{"book":"adl0957","page":18,"text":"7\n\nGeography\n\nPosition and Extent.—Afghanistan, that is, \"the land\nof the Afghans\", is an important inland country of Central\nAsia. It is roughly quadrilateral in shape, with a long narrow\nstrip projecting eastward to the confines of Sinkiang (Chinese\nTurkestan). It lies completely in the North Temperate Zone\nbetween parallels 29° 30' and 38° 30' of north latitude, and 60°\n30' and 75° of east longitude. The greatest length from east to\nwest—from the Khyber to the Zulfikar Pass (extreme northwest)—\nis a little more than 600 miles; while its greatest breadth from\nnorth to south—from Kham-i-Ab, on the Oxus, to the Chagai\nHills, in the extreme south on the Baluchistan border—is nearly\n500 miles. The total area aggregates 270,000 square miles, with\na population that may roughly be estimated at 12,000,000.\n\nAfghanistan at present is land-locked as a result of British\nappropriation in 1876 of the maritime province of Baluchistan,\ntill then a feudatory of the Amirs of Afghanistan. A little later\nQuetta was also occupied and turned into a military station.\nThis policy not only cut off Afghanistan's access to the sea, which\nis naturally a great obstacle to progress and trade; it went still\nfurther, and in the words of Amir Abdur Rehman Khan \"it\npointed a dagger at the heart of the country\". Within the\nexisting borders there are seven major provinces (Naib-ul-\nHukumagi), viz., Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif,\nKataghan, Nangrahar and Pactia; and six minor provinces\n(Hukumat-i-Ala)—Maimanah, Farah, Badakhshan, Girishk,\nParwan and Ghazni.\n\nBoundaries: The boundaries of the country have under-\ngone tremendous changes during the last 150 years. At the be-\nginning of the 19th century, the Durrani Empire, built by Ahmad\nShah Durrani (1747—1773 A. D.), extended from Meshad to","chars":1794,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00018.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/18","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/18","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."}}