{"book":"adl0970","page":63,"text":"30\nstriken with a most dreadful insanity. Some people are of the opinion that he was smothered to death by his cousin, Ashraff. Thus passed away the conqueror of Persia in the prime of his youth, for he was hardly twenty-seven at the time of his death. He was on the throne of Persia for the brief period of three years only.\nMahmud was a brave soldier and a great conqueror. A greater conquest could not be achieved with the means at his disposal. All his weaknesses were atoned for by his energy and personal valour. He is said to have taken pride in being a strict observer of his word, when that was pledged. But from the very beginning of his reign in Persia, he was beset with innumerable difficulties. He surmounted most of them by sheer courage, but he could not withstand the jealousies and intrigues of his own kith and kin. This indeed broke his heart and turned him mad.\nShah Ashraff (1725—1730). Mahmud was succeeded by his cousin, Ashraff, a man of talent and energy. But he came to power at a very critical time, when the Afghans in Persia were being threatened on all sides. The Russians were active in the north, while the Turks were","chars":1150,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00063.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/63","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/63","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."}}