{"book":"adl0957","page":15,"text":"4\n\nAfghanistan was a great seat of Buddhism, and it was from\nhere that this religion found its way into China, Turkestan and\nMongolia. The Buddhist monasteries discovered in the various\nparts of the country are not only important from the archæological\nand historical perspectives, but also from the point of view\nof the history of art. The well-known school of sculpture\nthat so wonderfully combined Greek realism with Indian\nmysticism, and which was named the School of Gandhara un-\ndoubtedly had its centre at Hadda, six miles south of modern\nJalalabad, where its most beautiful specimens have recently been\ndiscovered. As one goes from Hadda towards Peshawar, Taxila\nand Lahore, the Gandhara specimens lose the striking beauty\nthat characterises the specimens of Hadda.\n\nAfghanistan is also a promising field of investigation for\nthe student of comparative philology, who may hope here to\ncome across the last of the little known and dying Indo-European\nlanguages, which are spoken in some of the mountain fastnesses\nof the country even to this day. Some of these ancient Aryan\nlanguages are still preserved to a considerable extent in their\noriginal form and purity by many of the isolated hill-tribes.\n\nIt is also considered to be one of the most important\nprimary agricultural centres of the world; a whole series of\ndifferent plants have originated here. Afghanistan's vegetation\nstill awaits the investigation of the botanist, while the variety\nof its rocks and soils affords a vast field of research for the\nenthusiastic geologist.\n\nThe Afghans are a virile race of inexhaustible energy.\nSome look upon them as \"splendid specimens of humanity and\nthe best fighting men in Asia\". They are a gifted people, brave,","chars":1721,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00015.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/15","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/15","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."}}