Ghaznavids

The Ghaznavids were a dynasty of Turkic slave-soldiers who built an empire from the Afghan highlands and became the great patrons of Persian culture in the east. The family's founder Alptigin, a Samanid general, seized the hill town of Ghazna in 962; his son-in-law Sebuktigin broke with the Samanids in the 970s, and Sebuktigin's son Mahmud took the title of sultan, ruling from 998 to 1030. Mahmud's armies, stiffened by war elephants maintained at huge expense, campaigned every cold season: west to Rayy and Hamadan, east across the Punjab with seventeen expeditions into India that carried off the wealth of temples and cities. At his death the empire ran from the Oxus to the Indian Ocean. The court at Ghazna, though Turkic in origin, spoke, wrote and administered in Persian; the poet Ferdowsi dedicated his Book of Kings to Mahmud, and historians, astronomers and the scholar Alberuni worked under court patronage. Succession wars after Mahmud coincided with the rise of the Seljuks, whose victory at Dandanaqan in 1040 stripped away the west. The dynasty recovered under Ibrahim to a prosperous Punjab-centred state, but renewed civil war, Seljuk and Oghuz interference, and finally the Ghurids reduced it to Lahore, where the last sultan was deposed in 1186.