{"book":"adl0957","page":279,"text":"224\n\nPART—EIGHT\n\nChronology of Important Events connected with the history of Afghanistan\n\n(I) Pre-Islamic Period :\n\nc. 3000 B.C. : First settlement of the Aryans at Bakhdi (modern Balkh). We do not know much about the original home of the Aryans. Bactrai, Chinese Turkestan, the Pamirs, Germany, the plains of the Middle Danube, the Steppes of Southern Russia and even Western Siberia have all been suggested as the original habitat of these Indo-European races. According to Avesta, this original home of the Aryans (Aryana-Vaejo as it is called) was a region of delight, a kind of earthly paradise. Some geological convulsions changed the climate of this country, and the primeval happy home of the Aryans became suddenly very cold and sullen, which induced the migration of the Aryans to neighbouring countries. According to other traditions, the original home of the Aryans (Arya-Vesta, Arya-Varstha or Arya-Versha, as it is variously called, meaning the Abode of Honourable Men) seems to be the country watered by the Oxus and the Murghab, and bounded by the Caspian Sea on the west, the Hindukush on the south, the Kailas range on the east and the Kizil-Kum and other sandy deserts on the north. It was at Bakhdi, northern Afghanistan, that the Aryan","chars":1257,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00279.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/279","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/279","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."}}