FRENCH ARCHAEOLOGY AND NEW AFGHAN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

With the armistice of August 1919 that ended the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Aman Allah Khan declared Afghanistan's independence from Britain and soon opened the first Afghan embassies in European capitals. Pursuing a “third power strategy” to escape British and Russian influence, his government developed close relations with Germany and France.Footnote ⁹ As part of the cultural diplomacy that accompanied this policy, in September 1922 France and Afghanistan signed a convention that granted the newly formed Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) a thirty-year monopoly on excavation.Footnote ¹⁰ It was also in 1922 that Aman Allah agreed to the foundation of a French-style lycée, known initially as Maktab-i Amaniya (Amaniya School) and renamed as Lisay Istiqlal (Lycée Indépendence) in 1931.Footnote ¹¹ As we will see, Afghanistan's premier ancient historian, Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, would be one of the school's earliest graduates.Footnote ¹²

The person selected as the head of DAFA was Alfred Foucher (1865–1952). Having begun his career as early as 1895 with investigations in northwestern India that led to his foundational 1905 study on the “Greco-Buddhist” art of Gandhara, by 1922 Foucher was an experienced and internationally respected researcher.Footnote ¹³ Under his direction between 1923 and 1925, DAFA sent a team comprising André Godard (1881–1965), Joseph Hackin (1886–1941), Jules Barthoux (1881–1965), and several of their wives to survey the Kabul and Bamiyan countryside.Footnote ¹⁴ In November 1923, the DAFA team passed through Bamiyan en route to Balkh. However, Foucher stayed on in Bamiyan, spending eighteen disappointing months trying to use the records of Chinese pilgrims which Aurel Stein and others had used so effectively in uncovering Buddhist sites in Chinese Central Asia.Footnote ¹⁵ The rest of the team, meanwhile, focused on Begram and Jalalabad. Formal excavations began in the 1926 season, focusing on Hadda, near Jalalabad. There, between 1926 and 1928, Jules Barthoux worked on a site containing the ruins of eight monasteries and around 500 stupas. They yielded approximately 15,000 sculptures, only a relatively small portion of which were removed to the National Museum in Kabul and the Guimet Museum in Paris.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1928, Godard left Afghanistan after being appointed director of the newly formed Iranian Archeological Service by Reza Shah, a position he would retain until 1953.Footnote ¹⁷ However, he maintained his interest in Afghan archaeology, particularly in Bamiyan.Footnote ¹⁸

In 1930 Joseph Hackin began a formal survey of Bamiyan together with his wife Ria Hackin and the architect Jean Carl. This involved drawing plans and taking photographs of the surviving wall paintings, after which they turned to other Buddhist sites around Kabul. After 1934, when Joseph Hackin was appointed director of DAFA, he led excavations at Qunduz, Shuturak, Fundukistan, and again Begram (the site of the ancient Kapisa), together with assistant DAFA director, Jean Carl. It was at Begram in May 1937 that Hackin uncovered the celebrated Begram ivories and Begram glassware. With him was Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1.

Apprenticed to DAFA: Kuhzad with Jean Carl at Bamiyan in 1930 (Source: André Godard, Madame Godard, and Joseph Hackin, Asar-i Atiqah-i Budaʾi-yi Bamiyan, trans. Ahmad ʿAli Khan [Kuhzad], 2 vols. [Kabul: Anjuman-i Adabiyat-i Kabul, 1315/1937], unpaginated illustration).

After a lull during World War II, when several DAFA archaeologists were called to active service (including the Hackins, who drowned in a German torpedo attack off the Faroe Islands), DAFA resumed its activities in 1946. Under the directorship of Daniel Schlumberger (1904–72), excavations were carried out at Bactra near Mazar-i Sharif and Surkh Kotal. The latter, which Schlumberger excavated between 1952 and 1964, emerged as the most important Kushan site.Footnote ¹⁹ Although 1965 saw the establishment of the Afghan Institute of Archaeology and the following years saw DAFA excavate the Bactrian Greek city at Aï-Khanum (discovered in 1964), this essay focuses on the decades leading up to this point. It was during those decades, specifically between 1942 and 1961, that the pioneering ancient historian Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad served as director of the Anjuman-i Tarikh-i Afghanistan (Afghan Historical Society), the state foundation that formulated an official historiography for Afghanistan.Footnote ²⁰

That new historiography drew deeply on French research. Although DAFA began its activities in 1923, its first years did not yield substantial publications and it was not until 1928 that Hackin and the Godards issued their pioneering study of Bamiyan.Footnote ²¹ DAFA publications only started to really flow in the mid-1930s. The most important of these were Jules Barthoux's reports on the Buddhist site of Hadda and Joseph Hackin's reports on Begram.Footnote ²² In a manner that closely echoed the impact of the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) on Iranian historians in the 1920s and 1930s, these French works provided Kuhzad with digests from which to construct his own works in Persian.Footnote ²³ Vicariously, DAFA publications also introduced Kuhzad to earlier British scholarship on Graeco-Buddhist history from colonial India.Footnote ²⁴

However important DAFA and colonial European archaeology more broadly was to the emergence of the new Afghan historiography, it was not in itself a sufficient cause of the latter. Of equal importance was the foundation of three new Afghan cultural institutions, namely the Muza-yi Milli (National Museum) in 1931, the Anjuman-i Adabi-yi Kabul (Kabul Literary Society) in 1931, and the aforementioned Anjuman-i Tarikh-i Afghanistan (Afghan Historical Society) just over a decade later in 1942. Kabul's National Museum had its origins in the collection of manuscripts and weapons assembled at the royal palace in 1919, but with the foundation of DAFA in 1922, its director Alfred Foucher was charged with rearranging and, through partage, adding to its holdings by means of excavation.Footnote ²⁵ By the time it moved into its new building in 1931, the museum housed substantial amounts of pre-Islamic statuary, collections which expanded dramatically through subsequent DAFA excavations between the 1940s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁶ When the museum reopened in its larger premises in 1931, it contained 2,000 items of Graeco-Buddhist statuary just from Jules Barthoux's excavations at Hadda.Footnote ²⁷ Pre-Islamic antiquity was from this moment institutionalized as the acme of the Afghan past: the museum would not open a hall dedicated to Islamic antiquities until 1958.Footnote ²⁸ The pattern of Afghanistan's archaeological and museological development reflected somewhat earlier developments in the Ottoman Empire (where the Müze-i Hümayun [Imperial Museum] had been founded in 1868) and somewhat later developments in Iran (where the Muza-yi Iran-i Bastan [Museum of Ancient Iran] was founded in 1937).Footnote ²⁹ However, the direct influence came from France via the early mastermind of Afghan nationalism, Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933). Having served as Afghanistan's first foreign minister after independence in 1919, in 1922 Tarzi became the Afghan ambassador to France, from where he helped set in motion the archaeological convention with DAFA.Footnote ³⁰

The second key cultural institution was the Kabul Literary Society, established by Nadir Shah (r. 1929–33) in 1931 on the model of the Académie Française with which he had become familiar during his own years as ambassador to France.Footnote ³¹ As Vartan Gregorian has noted, the purpose of the Kabul Literary Society was broader than its name might suggest, being charged with “four aims: to study and clarify the Afghan historical heritage; to study and promote Afghan literature and folklore; to study and promote the Pashto language; and to spread knowledge about Afghanistan and its culture.”Footnote ³² After the Kabul Literary Society was disbanded in 1940, the Afghan Historical Society was established in 1942 to centralize efforts to promote an officially sponsored vision of the Afghan past.Footnote ³³ According to its government charter, the primary purpose of the Afghan Historical Society was the “compilation of a complete history of Afghanistan—from prehistoric times till today.”Footnote ³⁴ Its governing council included the minister of education, the minister of information and culture, and the deputy education minister.Footnote ³⁵

In contrast to the Kabul Literary Society, whose first two presidents were highborn associates of the royal family, the Afghan Historical Society represented a greater move towards the professionalization of history. In Afghanistan as in colonial India, the Middle East, and Soviet Central Asia, this professionalization took place according to European models.Footnote ³⁶ The founding president of the Afghan Historical Society was the aforementioned Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, who by 1942 had already positioned himself as the country's first professional historian of antiquity. Born in Kabul in 1907 to a minority Qizilbash (and thereby Shiʿi) family, Kuhzad was one of the earliest students to graduate from the French lycée founded in Kabul in 1922 and from which some 500 young men had graduated by 1928.Footnote ³⁷ Since the school in its early decades followed French principles of laïcité, it may have had a formative influence on Kuhzad's pioneering sensitivity to Afghanistan's pre-Islamic religions.Footnote ³⁸ What is certain is that the French he learned at the Kabul lycée would serve as a gateway language for accessing European scholarship, including French translations from languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese that he could not read.

Kuhzad was subsequently attached to the government's Shaʿba-yi Taʾalif wa-Tarjuma (Office of Compilation and Translation), where from the mid-1920s he was seconded to work as DAFA's official translator. A photograph from 1930 shows him crouched beneath the architect Jean Carl during the latter's survey of Bamiyan with Joseph Hackin.Footnote ³⁹ By the following year, Kuhzad had become a founding member of the Kabul Literary Society, through which he made the first Persian translations of DAFA publications.

Soon Kuhzad was promoted to the position of director of the Literary Society's Department of History.Footnote ⁴⁰ He began to pen his own articles on ancient Afghanistan, or rather “Aryana” as he termed it. Though he also served from the early 1940s until 1957 as curator of the National Museum, it was in his role as the founding director of the Afghan Historical Society in 1942 that he would have greatest influence.Footnote ⁴¹ His selection for the post—which he would hold until 1961—points to the preeminence that pre-Islamic history rapidly acquired within two decades of its introduction to Afghanistan through the founding of DAFA in 1922.

KUHZAD AND THE KABUL LITERARY SOCIETY

As late as the reign of Aman Allah Khan from 1919 to 1929, historical writing in Afghanistan comprised dynastic and genealogical works modeled on the traditional Persianate tāʾrīkh. Albeit with novel methods of source criticism, traditional historiography was still being written by the court historian Fayz Muhammad Katib (1862–1931), who continued the lineage of dynastic works written since the 18th century Tarikh-i Ahmadshahi of Mahmud al-Husayni in which Afghan history was synonymous with that of the Saduzaʾi and Muhammadzaʾi dynasties. The early volumes of Katib's Siraj al-Tawarikh (Torch of Histories) were published in Kabul between 1913 and 1919 and he continued to work on later volumes throughout the 1920s, albeit out of royal favor for political (rather than intellectual) reasons.Footnote ⁴² As the country's most celebrated historian, Katib was also still producing works of genealogical history, such as his Nizhadnama-yi Afghan (Genealogy of the Afghans). Although it followed such Mughal-era histories as the early 17th-century Tarikh-i Khan Jahani (Khan Jahan's History) to trace the tribal and ultimately Qurʾanic ancestries of the leading Pashtun tribes, Nizhadnama-yi Afghan was not published until 1933, right on the cusp of the new archaeology-based vision of the past promoted by Kuhzad.Footnote ⁴³

It is important to keep this historiographical landscape in mind as we turn our focus to the 1930s, the decade after the arrival of DAFA. For these years saw Afghan historical writing radically transformed by Kuhzad's introduction of new methods, models, and chronologies for constructing a national past that was broader and deeper than either the dynastic or genealogical historiographical models that preceded it. As late as 1936, French archaeological findings had still not been incorporated into the national history being constructed as one of the core charges of the Kabul Literary Society. This would soon change through several major publications that Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad prepared under the aegis of the Literary Society in response to the spectacular discovery of ivories and glassware at Begram, around sixty kilometers north of Kabul, in May 1937.

As France's chargé d'affaires noted in a letter from Kabul that September, “For the first time, perhaps, the Afghans seem truly interested in the work of our [archaeological] mission. The excavations at Begram have been visited by several ministers . . . the king himself visited the exhibition mounted at the Kabul museum.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Kuhzad seized this unique moment of royal and ministerial excitement about pre-Islamic history. Over the following months, he launched himself into the writing of the articles and monographs that would elevate him to the position of Afghanistan's most influential historian. And Begram would take center stage.

So it was that between 1937 and 1938 Kuhzad wrote his major early monographs. The most important was on Begram, with two other books pursuing the related topics of the hitherto-ignored Kushan Empire (of which Begram was capital) and the historical insights provided by pre-Islamic coins (as distinct from the Islamic manuscripts used by previous Afghan historians).Footnote ⁴⁵ Having finished his translating apprenticeship, in 1938 he published his own book on Begram under the imprint of the Kabul Literary Society. Recognizing the opportunity lent by the official excitement about Begram, for the first time in Afghan historiography Kuhzad devoted a book to the focused study of a single archaeological site. Moreover, he himself had played at least a supervisory part in its excavation, having been present at the discovery the previous year of the famous ivories and glassware.

Drawing on new source techniques adapted from European scholars, Kuhzad began his monograph with a section on the geography of Begram—or rather, ancient Kapisa—as described by Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Sanskrit sources. Untrained in these languages, he necessarily derived this information from European scholars such as “Kaptan Kanangham,” who, since Kuhzad cited his Jughrafiya-yi Qadim-i Hind (Geography of Ancient India), was presumably the British numismatist and pioneer of Indo-Buddhist archaeology, Alexander Cunningham (1814–93), author of The Ancient Geography of India: Part I: The Buddhist Period (1871).Footnote ⁴⁶ Drawing on such works, Kuhzad paid particular attention to the etymological links between Begram and the name of the Hindu god-hero, Ram.Footnote ⁴⁷ After describing the climate and present-day inhabitants of the region (and attempting to link them with its ancient peoples), he turned to a description of the various ruins of the site and their various periods of Greek, Kushan, and Buddhist settlement. In the next chapter, Kuhzad turned away from ancient written sources to focus on the folklore of Begram. Here he recounted the Persian versions of several of the stories (such as the legend of Marwan and Parwan and Noah's Flood) that would later appear in the book Légendes et Coutumes Afghanes that he authored with Ria Hackin.Footnote ⁴⁸ By taking seriously these “traditional tales” (afsāna-hā-yi mahalī), and placing them in a pioneering monograph of ancient history, Kuhzad appears to have been attempting to find a way of connecting the region's present-day inhabitants and their own sense of a historical identity to the undoubtedly unfamiliar history that he was otherwise presenting. Working on the unpublished final volumes of his Siraj al-Tawarikh (Torch of Histories) in the mid-1920s, the official state historian Fayz Muhammad Katib was still relying on the court histories and chancery documents that had been the stock-in-trade of Persianate historians since the time of Baihaqi nearly a thousand years earlier. Just over a decade later, Kuhzad was now introducing Afghan readers to new sources, methods, and timescales for the study of a past that he expressly claimed was their own national heritage.

Kuhzad turned next in his Begram monograph to the reports of ancient travelers (including the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, ca. 602–64) about the Kushan ruler Kanishka.Footnote ⁴⁹ Then he tried to connect their reports to the folklore and customs of Begram's present inhabitants. The following chapter turned to the conquests of Alexander, albeit again with a penchant for the stories recounted in the Greek sources, by drawing on earlier British authors such as H. H. Wilson.Footnote ⁵⁰ Kuhzad then turned to the Kushan period on which he had already written his first monograph the previous year, detailing the reigns of the main Kushan emperors.Footnote ⁵¹ Next, he devoted a chapter to the Buddhist heritage of Begram, referring to the distinct schools of Hinayana and Theravada Buddhism, and describing the importance of the various excavations of Buddhist sites of worship (maʿbad).Footnote ⁵²

Although the earlier chapters had all been illustrated with images of the Begram ivories found the previous year, only in the final chapter did Kuhzad turn to describing the archaeological excavations at Begram.Footnote ⁵³ Beginning with the amateur digs of Charles Masson (1800–1853) in search of ancient coins during the 1830s, Kuhzad focused mainly on the French excavations directed by Foucher.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here his earlier chapters on textual sources reached their dénouement as he explained how Foucher had used his readings of Xuanzang's ancient travelogue to identify Begram as an important potential site. Building dramatic tension, Kuhzad then explained how the French became distracted by their excavations at other sites around Afghanistan, such that they did not return to Begram until 1936. Then, through the efforts of Carl and Meunier, excavations in the ancient bazaar of the old city revealed Kanishka-era coins that proved the strata belonged to the Kushan period. Further excavations at Foucher's request led to the discovery of glassware, and Kuhzad provided a descriptive inventory of the chief items.Footnote ⁵⁵ Turning to the excavation of the so-called “new royal city” (that is, the second Kushan capital), Kuhzad gave a dramatic eyewitness account of how Joseph and Ria Hackin had unearthed the painted glass and carved ivory and bone treasures in rooms that, of all the possible rooms in the “new royal city,” they had somehow decided to excavate.Footnote ⁵⁶ The motifs on these treasures, he explained, proved that Begram had been in contact with the whole ancient world, from Rome to India. Turning to the voluptuous nudes depicted on the ivories (and used again as illustrations in his book), Kuhzad explained that these beautiful and artful carvings were supreme expressions of the art of Mathura in central India, adding (drawing here on the authority of Hackin) that they likely represented the artistic zenith of the Gupta era (Figure 2).Footnote ⁵⁷

FIGURE 2.

Archaeological Sensations: Publishing the Begram Ivories in Kabul (Source: Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, Bigram [Kabul: Anjuman-i Adabi, 1317/1938], opposite p. 47).

Kuhzad ended his 1938 history of Begram with an account of the dramatic discoveries of the previous year in which he himself had participated. Until the discovery in 1978 of the 1st century BCE gold treasures at Tillya Tepe, the Begram ivories would remain Afghanistan's most important archaeological discovery. Such was the excitement that a large exhibition dedicated to them was held at the Musée Guimet in Paris in the summer of 1938.Footnote ⁵⁸ At the same time in Kabul, Kuhzad was publishing his pioneering Persian history of Begram. His association with what rapidly became world-famous treasures would serve him well. Riding the wave of royal and ministerial excitement around the discovery of the Begram ivories, by 1939 Kuhzad was promoted to the position of director of the historical section of the recently formed Pashto Tolana (Pashto Academy), though like most members of the new intelligentsia he continued to write in Persian. When the Afghan Historical Society was founded in 1942, Kuhzad was appointed as its founding president.

In the interim period, he had continued publishing through the Kabul Literary Society and in 1939 that society's journal, Kabul, included an article in which he introduced readers to the idea of ancient Afghanistan as “Aryana,” the homeland of the Aryans.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was a notion that would have lasting influence over the following decades, not least through the establishment of an eponymous journal that would serve as the official publication of the Afghan Historical Society and as Afghanistan's first periodical dedicated solely to the study of history. We can now turn to Kuhzad's connections to the Historical Society and its journal to map out the expansion in the 1940s and 1950s of his new model of Afghan history.

KUHZAD AND THE AFGHAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The years between 1942 and 1961, during which Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad served as president of the Afghan Historical Society, marked the zenith of his institutionalized vision of the national past as rooted in the ancient land he called Aryana. His appointment coincided—and was apparently sealed by—his publication early in 1942 of a summary history entitled simply Aryana.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this work, he built on the methods he had learned from his French mentors by drawing on translations of the Rig-Veda, Zend-Avesta, and Greek geographers to paint a glorious picture of Afghanistan's ancient civilization. From his new institutional platform, he further promoted the study of antiquity, naming the Afghan Historical Society's flagship monthly journal Aryana in deference to this new temporal rooting of the Afghan past in the deep history of antiquity.Footnote ⁶¹ Under state supervision, the Afghan Historical Society's imprint also quickly came to dominate the publication of historical monographs.Footnote ⁶² When in 1946, his position as the society's director saw him publish an official three-volume work with the definitive title Tarikh-i Afghanistan (History of Afghanistan), two of its volumes were dedicated to the pre-Islamic period from prehistory through the Mauriyas to the Bactrian Greek kingdoms.Footnote ⁶³ Officially at least, Afghan history was no longer synonymous with Islamic history, with the latter now comprising only one of its many periods. No less importantly, nor was Afghan history synonymous with Pashtun history, whether in the two-century old format of the post-Durrani dynastic history or the more recent format of Pashtun nationalism. With the foundation of the influential Pashtun nationalist party Wish Zalmiyan (Awaken Youth) in 1947, Kuhzad's provision of a historiographical foundation for a nonethnic collective nationalism became all the more important.Footnote ⁶⁴

Kuhzad promoted Afghanistan's deep history not only through learned publications, but also through the post he maintained as curator of the National Museum. In October 1946 he established an annual salon d'automne, attended by the prime minister and other chief ministers of state, to display paintings by Afghan artists on historical themes.Footnote ⁶⁵ That first autumn season, the most dramatic painting on show depicted a battle scene of Alexander the Great at Artacana in western Afghanistan. Although the jury only awarded it second prize, Kuhzad appointed its painter Khayr Muhammad Khan (1915–90) as the museum's official artist. In his speech at the salon, Kuhzad explained that with the support of the Afghan Historical Society, “we aim at illustrating the history of Afghanistan and at gathering portraits of ancient kings.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Amid a Muslim society in which many people viewed figurative art (especially oils on canvas) as a dubious import, in a characteristically antiquarian turn Kuhzad reminded the gathered dignitaries that they “should not forget that the art of painting is not new in Afghanistan. As witnesses stand the frescoes of Bamiyan . . . which after 1,500 years are admired by visitors for their composition and colours.”Footnote ⁶⁷ That same year, Kuhzad pushed his imported cultural ventures even further by writing a play—in French and Persian versions—about Alexander the Great, using drawings of the Begram ivories and the paintings of the museum artist Khayr Muhammad Khan as illustrations.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the speeches that Kuhzad gave him, the Macedonian conqueror reflected frequently on the valor of the local tribes and soldiers he encountered during his adventures in Ariana. Only four years after the opening of Kabul's first official theatre, the Puhani Nandari (Theater of Learning), in 1942, Kuhzad was attempting to publicly position ancient history at the center of a new national identity.Footnote ⁶⁹

His writings from this period show the continuation of his interaction with DAFA and their further findings, along with the thematic broadening of his influential scholarship. Unsurprisingly, his own articles featured regularly in the Afghan Historical Society's Aryana journal. We will now turn to an overview of publications during his years as director of the Afghan Historical Society, looking at several representative examples.

Kuhzad's largest work by far was his aforementioned three-volume synoptic history of Afghanistan, published by the Afghan Historical Society in 1946 as an official statement of national history.Footnote ⁷⁰ While it is impossible to summarize the work within this essay, what was most important was that Kuhzad dedicated two of its three volumes to the pre-Islamic period, celebrating in particular the achievements of the polytheistic, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian civilizations of the Aryans, Bactrian Greeks, Kushans, and others. Again, this was a striking departure from every previous history of Afghanistan, including those written as late as the 1920s, which had reached back either only as far as the founding Pashtun Saduzaʾi dynasts of the 18th century or else, via scriptural genealogies to the “first Afghan,” the Prophet Muhammad's companion Qays ʿAbd al-Rashid.

In 1948, similarly through the imprint of the Afghan Historical Society, Kuhzad published another book, which he titled with a Chinese loan-word Tayan (Dàyuān [Pinyin: the Great Ionians]), referring to a Greco-Bactrian colony in the Ferghana Valley.Footnote ⁷¹ Echoing the techniques he had learned from French and then British scholars of using ancient Chinese sources to understand the Afghan past, he translated sections from the famous Records of the Grand Historian (Pinyin: Tàishǐgong shu, to which he referred by their alternative title of Shǐjì), completed around 109 BCE. The section on which he focused was the account of Dayuan (or Tayan, as he transcribed it into Persian), a kingdom generally accepted as being part of the Ferghana Valley in what was by the 1940s Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. However, Kuhzad's interest in Dayuan derived from the fact that its people were likely descendants of the Macedonian settlers left by Alexander the Great (the “Yuan” phoneme in “Dayuan” being a Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit yavana or the Pali yona, meaning “Greek”). Thus, as far as Kuhzad was concerned, Dayuan shared its culture with the Bactrian Greek kingdoms of Afghanistan, an interpretation that was likely correct. The section he translated was based on the report by the Chinese emissary Zhang Qian, sent to Dayuan in approximately 130 BCE, which described the geography, rulers, armies, people, and culture of that remote Greek kingdom in Asia. Since Kuhzad had not studied Chinese, he based his Persian translation of Shǐjì on a previous French or English version, again drawing on European scholarship to construct his increasingly rich historiographical panoply of Aryana's glorious past. Here we see how European archaeological and textual scholarship opened windows onto a wider Asian past that had been closed to earlier Afghan tāʾrīkh writers, whose sources were overwhelmingly Arabic and Persian. The writings of Orientalists, then, could be co-opted for nationalist purposes.

This continued to be the case during the mid-1940s, when Kuhzad wrote several notable articles for the official journal of the Afghan Historical Society. In the summer of 1944 alone, during the journal's second year, he published articles on the goddess Anahita, on Bamiyan's oldest Buddhist place of worship, which he had helped Foucher discover in 1930, and on the discovery (also in 1930) of several fragmentary Sanskrit manuscripts in a cave in Bamiyan.Footnote ⁷² In all of these articles, he drew extensively on French scholarship, which served as a funnel for the writings of scholars from Britain and even the Soviet Union, whose colonial domains abutted on Afghanistan. Among his articles for the Afghan Historical Society was one entitled “Anahita: Rabbat al-Nawʿ-yi Amu Darya” (Anahita: Goddess of the Oxus). It deserves special attention for having been written at a time when, in other regions of the Middle East such as Egypt, archaeological history was experiencing push-back from a new generation of Islamic historians who objected to the veneration of the jāhiliyya (age of ignorance).Footnote ⁷³

In that article, Kuhzad recounted how Anahita was one of the most important goddesses of ancient Aryana from the prehistoric period right up to the end of Bactrian Greek rule. Pointing to numerous discoveries of small statues as far apart as Afrasiyab in Soviet Uzbekistan and the Indus Valley in what was still at that point British India, he explained how the inhabitants of Aryana shared their worship of Anahita with a much wider region. Again, Kuhzad put to use archaeological data by referring to the findings of Sir John Marshall at Mohenjo-daro and the DAFA member Jean Carl at Shahr-i Banu near the northern Afghan town of Kholm. Drawing on a 1940 Russian book on the Bactrian Greeks, he added that mud statues of Anahita found in excavations at Afrasiyab closely resembled those found by Carl. In line with the methodology of his earlier works, he synthesized these archaeological findings with textual evidence (in this case including unnamed English translations of the Pashutan Sunjata (?) and the writings of Clement of Alexandria) to piece together a fuller history of Anahita's veneration, and transformation, over the longue durée of antiquity.Footnote ⁷⁴

At the center of Kuhzad's treatment of the ancient goddess was this lyrical description:

Here Kuhzad built on his daring written praise of the nude Hindu carvings on the Begram ivories (and his publication of their startling photographs) six years earlier in his monograph on Begram and article in the Kabul journal. Published so soon after being granted the presidency of the Afghan Historical Society, the Anahita article showed Kuhzad's confidence that the support of the state would allow him to write publically about the “pagan” goddess worship of his compatriots’ Muslim forebears.

This was a brave decision. The archaeological reassessment of a past previously regarded as “idol worship” (butt-parastī) had faced popular opposition since the earliest DAFA excavations. As early as 1926, Jules Barthoux's dig at Hadda had been attacked under the orders of a local mullah. Twenty-six Buddhist statues were destroyed in one night.Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet even at that early stage, King Aman Allah's new nationalist state intervened to uphold the value of the ancient past by deporting the mullah and punishing six of his followers with heavy fines and imprisonment.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even so, a few years later, the 1929 uprising by Habib Allah Kalakani saw the smashing of many other sculptures from Hadda that had been taken to the “safety” of the National Museum (the self-described mujāhidīn also destroyed the French library at Kuhzad's school, the Kabul lycée).Footnote ⁷⁸ And when, after celebrating Kabul's Muslim sites in his Urdu diary, the influential Indian religious leader Khwaja Hasan Nizami visited the museum in 1931, he referred dismissively to the surviving Hadda statues as simply “old idols” (qadīmī buttūn).Footnote ⁷⁹ Although there were multiple Muslim evaluations of pre-Islamic statuary, many Afghans shared Nizami's views. This was particularly (if, presumably, not uniformly) true of the nonliterate majority of the population, who were not exposed to the new historiography through state education.

A year after his Anahita article, Kuhzad continued his bold celebration of the old religions of Aryana with an article on statues of the Buddha for the December 1945 issue of the Afghan Historical Society's journal.Footnote ⁸⁰ Entitled “Sanʿat-i Yunani Budaʾi, ya Grigu-Budik” (Graeco-Buddhist or Gréco-Bouddhique Art), the article celebrated the artistic value of the Buddhist statuary found across eastern and central Afghanistan. As its partially transliterated title suggests, Kuhzad was again drawing on French scholarship, in particular Alfred Foucher's foundational two-volume 1905 study, L'art gréco-bouddhique du Gandhâra, which had in turn drawn on (if substantially modified) colonial British scholarship on the European roots of Indian art.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet Kuhzad's titular terminology was not so much a pedantic scholarly acknowledgement of his debt to French researchers as a search for an appropriately positive, or at least neutral, terminology in his own language. The obvious Persian term to use—butt, an etymological derivative of the Sanskrit title of Buddha—carried the pejorative meaning “idol,” thereby evoking precisely the negative Muslim connotations of such statuary that Kuhzad was seeking to dispel. Instead of using this older and obvious vocabulary, Kuhzad chose his words carefully in order to create, effectively ex nihilo in Afghan writings, an art historical discourse of aesthetic appreciation based around nonreligious categories. Deploying a blend of older terminology from Persian poetry with newer comparative world civilizational terms developed in India and Iran, he wrote in the neutral terms of the “temple” (haykal) and “place of worship” (maʿbad) rather than the “idol house” (butt-khāna), and of “sculpting” (haykal-tarāshī) and “statues” (mujassima) rather than “idols” (butt). This is not to suggest that the discourse of “idolatry” in Muslim societies had been entirely static up to this point. In previous centuries, the religious meanings of statuary had varied. Since at least the Abbasid period, artistic imports brought by diplomacy and conquest, then the imagery of Sufi poetry, had fed both aesthetic and ethnographic appreciations of sculptural exotica.Footnote ⁸² Not every previous Muslim evaluation of sculpture was moral and theological, then. But, in an Afghan context at least, Kuhzad's writings were distinctive for offering an approach to statuary that was civilizational and art historical. And here, his models and interlocutors were not his Muslim forebears, but his French tutors and, by the 1940s, equal partners.

Rather than focus on the religious aspects of this Buddhist statuary, Kuhzad therefore dwelt on the beauty of the carving and the quality of the stone, observations he used to construct a model of Buddhism as a “culture” (tahzīb) rather than a religion.Footnote ⁸³ Throughout the article, he drew on the authority of the founding director of DAFA, Alfred Foucher, while also using the latter's Gandhara book to connect the finds in Afghanistan to discoveries in Turfan and elsewhere in Chinese Central Asia.Footnote ⁸⁴ From the outset, there were nods to a new nationalist pride, with Kuhzad noting for example that the French archaeologists’ finds revealed “the secrets of the soil of Afghanistan” (asrār-i khāk-i afghānistān).Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, since Foucher believed that the cradle of “Graeco-Buddhist” art lay in Afghan Bactria rather than Indian Gandhara, the Frenchman proved a useful international supporter of Kuhzad's nationalizing claim for his country's civilizational primacy.

In the years after assuming the leadership of the Afghan Historical Society, Kuhzad wrote numerous other articles for Aryana, including a detailed (if belated) obituary in praise of the other DAFA director Joseph Hackin.Footnote ⁸⁶ When the French resumed their activities after the war, Kuhzad continued his intellectual collaboration with a new generation of DAFA researchers. As a result of the excavations initiated in 1952 at Surkh Kotal in Baghlan province by the new DAFA director Daniel Schlumberger (1904–72), in 1954 Kuhzad published a short book on the discoveries at that site.Footnote ⁸⁷ Since Surkh Kotal was quickly identified as a Kushan site, Kuhzad had good reason to be excited, having written his first monograph on the Kushans back in 1937.

Kuhzad's subsequent book on Surkh Kotal comprised a detailed essay of his own in which he introduced the site and its Kushan context, and his translation of a speech given by Schlumberger at the Kabul French Club. Having in his earlier works written extensively on the Greek, Buddhist, and Hindu heritage of Afghanistan, Kuhzad used the findings at Surkh Kotal to add Zoroastrianism to the Afghan civilizational past. From the outset, he claimed that Zoroastrianism had been widespread in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁸⁸ Championing as ever the importance of archaeology, he went on to explain that before the excavations at Surkh Kotal, the Zoroastrian era of Afghanistan's past had only been known through legends, folktales, and the occasional reference by early Islamic poets, such as Daqiqi (d. ca. 976). Placing Islam in historically (and terminologically) parallel status with other religions (adyān), he explained that although Afghanistan's history comprised four eras—of element worship (ʿanāsur-parastī), Zoroastrian Mazdaism, Buddhism, and Islam—until Schlumberger's excavations, the Zoroastrian era had been the least known.Footnote ⁸⁹ The discovery at Surkh Kotal of two fire temples, dated by numismatic methods to the Kushan era, had brought that period to light.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, a large statue of the great Kushan ruler Kanishka had been found and presented to the National Museum in Kabul: aside from a similar statue discovered in 1911 near Mathura in India, it was the only statue of Kanishka ever found. Having in this way positioned the new finds within his vision of an Aryana that nurtured all of the great religions of Asian antiquity, Kuhzad turned to his translation of Schlumberger's speech, which focused on the excavations’ details.Footnote ⁹¹ Through his translation and framing of the French findings, he had again channeled DAFA's discoveries towards his mission to glorify Afghanistan's pre-Islamic past.

The following year, 1955, saw Kuhzad reach out to his fellow Afghans more widely by authoring a popular Persian guidebook to Bamiyan.Footnote ⁹² Drawing on his usual sources by way of modern French archaeological reports and ancient Chinese pilgrim diaries, Kuhzad tried to bring the site to life for his fellow citizens. He focused on the painting of an ancient prince of Bamiyan to emphasize the artistic rather than the religious character of the site. This was not a place of idol worship, but of national culture. As he made clear through careful directions concerning road conditions, distances, and other practical matters, Bamiyan was now a place that was accessible to the emerging middle classes of Kabul. Through the novel Afghan genre of the tourist guidebook, Kuhzad hoped to reach a wider national readership than he could through his erudite essays and monographs. Signaled also in his school and university textbooks around this time, this public outreach coincided with the expansion of higher education and the creation of a middle class among whom the new conception of “Afghan” as signifying a collective and nationalist as distinct from ethnic and particularist identity was taking hold. The 1964 constitution would later confirm this broader definition of “Afghan.”

Since this middle class readership existed overwhelmingly in the cities, Kuhzad's guidebook and other works implicitly voiced a new urban valorization of the rural provinces. The decision to celebrate Bamiyan carried particular significance in this context of rural–urban relations. The Hazara inhabitants of the Bamiyan Valley had not only been long deplored as the epitome of rustic primitiveness (and, conveniently, exploited as cheap servant labor). They had also been denigrated and, during ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan's 1890s jihad, enslaved as Shiʿi infidels, particularly by ruling Pashtuns and their clients.Footnote ⁹³ Kuhzad's decision to celebrate Bamiyan, then, was not merely an automatic echo of French evaluations of the region's Buddhist monuments. As a Qizilbash Shiʿa publishing his guidebook amid the 1950s heyday of Pashtun nationalism, he was also deliberately valorizing the rural homelands of Afghanistan's non-Pashtun peoples. Echoing an ethnically plural present, the religiously plural heritage that he described was an attempt to challenge Pashtun historiographical hegemony not by the direct means of an ethnic Qizilbash or Hazara counternarrative (which would only emerge decades later) but through the more subtle and inclusive means of a collective national past.

If Kuhzad's more private agenda related to Afghan domestic politics, then his public agenda as official state historian required him to address his work to the realm of international politics. As part of the larger Afghan diplomatic push through such new venues as the United Nations, this venture in cultural diplomacy required Kuhzad to use his work as a means of civilizationally “normalizing” Afghanistan on an international stage. In the mid-1950s, a state effort to export the deep civilizational history of the Afghan past saw the publication of short official histories of “Aryana” by Kuhzad in both Italian and English.Footnote ⁹⁴ Despite its title, the Italian version focused almost exclusively on the pre-Islamic past, as accessed by archaeology and folktales that wrestled even the great Timurid city of Herat out of Islamic history to place its past in the hands of various ancient founders, whether Alexander or Siyawush.Footnote ⁹⁵ Based on lectures Kuhzad delivered in Rome through connections with the influential Italian Buddhologist Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984), the book positioned Afghanistan alongside European civilizational history through a chapter on Roman connections with Kushan-era Afghanistan.Footnote ⁹⁶

Around the same time, the leading Afghan diplomat ʿAbd al-Rahman Pazhwak (1919–95) published another English-language history of Aryana in London. Though it covered all periods of the Afghan past, Pazhwak's text framed that history in terms of antiquity, with cover and fly leaf photographs of Begram and a Buddhist statue from Hadda, both excavated by DAFA.Footnote ⁹⁷ As an influential Pashtun, Pazhwak shows the success of Kuhzad's attempt to compete with Pashtun nationalism by means of his more inclusive historical vision. The two men had close links: Pazhwak had a longstanding association with the Afghan Historical Society and had written for Kuhzad's Aryana journal numerous times.Footnote ⁹⁸ He was the perfect candidate to take Kuhzad's civilizational history of Afghanistan to the Anglosphere, as well as the world at large. For Pazhwak served from 1949 to 1951 as Cultural and Press Attaché of the Afghan embassy in Washington, before being appointed as Afghanistan's Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

China was also on the Afghan cultural diplomatic agenda. After Sino-Afghan relations were established in 1955, the Afghan Historical Society published an English edition of Tayan, Kuhzad's book on ancient Sino-Bactrian contacts.Footnote ⁹⁹ Putting the past plainly in the service of the present, the new edition included photographs of Afghan Prime Minister Daʾud Khan meeting Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing to sign the joint communiqué of October 1957.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As Afghanistan partnered with China as a fellow nation-state, it could now claim a civilization of equal antiquity.

That year, Kuhzad surrendered his curatorship of the National Museum in Kabul, though not before signing an agreement with Tucci to allow Italian archaeologists excavation rights.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Though the agreement with the Italians ended the French monopoly agreed to in the original 1922 convention, it did not put an end to French engagement with Afghan archaeology. ʿAbd al-Hakim Ziaʾi, Kuhzad's successor as curator (and later as director of the Afghan Historical Society), held a doctorate from the University of Toulouse, and DAFA carried out some of their most celebrated excavations in the years that followed.Footnote ¹⁰² As for Kuhzad, he maintained his directorship of the Afghan Historical Society until 1961, a position that saw him increasingly enter the new international politics of the post-European world order. In the next few years, many other concessions were given to foreign research expeditions, whether American or Japanese, with Kuhzad acting as an influential intellectual gatekeeper. These wider collaborations echoed the origins of Afghan archaeology in James Goode's interwar era of “negotiation” between European archeologists and Middle Eastern nationalists.Footnote ¹⁰³ Having built historiographical capacity, so to speak, through the early monopolist agreement with the French, the Afghans were now able to engage with a broader set of international partners on equal terms. It was a model intellectual venture in nationalist development policy.

In 1960, his final full year at the helm of the Afghan Historical Society, Kuhzad pulled off perhaps his greatest coup by persuading the world's most famous historian, Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), to lecture in Kabul. Toynbee wrote a travelogue on his Afghan journey as a passage through classical Greek rather than Islamic geography, while the Afghan Historical Society published his lecture on Afghanistan as a prime exemplar of his model of creative civilizational contact.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As the doyen of world civilizations history, Toynbee was the perfect figure to seal Afghanistan's entry into the league of historically civilized nations.Footnote ¹⁰⁵