Ahmad Shah Durrani Founds Afghanistan

January 1, 1747

After Nader Shah's murder, his twenty-five-year-old Pashtun cavalry commander, Ahmad Shah Abdali, took the Koh-i-Noor and a tribal assembly at Kandahar took him as their shah. He renamed himself Durrani, the pearl of pearls, and built an empire stretching from the Amu Darya to Delhi. Modern Afghanistan dates its birth to that gathering.