Chilzina

Chilzina — also written Chil Zena or Chehel Zina, "Forty Steps" — is a rocky outcrop at the western limit of Kandahar, named for the forty stone steps carved up its face. It crowns the western approach to the city, offering a commanding view over the plain, and carries inscriptions from two civilizations separated by more than seventeen centuries: an edict of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka and the conquest record of the Mughal emperor Babur.[1]

Babur's Jahan-nama arcade

The stairway and rock-cut chamber were commissioned by Babur, the first Mughal emperor, after his second capture of Kandahar; work was ordered on 13 Shawwal 928 AH (1522 CE) and, with interruptions, completed in 953 AH — a span of some twenty-five years. The complex, inscribed inside as the Riwaq-e Jahan-nama ("world-revealing arcade"), consists of a small chamber hewn into the rock roughly three by two metres, an open terrace before it, and the external flight of steps. Persian texts in nasta'liq script on its surfaces record Babur's conquests, several apparently carved under his son Humayun, and sculpted lion figures flank the entrance.[3][4]

The Ashoka edict

On the mountainside below the arcade stands the Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription, a Greek-and-Aramaic edict of Ashoka carved around 260 BCE — among the earliest known edicts of that emperor. Discovered in 1958 beneath a metre of rubble during excavations, it remains in an open-air compound on the slope. Its presence confirmed both that communities of Greeks lived in the region in the third century BCE and that Ashoka's empire incorporated Kandahar and ancient Arachosia; a cast is held by the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. The edict is sometimes called the Chehel Zina Edict after the outcrop itself.[1][2]

A second Greek Ashoka

The bilingual edict proved not to be alone. In November 1963 a German doctor in Kandahar bought, in the bazaar, a limestone plaque that French archaeologists traced to the ruins of Old Kandahar: forty-five by nearly seventy centimetres, inscribed entirely in Greek with the close of Ashoka's twelfth Major Rock Edict and the opening of the thirteenth — the passage of the king's remorse over his war in Kalinga. Its beginning and end are missing, and scholars believe it once carried all fourteen edicts in Greek, displayed inside a building. Presented to the Kabul Museum in 1964, it has been missing since the museum's looting of 1992–94. Together with two smaller Greek inscriptions from Kandahar — a dedication by a man "son of Aristonax" and an elegiac poem by one Sophytos — the plaques attest not just Mauryan rule but a cultured Greek community: Old Kandahar is traditionally identified with Alexandria of Arachosia, founded under Alexander, its territory ceded by Seleucus to Chandragupta around 305 BCE.[5][6]

Above Old Kandahar

Chilzina rises on the northern side of Old Kandahar, the citadel city whose ruins — grass-grown ramparts west of the modern street grid — preserve the outline of Kandahar before Nader Shah destroyed it in 1738. From the top of the steps the whole western approach to the city lies in view, which is precisely why successive powers found the outcrop worth carving: it turned a natural bastion into a proclamation.[1]

Sources

  1. Chil Zena — Wikipedia
  2. Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription — Wikipedia
  3. Chil Zena: A Carved Mountain Gateway and Stair Shelter in Kandahar — Ancient History Sites
  4. Chilzina and the Forty Steps of Kandahar — Atlas Obscura
  5. Kandahar Greek Edicts of Ashoka — Wikipedia
  6. Une nouvelle inscription grecque d'Açoka — D. Schlumberger, CRAI 1964 (Persée)