Gandhara: The Forgotten Pashtun Civilization That Preceded Iran and India

By Assad Sharifi

Section 1: The Mislabeling of Gandhara civilization

The hidden Gandhara Civilization and Pashtun identity

There is a quiet violence in misnaming. Civilizations are not merely remembered through dates and ruins — they are remembered through categories, and it is in these categories that truth is either preserved or destroyed.

Gandhara — a luminous, ancient civilization nestled between the roaring Indus and the shadowed peaks of the Hindu Kush — has long been buried not only by time, but by language. Not the Gandhari language it once spoke, but the language of modern scholarship — the blunt instruments of colonial classification, nationalist myth-making, and geopolitical laziness.

Today, Gandhara is often described using the term "Indo-Iranian", as if it were a shared child between two modern cultural giants: India and Iran.But Gandhara was not a child — it was an ancestor.It stood long before India had its political center, and long before Iran even had its name. Pashtun civilization must be saved from the so called scholarly plunder. To call it Indo-Iranian is not just a historical error — it is an act of erasure.

The Construction of a False Label to Gandhara civilization

The term Indo-Iranian was coined by 19th-century European linguists who were attempting to map out the great Indo-European language family. Armed with comparative phonetics and a thirst for order, they grouped together languages spoken from Bengal to Balochistan under a tidy umbrella. Pashto, for reasons both geographic and phonetic, was placed under “Eastern Iranian.”

But this was a map-maker’s fantasy, not a people’s truth.

Iran, as a political identity, is a 20th-century invention, renamed from Persia in 1935 under Reza Shah.Persian (Farsi) became a dominant literary and administrative language only after the Islamic conquests, and Zoroaster — the spiritual giant often claimed by Persian nationalism — likely lived in Bactria or Sogdia, far from the urban centers of ancient Persia.

Yet, modern Iranian nationalism, much like its Indian counterpart, has colonized memory — absorbing everything in its periphery and calling it its own. Under this gaze, Gandhara became a periphery, Pashto a dialect, and the Pashtun a misplaced Iranian.

But Gandhara Never Asked to Be Owned

The Gandharan mind did not see the world in tribal binaries.It carved Buddhas with Hellenistic drapery.It wrote in Kharosthi, a right-to-left script born of Aramaic, not Indian Brahmi.It spoke Gandhari Prakrit, not Persian, not Sanskrit.It meditated, traded, painted, whispered.

This was not Indo-Iranian —This was Gandharan.

And to continue calling it anything else is to participate in a lie. A lie that robs Pashtuns of their inheritance, and the world of a civilization that was its own axis, not a satellite.