Afghanistan Project CMS

<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>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>

<p>This is the story of a treasure that was lost and found and lost again. And then, when nobody expected it, it was found.</p> <p>When you think of nomads, you probably think of people who live in harsh conditions, people whose lives are riddled with struggle and poverty. Most likely, you don&rsquo;t think of gold.</p> <p>But in the first century BCE, it was nomads from the northern steppe who invaded the Greco-Bactrian empire in what is today Afghanistan. These nomads were not the poor wanderers that we may think of.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s not exactly clear who they were. Some have suggested they were related to the Scythians or perhaps to the future Kushans. But what is clear is that they buried several of their dead with a stunning hoard of gold.</p> <p>In 1978, a team of Soviet-Afghan archaeologists began excavating the site known as Tillya Tepe, or Hill of Gold, in northern Afghanistan. They unearthed more than 20,000 gold objects which were sewn into the burial shrouds of the dead.</p> <p>The objects visually depicted the nomadic lifestlye. These bracelets, for example, are shaped like antelopes, with the ears of the animals flattened as if they are running against the wind.</p> <p>The objects also showed an exceptional syncretism, which suggested that the nomads were in contact with civilizations across the continent. These shoe buckles, for example, depict chariots like the ones seen in eastern motifs.</p> <p>Meanwhile this sheath appears to have a dragon on it like the kinds found in Chinese artifacts, and yet this style of sheath is similar to those found in Iran and Mongolia.</p> <p>This golden bowl is of special significance. It has Greek lettering which tells the weight of the object. When the bowl was discovered, it was found underneath the skull of one of the deceased, much like the wooden cushions found in other nomadic graves in the region.</p> <p>This clasp shows the Greek god Dionysus along with his lover Ariadne. The winged goddess Nike can also be seen at the right. But the couple may not just be Greek. They also suggest a connection to the male and female pairings found so commonly in Indian art. And lastly, the winged griffin upon which they are riding seems to suggest classic Central Asian motifs.</p> <p>And then there is this exquisite folding crown. Covered in delicate, lightweight flowers, the crown could be folded and easily moved when the nomads needed to travel. This object shares a remarkable similarity to the crowns found in 5th century Korea, which provides a fascinating clue into the expansiveness of silk road trade and cultural exchange.</p> <p>In 1978, the hoard at Tillya Tepe was placed in the Kabul Museum. But during the civil war of the 1990s, the Taliban looted the museum. It was believed that all of the gold was plundered.</p> <p>But in 2004, after the Taliban regime had toppled, the world learned that the staff at the museum had courageously hidden the most valuable treasures in crates beneath the museum floors.</p> <p>The golden treasures were surrounded with several other important ivory, stone, and stucco pieces from other sites that were believed lost or destroyed.</p> <p>&quot;This is a beautiful day for the museum. This is a beautiful day for me.&quot;</p> <p>After their re-discovery, the objects went on tour to museums around the world. At a time when the west only heard negative news reports coming out of Afghanistan, the exhibit offered a breathtaking rediscovery of the region.</p>

<p>Bactria was the ancient name of a region in Central Asia that stretched between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya river.</p> <div> <p>In 250 BCE, this region was ruled by the Seleucid empire. But Diodotus, the Greek governor of this area, rebelled against his superiors. His new kingdom would become one of the richest and most urban empires of Asia.</p> <p>The new Greco-Bactrian empire prospered by encouraging trade across the region.</p> <p>&hellip; the Bactrian Greeks &hellip; brought to Afghanistan products from Greece such as wine, olives and so on. They took from Afghanistan lapis lazuli and various other minerals and gems.</p> <p>Trade enriched all the settlements known today as Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kabul. And as the empire grew wealthier it began to expand. They successfully pushed east into parts of India.</p> <p>As trade flourished, it also became more and more systematized. The Greco-Bactrians produced an outstanding system of coinage. And these coins became the face of the society.</p> <p>Some of the most famous coins from Afghanistan are the so-called Greco-Roman coins, because they have portraits on them, and those tell us about history. These are very well struck. They were clearly important for the society. They weren&rsquo;t just crude things made in the back room. They give you the official view of society.</p> <p>There are spectacular decorative motifs on these coins made of gold&hellip;They have survived into the modern world. Spectacular and simple in many ways but glorious representations in others.</p> <p>Sometimes these coins also displayed motifs of the local environment.</p> <p>There are figures and animals depicted on it, which tell us a great deal about the culture and the economy of the Bactrian peoples.</p> <p>As the Greek leaders interacted with local traditions, they were forced to re-evaluate their own culture. They had come to Asia steeped in the philosophical traditions of Plato and Aristotle. But in the new empire, Greek philosophy mixed with local Buddhist and Hindu traditions. A famous exchange between the Bactrian King Milinda and the Buddhist monk Nagasena demonstrates how two highly sophisticated cultures were meeting each other and negotiating their differences:</p> <p>One of the most famous of these dialogues is with King Milinda&hellip;the story is that he debated with a famous Buddhist monk Nagasena&nbsp;on the question of existence.</p> <p>And he comes up with a chariot and they get into a debate and Nagasena the monk says well how did you come to see me? He says well I rode on my chariot as you can see&hellip;</p> <p>[Nagasena] says, &quot;I see no chariot.&quot; Nagasena&rsquo;s looking around like, &quot;No, no chariot here.&quot;</p> <p>And Milinda says, &quot;I just rode up on it. You can see it.&quot;</p> <p>[Nagasena] says &quot;I don&rsquo;t see it.&quot; And Milinda says, &quot;well here it is.&quot;</p> <p>Nagasena points to wheel and says &quot;is that the chariot?&quot; Milinda says, &quot;no that&rsquo;s the wheel of the chariot.&quot;</p> <p>[Nagasena] points to the goad that the driver is holding. &quot;Is that the chariot?&quot;</p> <p>&quot;No that&rsquo;s not the chariot either.&quot;</p> <p>To the reins. To the harness. [Nagasena] points to everything. &quot;Is that the chariot?&quot;&nbsp;And Milinda says, no it&rsquo;s this part of the chariot, that part of the chariot. By the time they pointed to all the parts Nagasena says, &quot;well, you must agree with me there is no chariot.&quot;</p> <p>And that&rsquo;s when Milinda explodes and says, &quot;but it&rsquo;s NOT the wheels, the cart, the reins, the goad. It&rsquo;s all of them together is what we call a chariot.&quot;</p> <p>Nagasena&rsquo;s argument is essentially that to one extent the chariot is something you name. It doesn&rsquo;t really exist. On the other hand Milinda rode up and he rode down in this chariot. But he had a sudden realization, and again this is a philosophical concept, of what is naming. What is real? How much do we assume?</p> <p>This is not the type of conversation that we see in the Platonic dialogues. This is different. And it&rsquo;s because we&rsquo;ve got two cultures coming together that are looking at the world in slightly different ways but both are highly sophisticated. This is not you know ignorant barbarians learning at the feet of wise men. We&rsquo;ve got two very sophisticated cultures that have approached the world in a different way. And the area of Afghanistan is at this period the place where they&rsquo;re coming together.</p> <p>This exciting cultural exchange would soon lead to an explosion of Greco-Buddhist art that would continue well into the reign of the Kushan Empire.</p> </div> <p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>Make no mistake. Imperial history was bloody. Brutal assassinations, unthinkable acts of torture, and brash displays of treachery were commonplace.</p> <p>But ironically, it was bloodshed that, for a time, put an end to bloodshed. When 100,000 people were killed by King Ashoka&rsquo;s Mauryan army, something changed.</p> <p>Ashoka was so devastated by the carnage that he had caused that he surrendered himself to a Buddhist life of nonviolence and righteous duty.<br /> <br /> Ashoka was the ruler of the Mauryan Empire that was based in northern India and in Afghanistan as well. He was the kind of great ruler that the Buddhists idolized. A shakravartan, a great leader who exemplified the Buddhist values and supported and patronized Buddhism. In terms of political support and patronage, he was probably the most important figure in the development of early Buddhism both in India and in Afghanistan.</p> <p>Ashoka traveled throughout his Empire, spreading Buddhist ideals.</p> <p>He left 33 edicts carved in stone. The edicts told the story of a benevolent King who spread ideas of piety, respect, and nonviolence.</p> <p>The one in Kandahar was was written in Greek and Aramaic. It pleaded:</p> <p class="rteindent1">&ldquo;[I] abstain from killing living beings, and other men who work for me have desisted from hunting. And if people have a bad temper, they will cease from intemperance. &hellip; They will be obedient to their fathers and mothers and to the elders. By so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily.&rdquo;</p> <p>Ashoka&rsquo;s reign helped strengthen Buddhism in Afghanistan. It provided a foundation for the religion to flourish for hundreds of years.</p> <p>Ashokha's stone edict in Kandahar was ironically lost to war in the 20th century.</p>

<p>Poets were some of the most important people in the courts of the Timurid kings. They were not only artists; they had enormous power to influence the king and to ultimately write the history of centuries.</p> <p>So they want to entertain the king and tell him happy stories about how beautiful the spring is and how wonderful his lands are and how wonderful he is. And then he gives them money. This is a job. To be a poet at this time was a major career.</p> <p>We know, for instance, that the Shahnameh, the book of Kings, the Persian national epic, was presented to Machmud, and there was a contest with different poets. And we have depictions, much later, of course, showing the competing poets. So it was sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for poetry.</p> <p>The Shahnameh, which was written by the poet Faradose, around the year 1,000, finished about 1010, was, is a 50-thousand couplet poem, recounting the history of Iran and the Iranian world from its mythical foundation up to the Arab conquest in the 7th century. [...] It is the classic work of Persian poetry, somewhat comparable to the Iliad or the Odyssey in the Western tradition.</p> <p>And as Persian language spread through the region, so did its poetry &ndash; and through its poetry, its culture and its values.</p> <p>All of Iran is spreading eastward up to the Oxus of what is today Afghanistan, and across the Indus Valley through what is Pakistan and into India. So all this area is speaking the Persian language. And, the stories show how the kings related to each other and paid tribute, and the heroes would defend the borders. So you have the great stories of Rostam and how he defends the king. And the questions of loyalty to the king and loyalty to the crown, and how is a hero supposed to treat a tyrant king who is sometimes wise and sometimes not.</p> <p>What we find here is that the poetry is a treasury of all that matters in a culture both for an individual personally and spiritually, and socially how should you act in your career, in your life. How should you act politically? What are the values of standing up to a king or being quiet? And how should a people get along together, and how should a people get along with others? So the reason this literature and these poems have lasted for a thousand years is not because there&rsquo;s some kind of declaration. They are fundamental values and they are a mirror of society.</p> <p>The stories of the Shahnameh are ancient, but they live on today.</p> <p>So these stories of love and fighting and standing up for what is true are repeated over and over again, and the reading of the Shahnameh is a very heroic rhythm. It&rsquo;s tah-dum-dum, tah-dum-dum, tah-dum-dum, tah-dum. Tah-dum-dum, tah-dum-dum, tah-dum-dum, tah-dum. So this recitation is a live tradition also today. So for over a thousand years these stories of Ferdowsi&rsquo;s Shahnameh have been memorized, performed and loved. Children are named for the characters, boys and girls, in the Shahnameh because it touches ancient, ancient roots and values. And that&rsquo;s what poetry and literature gives us is that it touches what matters most to us in life.</p>

<p>For more than 1500 years, they watched over the Bamiyan Valley.</p> <p>Then one day they were gone.</p> <p>And then, they started to come back.<br /> <br /> Act I: BIRTH</p> <p>In the 6th century, two statues were carved directly into the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan.</p> <p>They were the largest statues of the Buddha in the world, and they were the jewels of the Kushan Empire.</p> <p>They were painted with rich colors, a bright beacon for travelers along the silk road, and their surrounding caves housed the earliest oil paintings in the world.</p> <p>Throughout the centuries, Bamiyan was a vibrant resting place, as traders and religious pilgrims from across Asia flocked to see the works of art. The area was rich, fertile, and cosmopolitan.</p> <p>Here we find obviously looking at the monasteries that surrounded the Bamyan Buddhas that this was an incredibly important place because trade caravans passed through here. And it has enough agricultural surplus to be able to support what you might consider to be the cultural level of a city without necessarily having the population to maintain it.</p> <p>But while the Buddhas invited guests, they also invited enemies. Mahmud of Ghazni, Genghis Khan, and Nadir Shah all tried to destroy the statues to prove their own might. But the statues survived, as if mocking the arrogance of emperors.</p> <p>Over the years, as Afghanistan transitioned and became almost entirely Muslim, the Bamiyan statues grew less important religiously. But they remained a source of pride for Afghans and an exceptional site of cultural heritage.</p> <p>They were Afghanistan&rsquo;s symbol to the world.</p> <p>Act Two: DEATH</p> <p>In 1996, the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan and began a cultural campaign to transform their country.</p> <p>Hoping to provide quick order to a disordered nation, they adopted a radical form of Islam. This fundamentalism forbade artistic depictions of the human body.</p> <p>Such depictions were seen as idols that might be worshiped in lieu of the invisible and infinite power of god.</p> <p>By 1999, the Taliban was indiscriminately destroying all Buddhist works of art in Afghanistan.</p> <p>But even they recognized that Bamiyan was an exception. In a public statement, they announced they would preserve the statues for the sake of tourism and cultural heritage.</p> <p>But the statues were a delicate issue for the Taliban. Every day that they remained standing, they challenged the tenets of the Taliban ideology.</p> <p>On the other hand, the Taliban were well aware that they could use the statues as bargaining points with the international community. Several countries were growing increasingly concerned about the fate of the Buddhas, and the Taliban knew they could win last-minute favors if they threatened to destroy the statues altogether.</p> <p>But as the Taliban grew increasingly unpopular, they knew they needed to flex their muscles more than ever. In 2001, they flew in the faces of the international community and many of their own countrymen. They dynamited the statues and destroyed them.<br /> VIDEO of blast.</p> <p>In the age of instant media, the destruction of the Buddhas became a sensation. People who had never heard of Bamiyan or of the Taliban were suddenly gripped by the story and disgusted by what they were learning about what was happening in Afghanistan. It seemed as if the Buddhas had become a potent symbol for the cruelty of the Taliban&rsquo;s ideology. This may have been precisely what the Taliban hoped to achieve.</p> <p>But it also meant that the Taliban would have to wonder if idols could be more powerful when they could no longer be seen.</p> <p>Act 3: REBIRTH</p> <p>Though the statues have been destroyed, Bamiyan remains one of the most fertile valleys in Afghanistan. It is still a popular tourist destination for Afghans, and there is even talk of rebuilding the Buddhas.</p> <p>Life goes on in Bamiyan, as Afghans everywhere work to rebuild their cultural heritage.</p> <p>In 2002, filmmaker Phil Grabsky traveled to Bamiyan to document the life of a boy living in the ruins of the Buddhas. He has continued to follow the boy&rsquo;s life as he grows up and becomes a man.<br /> &nbsp;</p>

<p>Aladdin, Alibaba and the Forty Thiefs, and Sinbad the Sailor were all connected&mdash;in literary fiction&mdash;to the Sasanian King Shahryār.<br /> There were many versions of this tale, but they all told the story of the King&rsquo;s great distrust of women.</p> <p>Every night he took a new wife only to murder her in the morning. Then, he married &Scaron;ahrzād, a Persian queen.&nbsp;That night, the Queen told the King an intriguing story with a cliffhanger&ndash;and refused to say more until the next night. The King, who wanted to know the ending, would spare her life, only to be met with another cliffhanger the next night.&nbsp;This reportedly went on for 1,001 nights.</p> <p><em>One Thousand and One Nights</em> is a masterpiece collection of stories drawn from throughout Eurasia. Aladdin is Chinese. Ali Baba, Middle Eastern. Sinbad&rsquo;s adventures led him throughout South Asian and African waters. This series of stories were immortalized centuries later, and retold again and again throughout the world.</p> <p>The story&rsquo;s subtext was about a mighty empire that had the wherewithal to connect so many great civilizations of the medieval world. And that was the true story of the Sasanid Empire.</p> <p>Out of the ashes of the old Achaemenid Dynasty rose a new Persian golden age led by the Sasanians.</p> <p>How the Sasanians came to power was unclear, but this much was true: when Silk Roads trade was threatened by nomadic invaders, the Sasanians conquered the Hindu Kush region. This act helped stabalize Eurasian trade and helped spread Sasanian influence East and West.</p> <p>The Sasanians had a strong relationship with China. The empires forged alliances against nomadic invaders.</p> <p>To the West, relations with the Roman Empire was tumultuous at times, but the Emperors regarded one another as equals. Over the centuries, Sasanian art influenced medieval art traditions in Europe, Asia, and beyond.</p> <p>The Sasanian period was an era of great artistic efflorescence, great Sasanian craftsmen in Iran and Afghanistan, silversmiths, goldsmiths, potters, the whole range were found in the Sasanian culture and they did have an impact on Afghan cultural and artistic production.</p> <p>Trade flowed freely, and so, too, was this a period a wellspring of new beliefs in the Hindu Kush region. Mithraism, which was a religion that in many ways resembled Zoroastrianism, came to be.</p> <p>Zoroastrianism had become polluted and sort of corrupt. Mithraism was a reaction to that. It was part of the Sasanian heritage.&nbsp;To a certain extent, they de-emphasized the Buddhism that had been dominant during the Kushan period. You have a kind of amalgamation during the Sasanian period of those religious traditions.</p> <p>The artistic and cultural influences left by the Sasanid Empire would last for hundreds of years to come, but the forthcoming Muslim conquests would also have a lasting impact on the Persian world.</p>