{"book":"adl0957","page":193,"text":"148\n\nTimur Shah (1773-1793): Ahmad Shah was succeeded\nby his son, Timur, who lacked the energy and farsightedness of\nhis illustrious father. It is not possible for a successor of a great\nking to rest upon his father's laurels and enjoy perfect tranquillity\nwithout exerting himself.\n\nSo was the case with Timur. As soon as the grip of the\nmaster hand was no more, numerous sources of danger cropped\nup. Timur was incapable of dealing courageously with all these\ndifficulties. The result was that the chiefs gave him but nominal\nhomage and the greater part of his reign was spent in quelling\ntheir uprisings. His shifting and vacillating policy and easy-\ngoing temperament brought great loss to the kingdom founded by\nAhmad Shah the Great, and its real disintegration begins with\nTimur Shah's reign. It was Timur Shah who changed the\ncapital of Afghanistan from Kandahar to Kabul.\n\nZaman Shah (1793-1800): After the death of Timur his\nfifth son, Zaman, was able to occupy the throne with the help of\nSardar Payenda Khan, the influential chief of the Barakzais.\nZaman Shah, from the very beginning of his reign was beset with\ninnumerable difficulties, both external and internal. His elder\nbrothers, Hamayun, governor of Kandahar, and Mahmoud,\nGovernor of Herat, thinking themselves lawful heirs to the\nthrone, took up arms to contest for power.\n\nZaman Shah, after consolidating his position in Afghan-\nistan, turned to India, with the object of turning out the British.\nBut there was too little security at home to ensure success abroad.\n\nThe British were greatly alarmed to learn of his plans.\nThey took prompt measures for the security of their Indian\nterritories, now threatened by Napoleon on one side and Zaman\non the other. Captain Malcolm was accordingly deputed as","chars":1771,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00193.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/193","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/193","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."}}