, 3–4th century AD The area was ruled successively by the
Achaemenids,
Seleucids,
Mauryas,
Kushans, and
Hephthalites before the
Saffarids Islamized it and made it part of their empire. It was taken over by the
Samanids, followed by the
Ghaznavids and
Ghurids before falling to the
Delhi Sultanate. In the 13th century, it was invaded by
Genghis Khan and his
Mongol army. In the following decades, the
Qarlughids emerged to create a local dynasty that offered a few decades of self-rule. Later, the area became part of the
Timurid dynasty, the
Mughal Empire and the
Durrani Empire. The subjugation of the Hazarajat, particularly the mountain fortresses of Bamyan, proved difficult for the invaders at their conquest of the region. "adopted the language of the vanquished".
19th century In the 18th and 19th centuries, a sense of "Afghan-ness" developed among the
Hazaras and the
Pashtuns began to coalesce. It has been suggested that in the 19th century there was an emerging awareness of ethnic and religious differences among the population of
Kabul. This brought about divisions along "confessional lines" that became reflected in new "spatial boundaries". During the reign of
Dost Mohammad Khan,
Mir Yazdanbakhsh, a diligent chief of the
Behsud Hazaras, consolidated many of the districts they controlled. Mir Yazdanbakhsh collected revenues and safeguarded caravans traveling on the
Hajigak route through Bamyan to Kabul through
Sheikh Ali and
Behsud areas. The consolidation of the Hazarajat thus increasingly made the region and its inhabitants a threat to the
Durrani state. Hazara chieftains in 1879 Until the late 19th century, the Hazarajat remained somewhat independent and only the authority of local chieftains was obeyed. Joseph Pierre Ferrier, a French author who supposedly traveled through the region in the mid-19th century, described the inhabitants settled in the mountains near the rivers
Balkh and
Kholm "The Hazara population is very less but ungovernable, and has no occupation but pillage; they will pillage and pillage only, and plunder from camp to camp". Subsequent British travelers doubted whether Ferrier had ever actually left
Herat to venture into Afghanistan's central mountains and have suggested that his accounts of the region were based on hearsay, especially since very few people entered the Hazarajat;
Pashtun nomads (Kuchi people) would not take their flocks to graze there, and few caravans would pass through. Afghanistan's
Kuchi people, who are unsettled nomads who migrate between the
Amu Darya and the
Indus River, temporarily stayed in Hazarajat during some seasons, where they overran Hazara farmlands and pastures. Increasingly during summers, these nomads would camp in large numbers in the Hazarajat highlands. The travels of Captains P. J. Maitland and M. G. Talbot from
Herat, through
Obeh and
Bamyan, to
Balkh, during the autumn and winter of 1885, explored the Hazarajat proper. Maitland and Talbot found the entire length of the road between Herat and Bamyan difficult to traverse. As a result of the expedition, parts of the Hazarajat were
surveyed on one-eighth inch scale and thus made to fit into the mapped order of modern nation-states. More thought and attention was put into demarcating the definite borders of modern nations than ever before, which entailed great difficulties in frontier regions such as the Hazarajat. During the Second
Anglo-Afghan War,
Colonel T. H. Holdich of the
Indian Survey Department referred to the Hazarajat as "great unknown highlands". And for the next few years, neither the Survey nor the Indian Intelligence Department succeeded in obtaining any trustworthy information on the routes between Herat and
Kabul through the Hazarajat. Various members of the
Afghan Boundary Commission were able to gather the information that brought the geography of remote regions such as the Hazarajat further under state surveillance. In November 1884, the Commission crossed over the
Koh-e Baba mountains by the Chashma Sabz Pass. General
Peter Lumsden and Major C. E. Yate, who surveyed the tracts between
Herat and the
Oxus, visited the
Qala-e Naw Hazaras in the
Paropamisus mountain range, to the east of the
Jamshidis of
Kushk. Noting surviving evidence of terraced cultivation in times past, both described the northern Hazaras as semi-nomadic with large flocks of sheep and black cattle. They possessed an "inexhaustible supply of grass, the hills around being covered knee-deep with a luxuriant crop of pure rye". Yate noted clusters of kebetkas, or the summer dwellings of the Qala-e Naw Hazaras on the hillsides and described "flocks and herds grazing in all directions". The geographical reach of the authority of the Afghan state was extended into the Hazarajat during the reign of
Abdur Rahman Khan. Caught between the strategic interests of foreign powers and disappointed by the demarcation of the
Durand Line in southern Afghanistan, which cut into Pashtun territory, he set out to bring the northern peripheries of the country more firmly under his control. This policy had disastrous consequences for the Hazarajat, whose inhabitants were singled out by Abdur Rahman Khan's regime as particularly troublesome: "The Hazara people had been for centuries past the terror of the rulers of Kabul".
20th and 21st century In the 1920s the ancient
Shibar Pass road which leads through Bamyan and east to the
Panjshir Valley was paved for lorries, and it remained the busiest road across the
Hindu Kush until the building of the
Salang tunnel in 1964 and the opening of a winter route. The Hazarajat became increasingly depopulated as Hazaras migrated to cities and to surrounding countries, where they became laborers and undertook the hardest and lowest-paid work. As the Afghan state weakened, uprisings broke out in the Hazarajat, freeing the region from state rule by the summer of 1979 for the first time since the death of
Abdur Rahman Khan some Hazara resistance groups were formed in
Iran, including
Nasr and Sipah-i Pasdaran, with some being "committed to the idea of a separate Hazara national identity". During the war with the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, most of the Hazarajat was unoccupied and free of Soviet or state presence. The region became ruled once again by local leaders, or mirs, and a new stratum of young radical Shiʿi commanders. Economic conditions are reported to have improved in the Hazarajat during the war, when
Pashtun Kuchis stopped grazing their flocks in Hazara pastures and fields. The group ruling Hazarajat was the
Revolutionary Council of Islamic Unity of Afghanistan or
Shura-e Ettefaq, led by
Sayyid Ali Beheshti. The region's geographic nature and un-strategic location meant that the government and Soviets ignored it as they fought rebels elsewhere. This effectively allowed the Shura-i Ettefaq administration to rule over the region and give autonomy to the Hazaras. Their politically opposing groups were mostly educated, secular and left-wing. Between 1982 and 1984, an internal civil war caused the Shura to be overthrown by the
Sazman-i Nasr and
Sepah-i Pasdaran groups. However inter-factional rivalry continued thereafter. Most of the Hazara groups united in 1987 and 1989 and formed the
Hizb-e-Wahdat. In retaliation, the genocidal policies of Amir
Abdur Rahman Khan's era were adopted by the Taliban. In 1998, six thousand Hazaras were killed in the north; the intention was ethnic cleansing of Hazara. At that stage, Hazarajat does not exist as an official region; the area comprises the administrative provinces of Bamyan,
Ghor,
Maidan Wardak, Ghazni, Oruzgan,
Juzjan, and Samangan. == Demographics ==