This paper examines cityscapes and built environments in early nineteenth-century Afghanistan through the reading of a rediscovered illustrated Persian chronicle of the Durrani Empire (1747-1842). The manuscript, titled Tazkirat al-Salatin (“Biographies of Sultans”), alternately Taza Akhbar (“Fresh News”), was completed in the month of Safar 1233 Hijri Qamari/December 1817 by an anonymous munshi writing at the behest of the British East India Company. Tazkirat al-Salatin / Taza Akhbar presents a history of the Afghan Durrani Kingdom from the aftermath of Nadir Shah Afshar’s Indo-Persian empire and the founding reign of Ahmad Shah Durrani to its waning years on the eve of entanglement with the East India Company. It chronicles the imperial formation of Durrani Afghanistan along the eastern borderlands of the Qajar Empire in Greater Khurasan. Through the prism of a rediscovered manuscript on the Durrani Kingdom and the face (surat) of its fortressed cityscapes and built environments, this paper explores the themes of imperial space and sovereignty in Afghanistan during the first decades of the nineteenth-century. The manuscript of Tazkirat al-Salatin / Taza Akhbar paints a view of the urban landscape and topography of Afghan cities – their ecologies, water systems, walls, gateways, monuments, neighborhoods, streets, hinterlands, and people – in relation to the sovereignty of the Durrani Empire. It depicts an array of urban spaces and independent city-states as they cohered, in turbulent times of war, into an interconnected landscape of Indo-Persian fortressed cities – Qandahar, Kabul, Ghazni, Herat – that became an Afghan empire. The history of nineteenth-century Afghanistan often lingers in the shadow of the “Great Game,” and much remains to be known about the Durrani Empire. In most studies of modern Afghanistan, the environment and landscape figure primarily as setting, a moment of staging before moving on to political, diplomatic, and religious analysis. By contrast, this paper explores the question of how the built environments and cityscapes of the Durrani Empire came to be mapped and inscribed.