{"book":"adl0970","page":51,"text":"18\nblockade a city of such magnitude with less than\n20,000 men. Yet so well did Mahmud com-\npensate for the lack of manpower by his\nvigilance and activity that before long the\ninhabitants began to suffer all the horrors of an\nacute famine. At length, after repeated sallies\nhad been beaten back with great loss in men\nand material, and all attempts of troops from\nthe provinces to pierce the Afghan line and force\na convoy of food into the beleagured city had\nfailed, the necessity of surrender became more\napparent. Finally after a siege of eight months,\nthe Shah, accompanied by his courtiers and\nhigh-ranking officers, came out of the city and\nsurrendered himself to Mahmud at Farahabad,\nthe headquarters of the Afghans. The Shah\nwith his own hand placed the diadem on the\nhead of the conqueror and gave him the keys of\nthe city.\nShah Mahmud in the beginning of his reign\nin Persia showed qualities of a good statesman.\nThe moment he became the master of the capital,\nhe tried his best to relieve the inhabitants of the\nmiseries of famine. His next care was to establish","chars":1073,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00051.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/51","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/51","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."}}