Afghanistan Project CMS

<p>In the early 1700s, western Afghanistan was governed by Persian rulers known as the Safavids.</p> <p>For the first time in history, these rulers made Shiite Islam the official religion of Persia, persecuting all those who refused to convert.</p> <p>But the Pashtuns of Afghanistan were almost uniformly Sunni.</p> <p>In 1709 a wealthy Pashtun chief of the Ghilzai tribe rose up against the Shiite rulers.</p> <p>Mir Wais Hotak killed the despised governor and seized control of the Kandahar region. But only six years after his rebellion, he died of natural causes, and his son Mahmud soon replaced him.</p> <p>Mahmud was brutally ambitious, determined to expand his power beyond Kandahar.</p> <p>In 1722, he invaded Isfahan, the heart of the Safavid empire. He sacked it and massacred thousands.</p> <p>Mahmud&rsquo;s brutality was so extreme that he even went so far as to invite the nobles of Isfahan to a banquet &mdash; only to have them all slaughtered by his army. Soon thereafter Mahmud, the Afghan, declared himself the Shah of all of Persia.</p> <p>But the 18th century would prove that hubris would lead to defeat. Some say Mahmud spiraled rapidly into paranoia and insanity. In 1725, he died, possibly at the hands of his own men.</p> <p>His weak nephew replaced him, but only a few years later, a poor peasant named Nadir Shah would rise up and grab the Persian reins back from the Afghans.</p>

<p>The nation known today as Afghanistan did not really start to emerge until the 18th century. Prior to that, it was a loosely defined region, ruled by a series of empires that rose and fell throughout the centuries. These empires controlled vast territories, much larger than the nations that would eventually replace them. But ruling that amount of land required some compromises.</p> <p>Because the area was so vast and because the resources were spotty &amp;mdash that is some parts were very valuable and others were not so valuable, difficult of access, either deserts, mountains, steppes &amp;mdash what governments attempted to do was to rethink how should we rule such a place? And the way they did this is by what I call a &quot;Swiss cheese model of empire.&quot;</p> <p>That is to say, you ruled the places that were valuable and you provided services to their people, but you were more flexible about places that didn&rsquo;t justify the cost of administration.</p> <p>This meant that some parts of this region had a strong government presence while others did not. It was an empire, but it was an empire with many, many holes.</p> <p>In essence the urban areas, the irrigated agricultural areas, are the places that governments have always dominated. They&rsquo;ve always taxed. They&rsquo;ve always administered.</p> <p>Meanwhile, the people in the more remote regions, remained mostly autonomous, allowed to use their own tribal systems for governing themselves. But this freedom came at a price.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s a downside to being autonomous. The areas that are autonomous are usually very poor. So you can celebrate your freedom but you&rsquo;re living in poverty.</p> <p>But of course, these remote regions were not completely isolated from the more cosmopolitan centers of the empires. Some roads did pass through, sustaining rural people with at least a modest income.</p> <p>What we found is Silk Route caravans of quite ancient date passing through these territories bringing very, very high valuable goods. Not because they were going to necessarily sell them there. They weren&rsquo;t. But as long as they&rsquo;re passing through these people are bringing money, they&rsquo;re bringing ideas, they&rsquo;re bringing news. You might think about it as a large truck stop in Wyoming.</p> <p>And so the vastness of empire was continually bisected, and the different points within it were connected to each other, despite large areas that remained independent.</p> <p>In the 18th century all of this would have to change.</p> <p>Afghanistan would begin to emerge as a nation, the lines of its territory drawn in the sand. It would have to create a uniform national identity and all the holes would need to be connected.</p> <p>That project, and all of its challenges, would continue into the modern era.</p>

<p>What is known about Afghan history is typically pieced together.</p> <p>Unlike the Greek or Chinese Empires, there were no known scribes nor mapmakers. What we understand about Afghan history was often derived from foreign sources or visual clues.</p> <p>That is, until the time of Babur. The <i>Baburnama</i> was the first autobiography in the Muslim world.</p> <p>The narrative chronicles how one prince adopted a home in Kabul and founded the last Indian Dynasty. It is a remarkable story.</p> <p>He wrote an extraordinary autobiography, which tells us a great deal about a cultured man. He and his successors introduced a level of Persian sophistication into Northern India and founded the last dynasty of India, the Mughal Dynasty.</p> <p>A descendent of Ghenghis Khan and Tamerlane, he had the blood of a Turkic warrior, but the prose of Persian nobility.</p> <p>The story starts when Babur was 12. His father had died and he inherited&ndash;and lost&ndash;a kingdom in the lush Ferghana Valley north of Afghanistan.</p> <p>As a teenager, Babur the prince was victorious at times, but the victories were short lived. He captured Samarkand, only to lose it. He would stew then re-attack.</p> <p>In his early twenties, Babur seemed to strategize more. He took to the forests, where he lived for three years, slowly building and training an army. He had an Empire to establish.</p> <p>When he was ready, he crossed the mighty Hindu Kush mountain range, and captured Kabul, a city he grew to love. In his autobiography, he described Kabul in great detail</p> <blockquote>&ldquo;It is a pretty little province, completely surrounded by mountains. This province is a mercantile center. From India, caravans of 10, 15, 20 thousand pack animals brings slaves, textiles, sugar, and spices. Many Kabul merchants would not be satisfied with 300 or 400% profit! Goods from Iraq, Antonia, China, [and beyond] can be found in Kabul.&rdquo; -excerpt, <em>Baburnama</em></blockquote> <p>While in Kabul, he lays out a garden. Gardens which were part of his homeland and which he missed. They tend to be walled enclosures with water channels that run at regular intervals, cross-sections. And that&rsquo;s exactly what we see in Babur&rsquo;s garden, which has terraces with water that runs, running water, because water adds sound, background noise, but also cooling, fragrance, all the senses.</p> <p>It shows what an important role gardens play in this whole part of the world. If you look at the landscape, you&rsquo;ll see why gardens are so important. The landscape is sear. It&rsquo;s dark. It&rsquo;s dusty.</p> <p>If you bring water, it&rsquo;s fertile. So water becomes the image of paradise. The Garden of Eden, the Promised Land.</p> <p>Despite his adoration of Kabul and his garden, he was not ready to retire. He conquered Kandahar, another wealthy city along prosperous trade routes.</p> <p>Babur had grown to become a powerful and wealthy King. He crossed the Oxus River and conquered his ancestral lands of the Ferghana Valley.</p> <p>He then set his sights on India. At this point in history, warfare had changed profoundly. He used new technologies and his battalion of 12,000 was able to defeat an army of 100,000.</p> <p>He sacked what is today Northern India. He and his descendants ruled the subcontinent for three centuries, instilling a legacy of Persian culture and Islamic faith.</p> <blockquote>&quot;If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this!&quot;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; - inscription on Babur&rsquo;s tomb in his Kabul Garden</blockquote> <p>Babur died in Northern India, but was later brought back to Kabul and was laid to rest in his beloved garden.</p> <p>Times changed, and so did the garden. Natural disasters and decades of war have ravaged the site, returning it to a dusty landscape. Over the years, there were several efforts to restore the garden.</p> <p>They [gardens] change, from day to day, form season to season. And we have no idea what gardens looked like. So any time we see a garden, that&rsquo;s only the seasonal aspect. We have depictions of them in miniature paintings, but again, these are probably idealized, because they often show plants that don&rsquo;t bloom or blossom at the same time.</p> <p>The latest effort to renew the garden is by the Aga Khan Development Network.</p> <p>As Babur&rsquo;s Gardens are renewed, so, too, is Kabul&rsquo;s cultural heritage coming back to life.</p>

<p>With the collapse of the Timurid Empire in Central Asia and Iran, a native dynasty called the Safavids took power in Iran, and ruled the country for several centuries, up until the 18th century.</p> <p>It was another glorious time for art.</p> <p>New techniques, such as modeling, were introduced.</p> <p>And new subjects, like women and love, became popular.</p> <p>But as much as it was defined by love, it was also defined by hate. Specifically, the hatred that the Safavid ruler Ismael felt towards the Ottomans.</p> <p>Ismael Shah&rsquo;s army battled the Ottoman Empire to the West. The fighting led to the divided caliphs of Islam.</p> <p>What made it unique was the conversion of the population to the Shiite form of Islam.</p> <p>While the Ottoman world were orthodox Sunni, Ismael was Shiite. The people of his Safavid world were told to convert to the Shiite denomination&ndash;or face death.</p> <p>The heart of the Safavid Empire was in what is today Iran. The Hindu Kush region was on the very edge of the Safavid Empire.</p> <p>It was unclear how much influence the Safavids really had on Afghanistan&ndash;aside from one very important consequence: the end of Silk Roads trade.</p> <p>As the Silk Road had to go through Iran, and by converting to the Shiite form of Islam, the Safavids made enemies, both to the west, the Ottoman Empire, which was a bastion of Sunni orthodoxy.</p> <p>And also to the South, where land-based trade connected to seaports. Around the same time, another ruler was building an army that would become the great Indian Mughal Empire.</p> <p>And Central Asia and Afghanistan, which were also bastions of Sunni orthodoxy. So the struggles and conflicts back and forth between the Ottoman Empire, the Safavids in Iran, the Mughals in Afghanistan and India spelled the end of trade across Asia.</p> <p>This interruption in land-based trade probably had an influence on the rise of European and Chinese explorations of sea routes.</p> <p>But the Safavid reign would not last forever. In the 18th century, the Pashtuns would wrestle control of the region, and turn it from a buffer zone to a national homeland.</p>

<p>Calligraphy is the most important art in Islam. In fact, for many Muslims, it is the only art.</p> <p>And in many ways, it replaces images. If you walk into a cathedral in the West, over the doorway, you have Christ. If you walk into a Mosque in a place like Afghanistan, you have calligraphy. You have writing. Beautiful writing. And writing is endowed with as much art as Western sculptors endowed sculpture.</p> <p>Calligraphy is also one of the art forms that is still practiced today. It is one of those very rare ones that people still use many of the same techniques. The reed pen, the very fine paper.</p> <p>And it is one of these art forms that flourished in Afghanistan. In the 14th century, when the first books flourished in the Persianate world, the miniature was very small. It starts to grow in importance as painters become as important as calligraphers. And by the time of Bihzad, you can see we have almost reached full page paintings.</p> <p>This is a painting by Bihzad, who was the most famous Persian painter of all time. He flourished in the 15th century in the city of Herat, which was the center of court culture and book production at the time. And he signed only one manuscript.</p> <p>This page shows this scene of Yusuf and Zulaykha, the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife from the Bible, where she tempts him and he moves through seven rooms up to the top. He is about to yield to her at the last minute, the seventh room, when he realizes that God is his witness and he turns to flee. Bihzad has captured the epitome of the action just as Yusuf in green has turned and is about to flee out the door with Zulaykha pulling behind him.</p> <p>What is amazing about Bihzad's compositions is the intricacy and yet the clarity at the same time, achieved mostly through a very balanced use of color that just makes your eye jump around the page.</p> <p>If you look at the double page frontispiece from the wonderful manuscript of Bihzad, you have to start on the right where the door to the courtyard is, and you move through the courtyard, and the Sultan is sitting on the far left under the tent. It shows the sultan himself and his court, so you can actually see the sultan sitting under a tent with his courtiers before him, and the kinds of food that were brought to court, and the kinds of conversations that they had that they were part of court culture at the time.</p> <p>You have to remember that these are paintings within books. So first, they prepared sheets of paper, which they lined, so you can see the rows of poetry at the bottom, and they left a very large space in the middle for Bihzad to complete his composition. He blocks it out and then he paints it in with these pigments that he has had to grind up himself. One of the reasons that Persian painting is so famous is for the clarity of the colors and the saturation of the colors. Bihzad was the master of mixing colors and combining tints. After he had finished blocking out the painting then presumably someone, or perhaps him, came and added the inscriptions which tell you what the title of the painting is and incorporate verses from yet another poem, right into the architecture.</p> <p>We do not know whether the patron said, &quot;This is a story that means a lot to me. I want it illustrated.&quot; Or the calligrapher thought, &quot;I like this story. I am going to leave space for it.&quot; Or he was looking at an older book and it has the same illustration in there, just copying. We just do not know. But you can see by this time, that the painting has become even more important than the text. It is taking up almost the whole page. And this is the importance of Bihzad.</p> <p>The paintings themselves are signed by Bihzad and it was made for Sultan Husayn Bayqara. We do not know what he did with it. Did he sit and read it in bed? Did he bring it up to his court and show, &quot;Look, I am a great poet myself and a patron of Persian painting and Persian books.&quot; We just do not know. But we know that they spent a lot of time and investment in these works of art.</p>

<p>&ldquo;The precious merchandise of many foreign countries is stored up here. The soil is rich and productive, and yields abundant harvests. The forest trees afford a thick vegetation, and flowers and fruits are plentiful. &nbsp;The inhabitants are skillful in the arts and trades beyond those of other countries. The climate is agreeable and temperate. The people are brave and energetic. They are copied by all surrounding people in point of politeness and propriety. The king is full of courage, and the neighbouring countries obey his commands.&rdquo; &ndash; Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang&rsquo;s description of Samarkand</p> <p>This is how the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described Samarkand.</p> <p>Some of the most beautiful accomplishments in the arts, literature, and architecture in Central Asia were produced during the Timurid Empire, whose kings ruled from the great cities of Samarkand and Herat.</p> <p>The great ruler Tamerlane or Timur started uniting the various regions of Central Asia that had fallen apart and fragmented after the Mongol decline.&nbsp;And so in the latter part of the 14th century, he actually conquered a territory that was much larger than the territory and lands conquered by Genghis Khan himself.</p> <p>As the empire grew to include many cultures, it became more stable and prosperous. And the wealth of the royal court, in turn, spurred great achievement in the arts.</p> <p>Artists, like everyone else, have to make money. They have to support themselves. So artists tend to move where there are sources of patronage. At times when the court is rich and the court is munificent, it gives out money, then artists flock to it.</p> <p>So much of the art is created when the court is strong, willing to pay for adventuresome techniques, adventuresome designs, new and different craftsmen, and reward them for what is considered good work.</p> <p>Under the hands of the most skilled artists and craftsmen from across the empire, great cities once again rose from the dust of the Mongol destruction.</p> <p>Samarkand in Central Asia in the modern country of Uzbekistan was one of the most important regions along the Silk Roads. As early as the 3rd Century B.C., it was a critical region, and served as a marketplace and a center of Silk Road contacts back and forth across Eurasia.</p> <p>Samarkand was chosen by Tamerlane as his capital city, and it was during that time that the great monuments and buildings of Samarkand were built. The so-called Registan, the central square in Samarkand is one of the great monuments of Islamic architecture with mosques, Madressas, [...] bathhouses, tombs, all around a central square, which has survived into the present day.</p> <p>After his death, Tamerlane&rsquo;s son, Shahrukh, moved the capital city from Samarkand to Herat. Herat became a center of the region, attracting artists and traders from as far away as China and the Middle East, and the Silk Road trade revived during this time.</p> <p>The great monuments built in Samarkand and Herat during the Timurid period feature intricate and distinctive blue mosaic tilework. Few still stand, but the artistic achievement they represent continues to capture the imagination today.</p> <p>One of the high points of architecture in this part of the world is the use of tile to clad the outsides of buildings. Buildings are traditionally made of brick. There&rsquo;s no good stone for building in this part of the world. Brick is the color of dirt. In fact, the word &lsquo;khaki&rsquo; comes from the Persian word for &lsquo;dust&rsquo; &ndash; khaki means dust colored.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So in order to separate the building from the environment, they learned to use colored tile, beginning in the 12th century. This reached its high point in Afghanistan and surrounding regions, in the 15th century, when they made tiles in different colors and cut them up into little pieces, and assembled them in mosaic. &nbsp;So it catches the light and it glows.</p> <p>You have to imagine coming across the Steppe on a donkey or a camel, miles, plodding along and you come to a city like Herat, and what you see are these enormous minarets, very tall &ndash; some of them are 70 feet, a hundred feet tall. And they shimmer as you come across the landscape.</p> <p>Today, modern artisans labor to restore the great monuments of this golden age of Central Asia.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>Genghis Khan felt betrayed by the people of Herat.</p> <p>And his brutal punishment of the city was as swift as it was complete.</p> <p>The Great Khan commanded his army to kill every man, woman, and child.</p> <p>He ordered troops to burn the city&nbsp;and to crush the life-giving irrigation systems;&nbsp;not even animals and plants were spared.</p> <p>Herat, once a great city, was reduced to a massive grave when the Mongols were done.&nbsp;This is just one part of the story of the largest Empire the world has ever known.</p> <p>Many cities have their own tales of Mongol treachery. And although devastating, Herat&rsquo;s story was not unique.</p> <p>The Central Asian Shah, whom Genghis attacked, was finally defeated, but his son wound up in Afghanistan and Northern India in the 1220s, and so the Mongols had to move into Afghanistan, and particularly in the area of Herat, the major city in Afghanistan. At first, they defeated the people of Herat, and the people submitted, but subsequently, the people in that region revolted against Mongol rule, which was the worst thing they could&rsquo;ve done, as the Mongols did not believe in allowing people to rebel against their rule after having voluntarily submitted. And so they came in and did considerable damage to Herat and the surrounding region.</p> <p>It was with this military might that the Mongols created the largest land-based empire in world history.</p> <p>The Mongols conquered China and Japan in the East,&nbsp;and Russia and Europe to the West.</p> <p>But out of calamity and ruin rose peace and prosperity.</p> <p>The so-called Pax Mongolica, the peace that the Mongols initiated by taking over nearly all of Asia, at least Northern Asia and parts of Europe, led to a tremendous amount of interaction between peoples.</p> <p>This was a time in which there was considerable travel across Asia, considerable travel by merchants, by religious pilgrims, by entertainers, by individuals who just had a penchant for adventurous travel, and all of that was facilitated by the Mongol peace Eurasia.</p> <p>The Mongol era in Afghanistan witnessed a kind of development of the capabilities of some areas of Afghanistan to set up their own governments and to provide the necessary tasks that people had been subjugated had to provide for the Mongols, postal stations, taxation and so on.</p> <p>As the Mongols conquered greater swaths of land, they also controlled more trade routes.</p> <p>This meant that their tax revenue grew. There was even an early banking system.</p> <p>The ability for businessmen to borrow money led to greater prosperity for the merchant class.</p> <p>And so the Mongols introduced a kind of greater centralization in parts of Afghanistan that had been the case earlier. Of course, the people of Afghanistan also benefited from the cultural interactions and diffusion that occurred throughout the Mongol domain, so there was a kind of balance.</p> <p>The Mongol Empire&rsquo;s powerful infrastructure ushered in trade and prosperity as well as cultural exchange throughout Eurasia.</p> <p>But the same channels that facilitated smooth exchange of peoples, goods, and ideas, also helped spread the Black Plague.</p> <p>After Genghis Khan&rsquo;s death, the massive empire proved too large to hold together and it weakened in the 14th century.</p> <p>The true legacy of Genghis Khan&rsquo;s rule may have been the example he set for his successors. In only a few short decades after the fall of the Mongol Empire, another powerful leader would emerge from Central Asia to build an empire of his own.</p>

<blockquote>We came around the edge of a scree slope and saw the tower. A slim column of intricately carved terra-cotta set with a line of turquoise tiles rose two hundred feet. There was nothing else. The mountain walls formed a tight circle around it and at its base two rivers, descending from snowy passes, ran through ravine into wilderness. Pale slender bricks formed a dense chain of pentagons, hexagons, and diamonds winding around the column. On the neck of the tower, Persian blue tiles the color of an Afghan winter sky spelled: GHIYASSUDIN MUHAMMAD IBN SAM, KING OF KINGS.... <br /> -From <em>The Places in Between</em>, by Rory Stewart</blockquote> <p>The most surprising city in Afghanistan is probably the city of Jam, known mostly today by its minaret, but also by some ongoing excavations carried out in the last few years.</p> <p>The Minaret of Jam, which is the second highest in the world and 200 feet high, was lost, basically, to outsiders until the 1950s. That&rsquo;s extraordinary, to not know about a world masterpiece. It&rsquo;s now been named a UNESCO World Site. And we have to imagine it was a flourishing city when this minaret was built.</p> <p>Mountain cultures in Afghanistan tend to remain somewhat isolated from the world, concentrating their resources and ambition towards survival in the difficult terrain of their homeland. But from one isolated mountain province in Afghanistan, Ghor, a great empire descended to rule the lands of Central Asia.</p> <p>The chief Ghorid ruler, Ala-ud-din was one of the great warriors of ancient times. He earned the title of &quot;the World Burner&quot; by moving into and destroying the prime city of the Ghaznavids, Ghazni.</p> <p>The Ghorids ruled from their mountain capital deep in the Hindu Kush mountains in central Afghanistan, which is sometimes known as the lost city of the Turquoise Mountain. Of this fabled mountain city, only a single minaret remains, isolated in a lonely valley.</p> <blockquote>Food, fodder, and all goods for the city must have been carried in, either over the snow passes we just crossed or, if the villagers were right, on a causeway of planks laid for five kilometers up the Hari Rud River. The valley walls were steep, prone to landslides, and difficult to build on. The lower houses must have received at most an hour&rsquo;s sunlight a day.</blockquote> <blockquote>No easy roads connected the city to the Ghorids&rsquo; kingdoms in Herat, Bamiyan, or Ghazni, still less Delhi. Nevertheless, the villagers&rsquo; excavations suggested that more people had lived in this remote, unpleasant, impractical gorge eight hundred years ago than lived in any town in Ghor today. This suggested a great deal about the power of the Ghorids and their desire to emphasize their mountain roots in opposition to the rival nomads of the plains.&rdquo;</blockquote> <blockquote>-From&nbsp;<em>The Places in Between</em>, by Rory Stewart</blockquote> <p>Ever since its rediscovery by a French scientist in 1957, the minaret of Jam has raised more questions than it has answered &ndash; not only about the Ghorids, but about the function of minarets themselves.</p> <p>We don&rsquo;t know why minarets were built. Everyone says, &ldquo;Minaret. Aha. Call to prayer.&rdquo; It doesn&rsquo;t seem like that&rsquo;s a functional explanation, in the sense that why do you need a five-story building to call to prayer. You couldn&rsquo;t hear your voice, if you were that tall. Furthermore, it seems that the earliest built mosques did not have minarets.</p> <p>In addition to its role as a religious structure, the minaret of Jam may have been built as a monument, landmark, or a watchtower.</p> <p>Minarets were probably multi-functional. Some of them marked passes, particularly in this part of the world, the passes through Afghanistan and into Pakistan or Iran. Some of them may have been symbols of Islam, simply made to show the presence of Islam. Some of them were surely used to mark congregational mosques.</p> <p>Today preservationists are fighting to save the minaret of Jam from not only the ravages of time and of the elements &ndash; but also of man. The very isolation of the Ghorid empire&rsquo;s lost city today makes it inaccessible and dangerous for the archaeologists who want to excavate the site, and at the same time protects looters who smuggle antiques from the watchful eyes of the authorities.</p>

<p>At many times throughout history, the people of today&rsquo;s Afghanistan found themselves at the mercy of a foreign power. But at other times, as during the reign of the Ghaznavids, the lands of the Hindu Kush became the center of the world.</p> <p>The invasions of the Turkic and Mongol peoples, starting with the Ghaznavids in the 10th century and stretching to the Mongols in the 13th century, were based upon their cavalry.</p> <p>The horses gave the Turkic and Mongol peoples a tremendous advantage over the settled civilizations in Afghanistan and undoubtedly facilitated their success.&nbsp;</p> <p>The calvary and military skills of the Ghaznavids enabled them to overthrow the Samanid Dynasty. Surprisingly, they first learned these skills in an unlikely place: when they were pressed into serving in the slave guard of the ruling Samanids themselves.</p> <p>Slavers would go out into Central Asia and other places and steal children, and then raise them to be soldiers. But they didn&rsquo;t just put guns in their arms, they taught them poetry. They taught them to be knights and they taught them how to run an army. And so these warriors were very cultured, very strong, very organized were able, of course, to take over. And so, we see the way that the first successful waves of these are able to topple the Samanid Dynasty, and the first one that&rsquo;s set up is the Ghaznavids in Ghazni.</p> <p>Mahmud, the first king of Ghaznavids, established the center of their empire in Ghazni, in southeastern Afghanistan.</p> <p>Mahmoud of Ghazni, the leader of the Ghaznavids and the most prominent ruler of the Ghaznavids, was an ardent Muslim. He helped to convert the population of Afghanistan to Islam. It is from this point on that we can talk about an Islamic Afghanistan.</p> <p>In the late tenth and eleventh century under the Ghaznavids, Afghanistan was a center of culture, and a world power. This is when Islam expands into India; Mahmud is known as the Great Conqueror, Mahmud the Conqueror, because he brings Islam to India.</p> <p>And you have to imagine, opening up into India brings you great riches. India was a tremendously rich land; it&rsquo;s the land of the elephants; it&rsquo;s the land of marble. And hence he brings some of that loot back and he uses it to build magnificent palaces. We know the minarets that he and his successors built. And these are testament to the kinds of patronage that were going on at that time, when Afghanistan was the center of the region.</p> <p>Mahmud wants to be not just a warrior conquering king, but he wants to be known as a great king. And what do you need to be great? You need poems and art and you need beautiful buildings and you need intellectuals at your court. So he uses all his powers of paying people and cajoling people and twisting their arm to come into his court and to make it a really flowering glorious center of culture. And so, people wanted to go there also because they knew they could get paid.</p> <p>The Ghaznavid court represented a fusion of Turkic and Persian cultures for the first time in Afghanistan. The Turkic administrative and military strengths created a strong and properous rule, under which the Persian artistic traditions of poetry and painting could flower. Once again, a unique hybrid developed at the crossroads of cultures.</p>

<p>What is art?</p> <p>And what makes it valuable?</p> <p>Is it defined by beauty?&nbsp;Masterful technique?&nbsp;Rarity?</p> <p>How do we know art when we see it?</p> <p>Most of what we consider art from Afghanistan is very different from what we consider art in the West. There is no tradition of independent painting and sculpture, which is our major art form from the West. Instead, what we think of as art are everyday objects that are of a finer quality but still functional.</p> <p>They all have a purpose. They&rsquo;re not like sculpture that you just look at or paintings that you just hang on the wall. They served some function. And one of the questions you should always ask when you see a work of art is, &ldquo;So how was it used?&rdquo;</p> <p>The importance of art is that it tells us about different kinds of society than texts. Texts tend to be written by the literate, the upper classes, the learned classes, men &ndash; and they reflect those views.&nbsp;Art is made for a wider variety of people, particularly day to day art. And much of what we talk about from medieval Afghanistan is day to day art, things that were functional objects, just nice examples of them.</p> <p>Weaving, embroidery, and other textile traditions are some of the most important art forms in Central Asia. Textiles define space inside the home and they define who people are &ndash; such as their ethnicity, rank, or occupation. But despite their importance &ndash; or perhaps precisely because of their importance &ndash; historical textiles are rarely preserved and found.</p> <p>The problem with textiles is that they are literally worn to death. If you had a beautiful robe like this and you tore it, well, you&rsquo;d turn it in to the lining. And if you tore the lining, you&rsquo;d make it the interfacing. And if it was the interfacing and that got ruined, you&rsquo;d make it into stuffing. So we have very, very few garments left. [...]</p> <p>This wonderful cloth of gold, that&rsquo;s mentioned even in Chaucer, and was a specialty of cities like Herat. It was exported as far as England. And we know that Genghis Khan took weavers from Herat, from Afghanistan, and took them to China to teach people how to weave this cloth of gold. [...]</p> <p>One of the most famous textiles from the Samanid period was preserved as a shroud in an abbey in northern France.</p> <p>It has an inscription at the bottom that said it was made for an emir. And we know from historical sources that he was an army commander in central Asia, and that he was put to death in 962. And he commanded troops in what is now the province of Khor&ndash; or what is the province of Khorasan, which comprises now eastern Iran and western Afghanistan.</p> <p>The textile is superb. It shows two elephants, a ring of camels, and an inscription at the bottom asking for blessings on this commander, Abu Mansur Bukhtegin. Since it asks for blessings, we know he&rsquo;s still alive. And since he died in 962 according to the texts, we know it must have been made before he died. So it provides a very, very rare example of a datable textile.&nbsp;</p> <p>Although historians may be able to pinpoint where and when an artifact or handicraft was made, it&rsquo;s purpose is much harder to determine.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s an extraordinarily complex weave, and we can&rsquo;t imagine that only one was woven. We have to imagine that there were hundreds of these textiles, all with the man&rsquo;s name on it. Did he use them on his troops? Did he hang them around his palace? We have no idea. But they&rsquo;re quite extraordinary, both for its state of preservation and for its iconography, it&rsquo;s &ndash; what it shows on it.</p> <p>Because Afghanistan was so rich in metals, decorative metalwork like jewelry was also an important part of the craft tradition, as were metal objects used for bathing, cooking, and transporting food and drink. One of the most famous of these is the Bobrinsky Bucket, which is named after the Russian Count Bobrinsky, who found it.</p> <p>it is probably the most famous piece of metalwork from Afghanistan because it actually says that it was made in Herat. It gives the date, which corresponds to 1163. It gives the name of the patron, or owner, who was a merchant. And it also gives the name of the workman who made it.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s extraordinary in technique. It has bands that show different kinds of scenes of princely life &ndash; hunting, feasting and backgammon. It has all kinds of writing on it, hence all the information we know about it &ndash; writing that includes interlacing; writing that includes human figures, where actually the letters grow into human heads.</p> <p>We just don&rsquo;t know what it was for. We know what it wasn&rsquo;t for. It can&rsquo;t be used for cooking &ndash; it&rsquo;s too fancy. It can&rsquo;t be used for holding milk, as a milk bucket, because milk curdles with copper.</p> <p>The only functional purpose we can imagine is that it was used as a bath bucket, when you filled it with water and poured water over yourself in the traditional Turkish bath. And we actually have later paintings from the 15th century showing plain versions of this kind of bucket. But why you would want a bath bucket covered with wonderful scenes and all kinds of writing, is very unclear.</p> <p>One of the problems is that we don&rsquo;t know whether the Bobrinsky Bucket is unique, or typical. It survived. Did it survive just because it was buried? Or did it survive because people made hundreds of them and this is just one example. So we have to be very careful about how we generalize from our single examples.</p> <p>Although artifacts that are unique and well-preserved can be a treasure trove of new information, their importance can be exaggerated because of their rarity and beauty. Maybe that&rsquo;s because today we see art in something that was once only an everyday object.</p>