch of the Barakzai took power around 1826.