{"book":"adl0970","page":17,"text":"iv\n\nculture, such as Bamian, Herat and Ghazni, were either razed to the ground or burnt to ashes. Millions and millions of people, some of them scholars of world-wide fame, were mercilessly butchered. As a result of this catastrophe, un-paralleled in human history, a wave of pessimism spread through the length and breadth of the country. Those, who had been fortunate enough to escape this general slaughter, took to penance and mortification. The philosophy, \"this world is a hell for true believers\" gained ground. Every misfortune, for which they themselves were responsible, was looked upon as punishment for their past sins and evil deeds. It was also believed that to combat these mishaps and diseases was beyond the power of human beings. This was the beginning of fatalism and pessimism in this country, which has played an important role in Afghan history.\n\nAfghanistan had hardly recovered from the losses sustained at the hands of the Mongolian hordes, when another event happened, which crippled its trade and deprived it of its central commercial position. The country was lying on the cross-roads of world trade. Merchants from","chars":1143,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00017.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/17","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/17","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."}}