Peshawar

Tehsil Peshawar, District Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
The city was known as Purushapura (The city of Flowers).
The region was part of Gandhara, and had links to the Harappan civilization of the Indus river valley and to Bactria and Ariana, an ancient name for Afghanistan.
According to the historian Tertius Chandler, Peshawar had a population of 120,000 in the year 100 C.E., making it the seventh most populous city in the world.
The founder of the Mughul dynasty that would conquer South Asia, Babur Shah came to Peshawar and found a city called Begram and rebuilt the fort there, in 1530. His grandson, Akbar, formally named the city Peshawar which means "The Place at the Frontier" in Persian.
The Pakhtun conqueror Sher Shah Suri, turned Peshawar's renaissance into a boom when he ran his Delhi-to-Kabul Shahi Road through the Khyber Pass and Peshawar. Thus the Mughals turned Peshawar into a "City of Flowers" by planting trees and laying out gardens similar to those found to the west in Persia. Khushal Khan Khattak, the Pakhtun/Afghan warrior poet, was born near Peshawar and his life was intimately tied to the city. He was also an implacable foe of the Mughal rulers, especially Aurangzeb. Khattak was an early Pakhtun nationalist, who agitated for an independent Afghanistan including Peshawar. After the decline of the Mughal Empire, the city came under Persian control during the reign of Nadir Shah by the 18th century.

Peshawar would also join, following a loya jirga as a Pakhtun region, the Afghan/Pakhtun empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani by 1747. Pakhtuns from Peshawar took part in incursions of South Asia during the rule of Ahmad Shah Durrani and his successors. The Sikhs invaded and conquered Peshawar in 1834 after wresting it from Afghanistan. Sikh soldiers burned a large part of the city and felled the trees shading its many gardens for firewood. The following 30 years of Sikh rule saw the destruction of Peshawar's own Shalimar Gardens, not to mention the dwindling of the city's population by almost half.

With the collapse of the Sikh Empire and its defeat in the second Anglo-Sikh War, the British eventually occupied the city. They continued to rule from 1849 to 1947, when the city became part of the new nation of Pakistan.