{"book":"adl0957","page":14,"text":"3\n\ntoday, for the first time took to a settled life and laid the founda-\ntion of a rudimentary form of democratic government. It was\nhere that two of the great religious movements of the world—\nBrahminism and Zoroastrianism—took their origin. Again it\nwas here that two of the great religious classics (the Rigveda and\nthe Avesta) came into being.\n\nFrom the archæological point of view, the country is a\nmost remarkable storehouse of antiquities, only partly touched by\nthe hand of modern science. The Buddhist monasteries, carved out\nof rocks, are still the wonder of tourists and scholars. The glory\nof Bamian is inexhaustible. It was a great seat of culture,\nsimilar to those well known to the Indologists in Nalanda,\nAjanta, Ellora, Odandapura, etc. The remains of Balkh, the\n\"Mother of Cities\" when properly unearthed, might reveal the\ntreasures of Greco-Bactrian culture that are still hidden in the\nsoil of Bactria. The same may be said of the valley of Bagram\nin Kohistan, which has finally been identified with the spot\noccupied by the city of Capissa made famous by Ptolemy and the\nChinese pilgrim, Huien Tsang, in the seventh century A.D.\n\nNumismatic and epigraphic evidence is also very prominent\nin Afghanistan. The numerous varieties of ancient coins that are\nfound here give the impression that there is no country in the\nworld having such rich numismatic treasures. The coins that one\ncomes across are of unusual variety—Greek, Bactrian, Thracian,\nSassanian, Kushan, Hindu, ancient Afghan, Mogul, modern\nAfghan, etc. The inscriptions known hitherto are not very\nmumerous, for some parts of the country are not properly\nexcavated as yet. Naturally, most of these are in Arabic or\nPersian, but there are also inscriptions in Greek, Sanskrit and\nPali, and even in Aramaic in the Southern Province.","chars":1810,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00014.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/14","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/14","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}