{"book":"adl0970","page":15,"text":"ii\n\nHis history, too, is a checkered one. Sometimes he is establishing vast and powerful empires, extending to thousands of miles, with great centres of trade and arts, while at others he is involved in chaos and anarchy, destroying with his own hands the towering edifice he has created.\n\nHis geographical environment has had a deep and lasting effect on his customs, character, clothes and even his way of thinking. The mountainous and the uneven terrain of the country presents a very serious problem for the construction of roads. This lack of means of transportation as well as of communications has made journeys and thereby interchange of customs and ideas a very difficult task. It has resulted in dividing the people into clans and tribes, each leading for the most part an isolated and independent life preserving its peculiar dialect, culture and customs. Under a strong ruler, who would weld them together, the Afghans have achieved marvels, while a weak one would pave the way for internal discord and feuds.\n\nAfghanistan, since a very early time, had been on the cross-roads of world trade and a meeting ground of various nations and different culture","chars":1165,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00015.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/15","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/15","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0970/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0970_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."}}