Town and Citadel of Ghuznee

This lithograph was taken from plate 18 of 'Afghaunistan' by Lieutenant James Rattray.

This sketch was made near some mosques outside the Kandahar Gate to the west side of Ghazni, a city Rattray visited several times. Ghazni had enjoyed its principal moment of glory 800 years earlier when it was the capital of an empire extending from the Armenian mountains to the fertile plains of the Ganges.

Rattray wrote that it was now again well-known, "thanks to our love of territorial aggrandisement, and the occasional desertion of war's fickle deity from our ranks". He described riding slowly over a wide plain, dotted with relics of past ages, to Ghazni: "Interspersed with this havoc of centuries, as far as the eye could reach, were a succession of rich groves, vineyards, flower-gardens, melon-beds and orchards [while] in the blue distance, its white structures just discernable from the mountains it springs from, rested Ghuzni, with its bastions, town and citadel."