Kabul has been a settlement for more than 3,000 years: the Rigveda names its river, the Kubha. Its passes made it a crossroads between Central Asia and India, ruled in turn by the Kushans, the Hindu Shahis and the Ghaznavids. In 1504 Babur took the city and made it his base before he conquered northern India; he loved its gardens and is buried here.
Timur Shah Durrani made Kabul the capital of Afghanistan in 1776. In the 1920s King Amanullah Khan began to modernise it, and many of its avenues, palaces and parks date from then. The civil war of the 1990s destroyed much of the west of the city. Kabul is the country's largest city and its centre of trade, and its love of kite flying and of its bazaars has not changed.