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The Afsharids (Persian: سلسله افشار) were an Iranian dynasty from Khorasan that ruled the Persian Empire in the 18th century. At this time, the empire reached its greatest extent since Sassanid Empire.

The dynasty was born with Nader Shah, who proclaimed himself the Shah of Iran in 1736. Soon aftwards he waged a war against the Afghans and captured Kandahar, the home of the Ghilizai Afghans.

In 1738, he invaded India, massacred most of the population of Delhi and in a single campaign captured an incredible wealth, including the legendary Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The plunder seized from India was so rich that Nadir stopped taxation in Iran for a period of three years, following his triumphant return. He seems to have continued a career of conquest for lack of anything better to do. He made Mashhad his capital and - apparently for the sake of conciliating the Afghans - favored his Sunni subjects at the expense of the Shi'as.

A despotic ruler, he was assassinated in 1747, and for the next fifty years Iranian history is well nigh unintelligible. There was in essence a three-sided struggle between the descendants of Nader Shah, the Zand dynasty and the Qajars. For much of the time, Shahrokh, grandson both of Nader and Shah Hossein, remained nominally on the throne at Mashhad, but, blinded and intermittently imprisoned, he exercised no effective power.

• Nadir Shah (1736-1747)
• Adil Shah (1747-1748)
• Ebrahim (1748)
• Shah Rukh (1748-1796)
• Nadir Mirza of Khorasan (1797-1802)

• Full list of Iranian Kingdoms
• M. Ismail Marcinkowski, Persian Historiography and Geography: Bertold Spuler on Major Works Produced in Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, India and Early Ottoman Turkey, with a foreword by Professor Clifford Edmund Bosworth, member of the British Academy, Singapore: Pustaka Nasional, 2003, ISBN 9971-77-488-7.