An Inroad: Cars, Cameras and Connoisseurs

Travelling by car and truck on his journey to photograph the Timurid monuments between Mashhad and Mazar-e Sharif, Robert Byron (1905–41) took part in a shared venture in which European, Iranian, Afghan and Indian scholars developed new archaeological and architectural histories of Afghanistan and Iran. Emerging during the interwar decades which in his history of Middle Eastern archaeology James Goode designated “the years of negotiation” between Euro-American archaeologists and Middle Eastern nationalists, the investigations of Byron and his contemporaries found multilingual expression in books and articles about sites that were not only more easily accessible by motor car, but also more easily reproducible through photography.Footnote ² Between Kabul, Tehran and Calcutta, Berlin, Paris and London, the motivations and interpretations of different participants varied considerably. But the historical methods they jointly expanded—emphasizing the material evidence of excavation and architecture—relied on their common access to two coeval and complementary mechanisms for moving and seeing: the car and the camera. During what was conceived at the time as an ʿasr-e sur ʿat– or “age of speed”—whose quickened pace transformed Middle Eastern and European societies alike, these convoys of car-borne scholar-photographers rapidly disseminated new archaeological and architectural visions of the region’s past.Footnote ³ For as we will see, cameras and cars were part of a larger “intellectual infrastructure” that the two neighboring nation-states of Iran and Afghanistan developed through their interwar connections with such “third powers” as Germany, France and the United States.

Beyond the reach of the British, Russian and Ottoman imperial railroad systems, in the early decades of the twentieth century the inland and often highland monuments of Iran and Afghanistan were among the last great archaeological and architectonic prizes to remain unclaimed by European scholars. Then suddenly, during the 1920s and early 1930s, the rapid spread of drivable roads across both countries laid open the region to an international cadre of savants who no longer had to make the hard horseback rides required just a generation earlier.Footnote ⁴ When the British official-turned-historian Sir Percy Sykes (1867–1945) published his Ten Thousand Miles in Persia, they were miles travelled in the saddle no less than the hard donkey drives described in the Urdu travelogue of Mohammad Hosayn Azad (1830–1910), who had crossed Iran collecting manuscripts of Persian poetry.Footnote ⁵ But in the wake of the First World War, during which Indian and British soldiers laid Iran’s first drivable roads, the grueling memoirs by the likes of Sykes and Azad were replaced by a cheerier multilingual library of books and articles by boosters of motor travel who ranged from the Iranian ʿAbdollah Bahrami and the Indian Hasan ʿAskari to, to the French Antoine Poidebard, the German Gustav Stratil-Sauer and the American Alexander Powell.Footnote ⁶ From the mid-1920s, the rapid creation of an Afghan road network fostered a parallel multilingual output describing archaeological and architectural drives through the until-recently-closed territories between Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Ghazni.

Among these car travelers were aspiring scholarly experts from Europe and increasingly America who used imported Chevrolets and Fords to visit, inspect and photograph what quickly became a canon of archaeological and architectural monuments easily accessible by road. While one disciplinary division of these scholars focused on pre-Islamic sites, after the field of Islamic art history was formed through earlier access to colonial India, Egypt and North Africa, another group of investigators used their motor tours to inspect the medieval buildings of Iran and Afghanistan. Yet such easier transportational access also placed these European and American researchers in heightened contact with a rising generation of Afghan and Iranian intellectuals who, together with visiting Indians, were adopting the same disciplinary techniques and technologies to pursue their own archaeological and architectural investigations, often with state support. Far from being nurtured in isolation, these entangled interests and disciplinary dialogues found expression in a multilingual family of periodicals—Salnameh-ye Pars (founded 1925), Eastern Art (1928), the Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology (1931), Salnameh-ye Kabol (1932), Ars Islamica (1934), Athār-é Īrān (1936) and Aryana (1942)—that disseminated the field-based findings of these new architectural and archaeological historians through printed words and, crucially, photographs.Footnote ⁷

With his discerning eye and delicately descriptive prose, the British architectural historian Robert Byron was the epitome of the car- and camera-equipped scholars who, during the brief interwar period, transformed the study of the region between the Zagros and the Hindu Kush. Today Byron is mainly remembered for his travelogue, of which the American literary critic Paul Fussell grandly declared: “what Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book.”Footnote ⁸ But supporting the tour of the Timurid monuments of Mashhad, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif that Byron so artfully set in prose were four interrelated developments which laid the basis for the new archaeological and architectural histories being written by scholars from Europe as well as from the region itself. The first development was the automotive opening of Afghanistan and Iran: his journey was initially funded as part of a promotional test-drive from Beirut to Tehran of charcoal-burning trucks designed to obviate the patchy availability of petroleum supplies in the Middle East.Footnote ⁹ The second was the capturing of the region’s monuments on camera: as his journey progressed, Byron found employment as part of Arthur Upham Pope’s grand photographic Survey of Persian Art.Footnote ¹⁰ The third was the growing number of printed outlets for studies of Iranian and Afghan archaeology and architecture: the photographically illustrated articles for commercial magazines that Byron mailed back to London provided his other financial lifeline.Footnote ¹¹ And the fourth was the founding of new state and private institutions, ranging from national museums to learned societies, to support such research. And so, as we will see through the following sections, Byron’s road trip was not merely the idiosyncratic undertaking of a lone amateur. Instead, it drew on the shared components of a common intellectual infrastructure that enabled new ways of studying, appreciating and promoting the archaeological and architectural heritage of Iran and Afghanistan alike.

Intellectual Infrastructure: Between Historiographies of Nationalism and Transnationalism

By focusing on the connecting infrastructures and shared scholarly networks that created the new archaeological and architectural history of Iran and Afghanistan, this essay aims to make a conjoining contribution to the bifurcated historiography of the two neighboring nations. The first, and more general, contribution is to introduce the optic of the “region” into the recent transnational turn in scholarship on Iran and Afghanistan. The second, and more specific, contribution is to the fields of intellectual history and the “history of art history” by demonstrating the importance of what is termed here “intellectual infrastructure.”

In a productive attempt to expand the participants in the modern historical development of Iran and Afghanistan beyond the familiar picture of British and Russian interference, the recent transnational turn has taken several different forms. One has been to emphasize connections with “third powers” (whether Germany, France, the United States, the late Ottoman Empire or even Sweden).Footnote ¹³ Taking these transnational connections together, another body of work has emphasized the “global” participants in Iranian and particularly Afghan modernization strategies.Footnote ¹⁴ A third corpus of scholarship has sought to recover specifically “inter-Asian” interconnections in the modern period, particularly those that appear to have prolonged or revived prior “Persianate” routes of interaction.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the inclusive ambit of these investigations has left one striking lacuna: connections between Iran and Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁶ Even the booming field of the “Persianate world” has effectively overlooked this most obvious and enduring nexus of interaction. Yet the rise of motor travel tied the two new nation-states more closely together than ever, leading to the parallel intellectual developments described below.

This essay reconstructs one such shared set of Afghan–Iranian developments through a case study of the emergence of new disciplines of archaeological and architectural history during the interwar era. In so doing, the historiographical goal is to show that the spread of “transnational” and “global” connections was very much a “regional” development that shaped material and intellectual trajectories in Iran and Afghanistan alike. Here the essay draws on the recent rediscovery of the “region” as an analytical optic that is not so much separate from the national and the global but serves as an intermediary between them.Footnote ¹⁷ Here, the region in question is Pahlavi Iran and Musahiban Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁸ As we will see, this region was not merely produced by the older cultural legacy of the “Persianate world,” for the simple reason that regions are not unchanging facts of either physical or cultural geography, but subsist, evolve and disappear through the changing forces of historical process. At the bilateral level, the interwar period saw the beginning of modern Afghan–Iranian political and diplomatic relations via the 1921 treaty of friendship that was consolidated by the exchange of ambassadors and the signing of further agreements in 1928.Footnote ¹⁹ But this key period of Iranian and Afghan nation-building also saw the Afghan–Iranian region physically constructed through an adjoining infrastructure of drivable roads; socially constituted through the circulation of some of the same political, cultural and religious personnel; technologically fabricated through the shared use of transport, photographic and publishing machineries; and culturally fashioned through not merely the common use of Persian but through shared access to the same European and American scholarly networks that helped found the first scholarly journals, museums and other cultural institutions in both countries.

What came “after the Persianate” (to borrow a phrase from Mana Kia and Afshin Marashi) was therefore neither a complete disappearance of such older networks nor a seamless continuation of them.Footnote ²⁰ Rather, the nation-states of Iran and Afghanistan comprised a reconstituted region—geographically contiguous but crisscrossed by transnational networks—whose Islamic and pre-Islamic past was reshaped and reconfigured, reinvented and repressed, by shared access to transnational technologies, scholarly disciplines and the personnel who disseminated them.Footnote ²¹ Here, the optic of the “region” contributes to the recent endeavors of various scholars to break the interpretive stranglehold of Iranian exceptionalism, by demonstrating the sheer scale of parallel developments in Afghanistan. Ranging from technologies and institutions through intellectual collaborations to journals and translations, these parallels were far from coincidental. As we will see, they emerged on the one hand from access to the same technologies and international scholarly networks and on the other hand from mutually imitative and competitive emulation by the cadres of two competing modernist elites.

Turning to the second contribution to the historiography, the essay builds on the rich corpus of recent scholarship on the “history of art history” and the more established field of the history of archaeology, which have paid careful attention to the excavators, collectors, museums, exhibitions and conferences that laid the intellectual parameters for the study of “Persian art” and Iranian (and to a lesser extent Afghan) archaeology during the first three decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ²² Yet illuminating as it is, the art historical scholarship has tended to overemphasize the role of scholarly individuals and networks rather than the enabling infrastructures that tied their activities to the developmental particularities of the interwar period. Moreover, with a few exceptions, the art historical scholarship has paid little attention to Iranian (not to mention Afghan) scholarly participants in these enterprises.Footnote ²³ In response, this essay tries to connect this nascent subfield of the “history of art history” with recent work on Persian historiography, particularly as promulgated through printing and public history projects, during the coterminous Pahlavi and Musahiban periods.Footnote ²⁴

While studies of the history of archaeology have similarly emphasized transnational networks, they have more effectively highlighted the roles of local scholars and political factors, particularly the rise of an Iranian nationalist intelligentsia.Footnote ²⁵ Although work on both the history of art history and archaeology has devoted much attention to Iran, the emergence of parallel developments in Afghanistan has largely been overlooked.Footnote ²⁶ While the importance of field photography has been recognized with regard to the archaeological and architectural study of Iran, albeit in separate historiographies, its substantial dependence on the larger infrastructure of motor transport that laid open the excavations and monuments of both Iran and Afghanistan has not been recognized.Footnote ²⁷ More importantly still, the ways in which these new technological tools and accompanying methods of historical investigation were taken up by savants from the region itself has also been neglected, especially with regard to Afghanistan.

Holding these two historiographical contributions together is the model of an “intellectual infrastructure” that helped generate a region from the emergent nation-states of Iran and Afghanistan and, in doing so, enabled the overlapping investigations of archaeological and architectural history in which not only Iranian and Afghan but also Indian, European and American scholars participated. Using “infra” in its core sense of “below,” the aim here is to draw attention to the underlying structures that helped define the methodological contours of new disciplines and then distribute specific contributions to them. This in turn shows how ideas about the archaeological and architectural past emerged from the increasing ability of a multinational cadre of scholars to access the formerly-remote sites of excavations and monuments, then circulate ideas about them through meetings and publications, which were also spatial phenomena that required the mediation of infrastructure.

Here the essay draws on the recent revival of interest in material infrastructures, while following the anthropologist Brian Larkin in linking these “harder” infrastructures to the “softer” realm of ideas, and indeed, aesthetics.Footnote ²⁸ By bringing in new intellectual methods by way of research techniques and their accompanying conceptual apparatus, the essay similarly recognizes Brett Frischmann’s case for considering “ideas as infrastructure,” while sharpening the analytical focus onto disciplinary and methodological configurations of ideas by way of specific fields such as art and archaeological history.Footnote ²⁹ Linking these “hard” and “soft” infrastructures is the social realm of human actors whose collective networks—or informal “intersections” and “conjunctions” in the sociologist Abdou Maliq Simone’s terms—are also conceived here as constituting a form of infrastructure.Footnote ³⁰ Instead of allowing ideas and their promoters to float freely above material forms of infrastructure, this holistic approach helps us connect ideas to the disciplinary methods that individual scholars applied to spatially-situated evidence (buildings, excavations, museum collections) so as to produce theories and interpretations which were then disseminated through social networks, institutions, organizations and publications, whose circulation in turn depended on transportation and communication technologies. Rather than fall into the traditional predetermining traps of structural analysis, this holistic model reveals the dynamic, circulatory and dialogical processes that generated varied intellectual outcomes by way of contrasting and competing accounts of the archaeological and architectural past which, in emerging from the same “system,” were nonetheless mutually comprehensible.

While the main infrastructural factors highlighted in this essay comprise roads, cars and cameras, attention is also paid to the wider apparatus of printing houses, museums, academic organizations and private corporations that allowed individual scholars from different nations to create these shared disciplines of archaeological and architectural history through direct encounters and circulating publications (which crucially included translations).This underlying nexus of transportational, technological and communicational components on the one hand, and social, institutional and methodological components on the other, comprised the intellectual infrastructure that enabled the spread of new historical and aesthetic disciplines that were as coherent to participants in Kabul and Tehran as to those in Paris and New York.Footnote ³¹

Yet, as we will see, coherence and comprehensibility are not the same as agreement and uniformity. For if increased infrastructural integration produced convergences of disciplinary methods and institution-building, then it also led to divergent—in some cases, competing—historical narratives.Footnote ³² While the focus here is on infrastructural rather than political factors, the two cannot be wholly separated. This is because a major factor in this competitive divergence was the role of the nationalist state in Iran and Afghanistan in founding the museums, societies and journals that funded so much of the scholarly recovery of their “national” archaeological and architectural “heritage.” Although the state was by no means entirely absent from the European side, whether through the role of the British-led military “Dunsterforce” in laying out Iran’s first drivable roads or of state-sponsored German and French researchers, there was undoubtedly a far larger role played by voluntary societies and private corporations in enabling European, American and Indian scholarship on the region. Building on Goode’s conception of an interwar age of negotiation, we will see how European and American scholars shared not only archaeological finds with their Afghan and Iranian interlocutors, but also methodological, informational and ideological resources, as well as technological aids.Footnote ³³ In this way, the model of intellectual infrastructure helps us join together the historiographies of Iranian and Afghan nationalism and transnationalism with the “history of art history” through a clearer understanding of the underlying structures that allowed local nationalists and foreign researchers to collaborate more closely, and coherently, in the region itself and not only in overseas hubs such as Berlin and Bombay.

Taking Robert Byron as a continued point of reference, the remainder of this essay traces how an infrastructural triad of cars, cameras and journals enabled scholars in Tehran and Kabul, no less than the metropoles of Europe and the cities of India, to chart out new fields of archaeological and architectural history. Examining the expansion of drivable roads, field photography, then the institutions and journals that provided outlets for car- and camera-based research, the following sections draw on the lesser-known multilingual siblings of Byron’s Road to Oxiana to map the regional intellectual contours of the interwar “age of speed.” By conceiving two emergent nation-states as a single analytical unit, or region, linked by conjoining roads, shared technologies, interlinked institutions and a common multinational cadre of researchers, the following pages trace the convergences as well as divergences that characterized the twinned transnational birth of archaeological and architectural history in Afghanistan and Iran.

Infrastructural Components: Cameras and Cars in Iran and Afghanistan

When Arthur Upham Pope’s A Survey of Persian Art was published in 1938–39, its six volumes contained almost 1,500 plates of 3,500 photographs.Footnote ³⁵ The publication of the Survey marked the zenith of an intense period of photographic, and motorized, expeditions in Iran that began in the wake of the First World War. On the ground, Pope’s survey was centered around the almost obsessively encyclopedic collecting of photographs.Footnote ³⁶

Yet this was logical enough. Since the late nineteenth century, photographic collections had become crucial to the professionalization of archaeology and art history in general.Footnote ³⁷ Photography was similarly important to the emergence of the discipline that would be called Islamic art history, whether through the epigraphic photographs collected in Cairo by Max van Berchem (1863–1921) or the reproductions of Ottoman miniatures pioneered by Eugène Radisics de Kutas (1856–1917).Footnote ³⁸ But as late as 1920, aside from Friedrich Sarre’s pioneering Denkmäler Persischer Baukunst from 1901, Iran’s architectural heritage had only been sporadically captured on camera, particularly at the level of specific architectonic features.Footnote ³⁹ By 1930, many of the monuments of Afghanistan still remained either poorly photographed or not photographed at all, even in comparison to the Timurid monuments of Russian-ruled Transoxiana. The explanation lies as much in infrastructure as in scholarly interest, for, as Byron explained, “the reason is that Herat lies in Afghanistan; while Samarcand … has a railway to it … [and] for the last fifty years, has attracted scholars, painters, and photographers.”Footnote ⁴⁰ By contrast, the monuments of Afghanistan, both Islamic and pre-Islamic, were only rendered accessible by the construction of the new drivable roads that, in the nation-building decades of the 1920s and 1930s, also connected the historical sites of Iran to the colonial road networks of neighboring Syria, Iraq and India. As a consequence, the interwar era saw an increasing number of American, European and Indian visitors tour, describe and photograph the motor-linked monuments of Afghanistan and Iran, while a new generation of Afghan and Iranian savants made use of the same technologies to undertake their own historical projects.

Before turning to this international cadre of archaeological and architectural investigators, it is worth briefly tracing the spread of these photographic and automotive technologies to the region. First, though, it is important to make two interrelated distinctions: studio photography was not the same as field photography and photographs were not the same as printed photography. These secondary developments, which were so crucial to the expansion of archaeological and architectural historical studies, emerged more gradually. As we will see below, forming part of the same intellectual infrastructure, their development occurred simultaneously with the spread of the drivable roads that in the 1920s and 1930s opened the inland historical sites of Iran and Afghanistan to a new generation of scholars wielding the more lightweight and portable cameras of the period. These combined developments were crucial in enabling what Robert Hillenbrand has aptly called “the scramble for Persian art.”Footnote ⁴¹

With its earlier invention than the motor car, the camera was the first to arrive in both Iran and Afghanistan. The first daguerreotypes in Iran were taken as early as 1844, when the French adventurer Jules Richard (1816–91) took the first pictures at court in Tehran.Footnote ⁴² From the 1870s, the use of cameras by European visitors gradually enabled Iranians to acquire the requisite equipment and skills, including the Armenian-Iranian pioneer Antoin Sevruguin (1851–1933), who opened a studio in Tehran and then became an official court photographer to Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96).Footnote ⁴³ From the court, photography subsequently spread among Iran’s urban elite before being gradually incorporated in the burgeoning public sphere of books and journals that widened in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the 1920s, printed photographs began to displace the lithographic images and engravings used for such nascent studies of Iran’s archaeological heritage as the 1896 Asar-e ʿAjam (Monuments of Persia) of Forsat al-Dawleh Shirazi (1854–1920).Footnote ⁴⁵ Nonetheless, with color transparency film not invented until 1935 (and color negatives not until seven years later), even the best-funded publications, such as Pope’s Survey, reproduced only black-and-white photographs.Footnote ⁴⁶ In hiding Byron’s beloved Timurid blues and the haft-rangi tiles of the Safavids, this served to suggest stylistic continuities across borders, including with the monochrome Gothic architecture of Europe.Footnote ⁴⁷ Photography was, then, a thoroughly transnational enterprise, whether at the level of production, circulation or interpretation.

The development of photography in Afghanistan followed a similarly transnational trajectory.Footnote ⁴⁸ Just as the Caucasian borderlands of imperial Russia formed the transmission zone for photography in Iran, in the Afghan case it was in the Punjab region of British India that the first photographs were taken of visiting Afghan elites, from at least 1869.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, the first photographic images made within Afghanistan were those taken in 1879 by photographers who accompanied the Anglo-Indian forces during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Travelling at his own expense, the Irish photographer John Burke (1843–1900) deployed a wooden 4-by-5-inch field camera.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1881, Benjamin Simpson (1831–1923), a British surgeon from the Indian Medical Service, took a series of photographs of Qandahar (including its Islamic monuments), while souvenir images of Qandahar taken by unknown soldier-photographers were being advertised for sale in Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette even before the war ended.Footnote ⁵¹

However, reflecting again the situation in Iran, it was the patronage of Afghan royals that was the more influential factor in the domestication of the new technology within Afghan society itself.Footnote ⁵² Having learned how to take photographs at the court of his father in the 1890s, by 1909 at latest, Amir Habibullah (r. 1901–19) had set up a “royal atelier” ( ʿakkaskhaneh-ye shahi) in the garden of his Kabul palace, which popularized the new medium among the elite.Footnote ⁵³ But the more important moment for publishing photography came when Habibullah allowed Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933), the “father of Afghan journalism,” to establish the official newspaper Seraj al-Akhbar in 1911. Through the technical assistance of two émigré Turkish zincographers, Mehmet Fazlı and Mehmet Nuri, its pages subsequently became the first Afghan outlet for published photographs.Footnote ⁵⁴ While Seraj al-Akhbar occasionally included printed field photographs of buildings and other outdoor scenes, its pages mainly featured studio portraits of royals and officials, not least those taken by Prince ʿEnayatollah (1888–1946).Footnote ⁵⁵ However, this would gradually change during the 1920s, especially after the return to Kabul of Sahebdad (1896–1973), who was sent to Berlin to study photography and its associated printing techniques between 1921 and 1925 as one of around 175 Afghan students sent to Europe during the interwar decades.Footnote ⁵⁶ As well as teaching his skills to his two brothers—one of whom, Abdollah, founded the “National Photography Studio” (ʿAkkaskhaneh-ye Melli) in 1930—Sahebdad would become the photographer for the Kabol journal founded in 1931 as Afghanistan’s first venue for archaeological and art historical research.Footnote ⁵⁷

In Iran and Afghanistan alike, through state sponsorship, the spread of photography from the courtier to the scholar and from the studio to the publishing house occurred alongside the government road-building projects that widened the reach of the high-chassis American cars and trucks that fared best on the rough roads of the region. After the military initiation of Iran’s drivable road system by the British-led “Dunsterforce” during the First World War, the 1920s saw Reza Shah’s new government seize on road construction as the developmental remedy for the absence of an Iranian railroad system.Footnote ⁵⁸ By 1935, almost two thousand trucks and over a thousand cars were being imported to Iran every year.Footnote ⁵⁹ And by 1938, 14,000 miles of roads, including 3,000 miles of superior highways, had been constructed.Footnote ⁶⁰ Via the Iraqi border town of Khanaqin, this new road network was linked to the so-called “Nairn Way” opened up across the Syrian desert by the New Zealand soldiers-turned-entrepreneurs Norman and Gerald Nairn, who built up their passenger transport business under the French mandate.Footnote ⁶¹ As a result, within the space of a few years, Tehran was suddenly placed within convenient reach of Beirut, from where the Nairn Transport Company ran convoys of cars, then articulated trucks with bus-type cabs, to and from Khanaqin, where passengers were picked up by their Iranian counterparts. Between 1928 and 1932, another British-built strategic road was extended across Iraqi Kurdistan to the Iranian border near Piranshahr. It soon became known as the “Hamilton Road” after another New Zealander—its chief engineer Archibald Milne Hamilton (1898–1972)—who went on to publish his Road through Kurdistan in the same year that Byron’s Road to Oxiana appeared.Footnote ⁶² As we will see below, this new infrastructure brought not only Byron, Pope and their European colleagues to Iran, but also channeled Indian, Afghan and Iranian savants on their parallel journeys through what would soon become a roadside canon of historical sites.

Turning to the east, the Iranian road network connected with the similar road system being built across Afghanistan, which joined to the south and east the expanding motor road system of British India that crossed the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan.Footnote ⁶³ While Habibollah had been as much a connoisseur of cars as of cameras, with a particular fondness for a Rolls Royce gifted by the British, it was during the nationalizing reigns of his successors Amanollah (r. 1919–29) and Nader Shah (r. 1929–33) that the road system received more serious state investment.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Afghan governmental conception of drivable roads as the fabric of modernity not only led to the construction of new connections between cities, but also to the reconfiguration of historic cities themselves, as Kabul, Herat and, as we will see later, Balkh were reoriented around new “boulevards” linked by roundabouts.Footnote ⁶⁵ But beyond Kabul (where traffic islands were deployed as venues for nationalist monuments), as the 1930s wore on these motor-based urban reconstruction schemes fell, as it were, by the wayside of worldwide recession then war. Describing how “a system of divided roads, almost as wide as autobahns, radiated from the [city] centre to disappear through the pinewoods into the desert beyond,” as late as 1960 another car-crosser of the region would candidly describe Herat as “a town plan without a town.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Nonetheless, inter-urban—and international—roads enabled new kinds of interactions, not least those of the new cadre of Asian and European archaeologists and architectural historians. As in Iran (especially its eastern regions), émigré Indian taxi-drivers became important enablers of early motor transportation in Afghanistan, whether ordinary drivers plying the route from Peshawar or Amanollah’s royal chauffeur, Ram Prasad. Competing with these Indians, by the early 1930s local business concerns with government ties, particularly the Sherkat-e Baradaran-e Afghan (Afghan Brothers Company) and the Ashami Company, were importing the trucks that, given the highland terrain, became the basis of the country’s public transport system.Footnote ⁶⁷ No less than their Iranian counterparts, Afghanistan’s roads, trucks and cars laid the basis for the widening archaeological and architectural investigations of the interwar period. As we will see in the following sections, this was as much the case for European and Indian researchers as it was for Robert Byron, whose description of being taken by truck to photograph the Timurid monuments of Mazar-e Sharif opened this section.

From Roads to Books: The Mechanics of Scholarly Access

By the time Byron was lugging across Iran the heavy volume of Ernst Diez’s foundational study of Timurid monuments in the autumn of 1933, the imported cars that carried him and his highbrow baggage to the Afghan border had already yielded a decade-long intellectual harvest as cars enabled increasing numbers of scholars to access the region's architectural and archaeological monuments. One fruit of this harvest was determinedly utilitarian in character, comprising reports and surveys written by affiliates of various geographical societies, not least the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Central Asian Society (founded in 1901).Footnote ⁶⁹ The Royal Central Asian Society’s journal was soon brimming with reports on various sections of these desert and dirt roads, and the important question of what kind of vehicles stood a realistic chance of traversing them.Footnote ⁷⁰ These geographical reports were the matter-of-fact forebears of the architectural historical articles that began appearing a few years later as the aesthetic yield of the same roads. Their authors were in some cases the same figures. For while some of the contributors of these geographical reports were exploring brigadiers in the familiar soldierly mold of Percy Sykes (who became honorary secretary of the Royal Central Asian Society just as these reports began appearing in its journal), others belonged to the circles of archaeology, and even art history, that since at least the days of Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham (1814–93), the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, intersected with those of the soldier-explorers.

In April 1924, the French military officer-turned-archaeologist Antoine Poidebard (1878–1955) delivered a lecture to the Society (subsequently published in its journal) on the historical geography of Iran’s old communication routes, in which he emphasized how the dry climate of the region “permits of the use of motor transport over the main roads of communication.”Footnote ⁷¹ During the final year of the First World War, Poidebard had used a small Ford to drive a thousand miles across western Iran as part of a Franco-British reconnaissance mission aimed at assessing the viability of the military use of motor vehicles on its old caravan roads.Footnote ⁷²

After the war ended, Poidebard used this Ford-borne expedition as the basis for his subsequent scholarly reflections on both the ancient and medieval history of Iran, drawing on his wartime experience in logistics reconnaissance to focus on historical communication routes, whether those of the Achaemenids or what he dubbed as the later “Road of Islam” that crossed Iran on its way to China.Footnote ⁷³ He drew on his pioneering wartime motor travels to write a monograph on the historical routes across Iran through which some of Iran’s earliest car journeys served as the means for reconstructing the roads of antiquity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Like the other road reports of the day, Voyages au Carrefour des Routes de Perse was also replete with photographs of roads and cars that transformed the infrastructure into an aesthetic subject. Yet Poidebard was not only involved in ground-level photography; the former air force officer subsequently became a pioneer of archaeological aerial photography. In 1933, the same year that Byron was driving around Iran and Afghanistan taking photographs of Islamic monuments, Poidebard published La Trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie, which included 219 aerial photographs of archaeological sites in the Syrian desert.Footnote ⁷⁵

As the regional road network expanded further over the next decade, Byron’s erstwhile travel companion, Christopher Sykes, wrote another such report describing their initial motorized foray from Iran into Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷⁶ Published in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Sykes’ report gave as its rationale the fact that “these provinces are not often visited and as yet few travelers have done the journey by car,” before going on to detail the road directions, distances and driving conditions from Herat towards Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif.Footnote ⁷⁷ Here and there, Sykes had to rely on information passed on by the Indian Pathan lorry drivers who were already taking up their enduring role in the region’s transport business.Footnote ⁷⁸ But Sykes also had his cultural interests, which slipped between his paragraphs devoted to petrol supplies and pot holes. Having studied Persian for a year at London’s School of Oriental Studies, he took an interest in language, noting with regard to the Afghan-owned Chevrolet four-seater in which he and Byron were being driven that “‘machine-i-sawari’ [sic] is the newly coined word for such a vehicle.”Footnote ⁷⁹ He also shared his amateur evaluations of the region’s Islamic architecture, still at this point largely off the map of western scholarship, remarking of the shrine of ʿAli at Mazar-e Sharif that “the same treatment of the tiles, extracting an effect of silver from the enhanced dominant blue suggests, however remotely, a connection with the Masjid-i-Sabz of Balkh.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The following year, the latter building would be the subject of an article by Byron for the journal of Pope’s American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology.Footnote ⁸¹ Both articles—Sykes’ road report and Byron’s architectural historical study—were accompanied by photographs (five apiece) taken by Byron on their shared car journey.

Despite his primary ambitions of carving out a name for himself as an architectural historian to rival Diez and his German cohort, Byron also contributed to the new automotive subgenre of geographical writing with an article for the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society about road conditions between Herat and Kabul.Footnote ⁸² The article forms the prosaic shorter sibling of The Road to Oxiana: “The roads are indescribable, and it is a tribute to the genius of our lorry driver that on the nine hundred miles’ journey we had not one puncture and the bonnet was never opened.”Footnote ⁸³ Yet amidst the data on truck performances and road surfaces across the spaces in between his historic destinations were paragraphs describing the Timurid remains at Herat and Balkh. It was as though the region’s architectural history was struggling to break free from the infrastructure that allowed it to be studied.

Commissioned to take photographs on behalf of Pope’s Survey of Persian Art, Byron was closely associated with the American cohort of former war journalists, commercial travel writers and aspiring experts who also fanned out across Iran, then Afghanistan, during the interwar decades. One of the first was the sometime war correspondent E. Alexander Powell (1879–1957), who followed the newly opened Nairn Way from Beirut via Baghdad to Kermanshah, where he was met by a two-car convoy (“Fords, of course”) that conducted him on to Tehran and then through the rest of Iran.Footnote ⁸⁴ Like the French scholars discussed below, Powell framed his journey as a motorized exploration of “the chariot-ruts of history.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Together with his architectural descriptions, the dozens of photographs he published in By Camel and Car to the Peacock Throne gave many of his American readers their first glimpse of such monuments as the arch of Ctesiphon and the mud-brick buildings of Yazd.Footnote ⁸⁶ His book also included numerous photographs, among them a pair that contrasted an old Persian caravanserai with one of the new toll booths for cars along the Baghdad–Tehran road.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet Powell’s arrival was part of a larger sequence of American aides and advisors to Iran’s new nationalist government that also included archeologists and art historians.Footnote ⁸⁸ The most famous of these was of course Pope himself, along with his Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology which would form the most bibliographically fertile fusion of the car, camera and printed word.

In 1935, the same year that Byron published his own road reports for the Royal Central Asian Society, his fellow employee of Pope and American successor as a scholar of Timurid (and Ilkhanid) architecture, Donald Wilber (1907–97), reached Shiraz after “driving overland from Beirut and Aleppo in a vintage Ford station wagon.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Like almost all of the Americans who came to Iran in this period, Wilber had sailed to Beirut and then followed the same Nairn Way through Syria that Byron would subsequently describe (taking the “Nairn bus for Baghdad”) in the opening sections of his famous architectural travelogue.Footnote ⁹⁰ By 1937, Wilber had followed Byron’s road route to Herat to take photographs and notes on its Friday mosque on behalf of Pope’s survey.Footnote ⁹¹ These Anglo-American collaborations also drew in the English-born Eric Schroeder (1904–71), a friend of both Byron and the historian of Byzantine and Islamic art David Talbot-Rice (1903–72) from their Oxford days and subsequent Keeper of Islamic Art at the Fogg Museum at Harvard.Footnote ⁹² After meeting Pope at the influential exhibition of Persian art held at London’s Royal Academy in the spring of 1931, the great American impresario commissioned Schroeder to travel to Isfahan and survey the Friday mosque.Footnote ⁹³ Talbot-Rice subsequently visited Schroeder in Isfahan, from where they drove to Shiraz, Bushehr and Bishapur, taking photographs, measuring buildings and drawing plans.Footnote ⁹⁴ After establishing himself in the United States, Schroeder returned to Iran in 1935, where he ran into Byron in Kerman.Footnote ⁹⁵ Learning of his compatriot’s recent Afghan travels, Schroeder ventured into Afghanistan “mainly along the route followed by Mr. Robert Byron in 1934” to draw more detailed architectural plans of the major Islamic monuments of Herat and Balkh. Together with his photographs, Schroeder’s report appeared in Pope’s Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology in June 1936.Footnote ⁹⁶

By the time Schroeder followed Byron to Balkh, French researchers had already been in Afghanistan for more than a decade under the aegis of the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, which had undertaken its first investigations at Bactra/Balkh back in 1923.Footnote ⁹⁷ Their journeys were made in the French-manufactured Citröens that would subsequently loom large on the roads of Afghanistan.Footnote ⁹⁸ In an article reconstructing the route travelled by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (602–64) and the Délégation’s first monographic publication on the ancient route between the Punjab and Balkh, these road trips along ancient tracks led the Délégation’s first director, Alfred Foucher (1865–1952), to focus his early work on the region’s historical roads, just like the Iranian drives of his compatriot, Antoine Poidebard.Footnote ⁹⁹ While the reconnaissance expedition that Foucher made in 1924 along the route from Kabul to Balkh was made on horseback, the photographic report he published in La Géographie noted how the Afghan government had engaged an Italian engineer to oversee the construction of a drivable road, which would lay open the various excavatable ruins of ancient and Islamic sites that Foucher delineated en route for the Délégation’s subsequent motorized expeditions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ After remarking on the ease of driving along the Andkhoi–Khanabad route that Byron would take a decade later by Afghan truck, Foucher concluded his report with a photograph of Byron’s final destination, the Timurid mausoleum at Mazar-e Sharif.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Other French writings—such as Captain René Bertrand’s stirring tale of an east-to-west motor crossing of Afghanistan (effectively Byron’s route in reverse, and eight years earlier)—focused more explicitly on the modern drivable roads that enabled such architectural historical research. Bertrand’s report appeared in 1926 in the commercial magazine L’Illustration, which had been publishing stories of car expeditions since 1901, beginning with a crossing of the Sahara in French North Africa.Footnote ¹⁰² Along with the more learned geographical journals, with its abundant use of photography L’Illustration formed the more practical and popular sibling to the art historical journals on the region to which we will turn below, even publishing some of the earliest photographs to emerge from the French archaeological mission.Footnote ¹⁰³

Somewhere between the two outlets stood the middle sibling by way of the learned but nonetheless accessible guidebook to Bamiyan written by the later director of the French Délégation, Joseph Hackin (1886–1941), and his spouse Ria Hackin (1905–41).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Published in the same year of Byron’s road trip to research Timurid monuments, alongside art historical descriptions of the Buddhist caves and frescoes, the Hackins’ guidebook provided practical driving instructions to Bamiyan, which it explained could be easily reached from Kabul in six to eight hours by car (longer by lorry) via the new Kabul to Mazar drivable road.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For those who still couldn’t make the car journey, there were the photographs. While the early remit of the Délégation was mainly pre-Islamic sites, from 1923 onwards the road connecting Kabul with Peshawar—the best road in the country—allowed André Godard (1881–1965) to repeatedly visit Ghazni to inspect and photograph its famous minarets.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From 1936, members of the Délégation began a series of motor expeditions along the Helmand River, making surveys and taking large numbers of photos of the Islamic architecture of Sistan.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

While this reliance on cars and cameras to conduct and disseminate research continued to characterize the Délégation’s enterprises—including its later attention to Islamic architecture at Lashkari Bazar—the most prominent French embodiment of this combination was the Expédition Citroën Centre-Asia, better known as the Croisière Jaune.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Funded by the car manufacturer André Citroën (1878–1935), the Croisière Jaune comprised a 315-day drive between Beirut and Beijing that was successfully concluded in February 1932. While unquestionably in part a publicity venture for a private rather than state enterprise, the Croisière Jaune also had more serious ambitions, exploratory and intellectual, that brought it additional sponsorship from the French and American National Geographic Societies. Not least among these exploratory goals was its attempt to establish whether it was actually possible to use motorized vehicles to complete a land journey that, in the official report on the expedition, André Citröen grandly described as the Silk Road followed by Xuanzang and Marco Polo.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While such historic parallels were frequently drawn by many of the period’s motorists who crossed the region themselves, they were of course making use of an entirely new infrastructure, mechanical and intellectual. Hence, the earlier parts of the expedition followed the motorized “Nairn Way” between Beirut and Baghdad, and on to Tehran, while the further reaches of the journey through highland Afghanistan to Gilgit and Xinjiang included regions which had not yet been opened to motorized transport. For this reason, the seven vehicles comprised specially designed Citroën-Kégresse autochenilles—that is, trucks with regular wheels at the front and continuous tracks at the rear. The inclusion of a small crew of mechanics obviated the need to resort to village blacksmiths, as Byron had to when the axle of his Morris broke on the way to examine the early mosque at Damghan.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Nonetheless, the mechanics and logisticians of the Croisière Jaune enabled the work of a scholarly and artistic corps that included the archaeologist Joseph Hackin (by this time also director of the Musée Guimet); his protégé Jean Carl, who would soon make important discoveries at Begram and Fundukistan; and the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Along with them were the Russian painter Alexandre Iacovleff (1887–1938) and a cinematographic team led by André Sauvage (1891–1975), a friend of Gide and Cocteau, who together with the investigative journalist Georges Le Fèvre (1892–1968) would help publicize the success of the Citroën venture on their return to France.Footnote ¹¹¹ Like the motor journeys through the region of many of the decade’s pioneering architectural historians, it was primarily a reconnaissance aimed at the rapidly efficient gathering of raw data: Iacovleff made swift ethnographic crayon sketches; Sauvage made film recordings; Le Fèvre furiously scribbled down notes; and Hackin and Carl availed themselves of “the opportunity of observing many ancient monuments on its route.”Footnote ¹¹² In the age of speed, such was the tempo of investigation afforded by the new intellectual infrastructure.

Consequently, the Croisière Jaune was even more bibliographically and photographically productive than the period’s other car journeys through the Afghanistan–Iran region. Aside from Le Fèvre’s official book on the expedition, other members also wrote their own accounts, including its secretary-general André Gœrger and its sound recording engineer William Robert Sivel (1908–82).Footnote ¹¹³ Like their Anglophone counterparts, they also published reports in learned and popular geographical journals, with Hackin contributing one of the several articles about the expedition that appeared in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Le Fèvre sending photographic features for L’Illustration and Iacovleff publishing an article with his vivid ethnographic sketches in the American National Geographic.Footnote ¹¹⁴ On returning to Paris, Iacovleff would also issue a volume of lithographs of his rapid crayon portraits of tribal and townspeople he encountered along the new drivable road between Tehran and Kabul.Footnote ¹¹⁵ While producing art rather than studying it, Iacovleff shared the motorized infrastructure and tempo of his fellow investigators to widen appreciation not of buildings but of the region’s ethnographic heritage.

By the time the French journalist and amateur art historian Joël de Croze travelled through Afghanistan in 1947, its road-based transportation network had expanded considerably.Footnote ¹¹⁶ After reaching Kabul from Peshawar via “the Afghan Post, a passenger-cum-mail bus which runs to schedule throughout [the country],” he found himself in a Kabul with “buses running to schedule” and “new American cars.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ While outside the capital “the roads are poor, dust tracks all of them,” he nonetheless noted that “work is starting for better roads, an American company has been commissioned,” and in any case “the buses are clean, fairly comfortable and fares are cheap (Kabul–Herat across the whole of Afghanistan costs approximately Rs. 25).”Footnote ¹¹⁸ This infrastructure afforded the rapid bus-borne inspections of historical cities that in turn allowed de Croze—and the more professionalized European and American scholars who followed him—to reconstruct what he proposed to be the pre-Mughal Afghan antecedents of Indo-Islamic architecture.

Alongside the French, it was Germans who comprised the other major European contributors to the intertwined historical and automobilic investigations of Iran and Afghanistan. The access granted to French and German scholars by Pahlavi and Musahiban officials alike was a reflection of the “third-power strategy” that saw Iran and Afghanistan foster closer relations with France and particularly Germany rather than imperial Britain and the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The role of Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) in the development of archaeology in Iran, where he resided between 1923 and 1934, has recently been the focus of considerable attention.Footnote ¹²⁰ But as a result of shared access to the same intellectual infrastructure, Herzfeld’s decade in Iran, which culminated in his Archæological History of Iran, coincided with the publications on the region’s Islamic architecture by other central European scholars.Footnote ¹²¹ Building on Friedrich Sarre’s pioneering photographic study from 1901, the most important German publications on the region’s architecture (particularly of the Timurid era) were those of the Austrian Ernst Diez (1878–1961), who between 1912 and 1914, with Oskar von Niedermayer (1885–1948), had travelled across Iran as far as the Afghan border.Footnote ¹²² However, the scope of such investigative travels was rapidly widened when, after the formal declaration of Afghan independence, a series of German car journeys generated books that comprise the lesser-known motorized heirs to Diez’s Islamische Baukunst in Churasan.

These studies emerged from the substantial German expatriate community that developed in Kabul around a series of commercial and technical partnerships with the new nationalist government of Afghanistan.Footnote ¹²³ The earliest significant literary outcome of these connections was the record of a cross-country car journey completed in 1924 by the geographer, Emil Trinkler (1896–1931).Footnote ¹²⁴ In an admiring chapter devoted to the “fairytale city (Märchenstadt)” of Herat, he presaged Byron in evoking the “blue domes of the minarets whence the believers are called to worship.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Amateur art historian that he was, Trinkler knew what to look at and included in his book what were at the time rare photographs taken in Herat of the Ghurid Friday mosque, the Timurid minarets of the Musallah and the black marble sarcophagus of Hosayn Bayqara (r. 1469–1506).Footnote ¹²⁶ In 1926, Trinkler was followed by the Leipzig-trained Austrian geographer, Gustav Stratil-Sauer (1894–1975), who drove to Kabul by motorbike, a journey that not only led to a popular travelogue about his adventures but also laid the seeds for his subsequent book on Mashhad.Footnote ¹²⁷ Published in the same year as Byron’s Road to Oxiana, Stratil-Sauer’s Meschhed went far beyond the former’s evocative but impressionistic few pages on the pilgrim city by providing a systematic investigation of its human and economic geography. Here too motor transport played a role, with discussions (and photographs) of its impact on commercial and religious traffic by means of the Pilgerauto (“pilgrim-buses”) that had replaced the old camel caravans.Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet these were also architectural historical tools, for when Byron had taken a “British Bedford pilgrim bus” to Mashhad, its “driver obligingly stopped” at Qadamgah so that Byron could inspect the bulbous Safavid dome of its seventeenth-century shrine.Footnote ¹²⁹

The point of these European comparisons is not to argue that a shared intellectual infrastructure prompted these various scholars to produce a single, uniform interpretation of the region’s archaeological and architectural past. On the contrary, even at the level of medieval Islamic architecture, different theories developed. Nor was the emergence of single region from the two interconnected nation-states of Afghanistan and Iran necessarily reproduced in scholarly paradigms. While Byron promoted Afghanistan’s Timurid sites as an architectonic apogee, the country was largely excluded from the narrative of “Persian” art history that Pope and other pro-Iranian scholars constructed through their interactions with the nationalist historians we will turn to below.Footnote ¹³⁰ The point is rather that, as a core part of the new intellectual infrastructure that opened the region to scholars from America and Europe, roads and cars enabled the easier access to formerly remote sites that generated this body of scholarship, with all its disagreements and biases.

Shared Infrastructure, Identical Sites, Indian Appraisals

It was not only Europeans and Americans who were writing books based on their car journeys through the region during this period, but also Iranians, Afghans and especially Indians, for whom the same roadside archaeological and architectural sites often held different meanings. For at exactly the same time that Major McCallum and Antoine Poidebard were providing European savants with information on the new Iranian road system, Indians such as Sayyed Hasan ʿAskari and Sayyed Moslem Reza were publishing their companion reports in Urdu.Footnote ¹³² Like several of the European writers discussed earlier, ʿAskari had gained his early experience of the region during the war, when he had served as an interpreter at the British consulate in Baghdad.Footnote ¹³³ In September 1924, he departed from Paris for Beirut, whence he travelled via the Nairn Way to Iran then back home to India. ʿAskari wrote his book in Urdu for an Indian Muslim (and particularly Shi ʿi) readership. Iran held great interest for such readers, but had long remained far harder to reach than even Mecca, which had been easily reachable by steamship since the 1870s. Part travelogue, part travel guide, his book provided practical information about the costs, times and conditions of the Beirut–Tehran journey with the Nairn Company, echoing Byron’s remark that “All Syria is excited by the pictures of his [Nairn’s] new Pullman bus.”Footnote ¹³⁴ ʿAskari also provided details about Nairn’s competitor, the Eastern Transport Company owned by the Beirut brothers Francis and Alfred Kettaneh, which, he added, had an office in Bombay.Footnote ¹³⁵ Once the pilgrim reached Tehran, there were many “Caucasian (Qafqazi) Turks and Bedouin Arabs” who owned cars and regularly carried passengers to Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad.Footnote ¹³⁶ These were reasonably comfortable routes, though from Mashhad, he warned, the direct drivable road to the Indian border at Dozdab took seven days via mountainous roads.Footnote ¹³⁷ Nonetheless, when his fellow Shi ʿi compatriot, Reza, wrote his own travelogue on Iraq and Iran a year later, he informed his readers that it was only a four to six day drive via “ten-seat motor-lorries (motar-lari).”Footnote ¹³⁸

While ‘Askari took precisely the same route travelled by the likes of Robert Byron, visiting the same monuments in such cities as Kermanshah, Shiraz and Mashhad, his Safarnama gives us a sense of the divergent meanings which these places held for their European and Indian visitors. For when the Nairn Company convey stopped at Kermanshah en route to Tehran, ʿAskari paid a visit to the Sasanian rock relief depicting Khosraw II riding his horse at Taq-e Bostan on the outskirts of town.Footnote ¹³⁹ But as far as ʿAskari was concerned, the statue represented the heroic Rustam of the Shahnameh. When ʿAskari’s compatriot Reza made the same journey the following year on the way back from the Shi ʿi ʿatabat in Iraq, his car stopped at Bisotun where, he wrote, “beside the road, there is a tablet or ‘plate’ engraved onto the mountain.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Yet like ʿAskari with the Sasanian reliefs, standing before the Achaemenid inscription Reza conceived what he saw in terms of the site’s older Persianate association with the tale of Farhad and Shirin from Ferdowsi.

Like Byron and Godard a few years later, ʿAskari was also driven from Tehran to Damghan, where he likewise paused to visit its early Islamic buildings.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But while Byron and Godard were primarily interested in their historical significance (especially the very early congregational mosque known as the “Tari-khana”), ʿAskari’s concerns (or at least those of his imagined readership) were the pious motivations of the pilgrim for whom the Il-Khanid-period shrine of the Sufi Bayazid Bestami (d. 874) was of far more importance than the visually unremarkable early mudbrick mosque.Footnote ¹⁴² Like Byron, his Indian contemporary was also interested in Seljuk-era minarets, though the one at Bestam was mainly remarkable for its fascinating way of shaking as one the Iran’s celebrated “trembling minarets” (minarha-ye jomban).Footnote ¹⁴³ Similarly, when he reached Mashhad, ʿAskari headed to the same Timurid mosque of Gowhar Shad that Byron went to great lengths to creep into disguised. But despite remarking that the building was “worth seeing (qabildid),” its primary significance remained as a place of Shi ʿi pilgrimage.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This was also true for his fellow Indian motor pilgrim, Reza. Nonetheless, Reza provided a detailed description of the history and physical appearance of the various buildings of the shrine complex in Mashhad, including the mosque of Gowhar Shad, which in an Urdu echo of Byron’s obsession with Timurid blue tiles he depicted as having “a beautiful sky-colored little dome.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Reza also gave its date of construction as 1418: in being correct, this was unremarkable except that he provided the Christian rather than Hijri date.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Here was a small signal that he and the likes of Byron had nonetheless entered a shared historical schema.

This sense of travelling through an Indian Muslim “memory space” was echoed in the subsequent Urdu travelogue of the north Indian historian, Sulayman Nadvi (1884–1953), who was driven to Kabul in late October 1933, just a few weeks before Byron reached Herat on an Afghan passenger truck.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ But while Byron would champion the Timurid style over the well-known Mughal buildings he had previously visited in India, for Nadvi Afghanistan was of primary architectural significance as the location of the tomb of the first Mughal emperor, Babur.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In his account of his journey, Nadvi described to his Indian readers the site of Babur’s burial, with gardens that resembled the Mughal Bagh-e Shalimar in Lahore; the mosque built by Shah Jahan (noting the hijri date of 1056); and the simple uncovered tomb which he contrasted with the grand, domed mausolea of Babur’s descendants in Delhi and Agra.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Just as Godard had recorded the Arabic inscriptions on the towers at Ghazni a few years earlier, and the interpreter for the French legation Leonidas Bogdanov (1881–1945) had published the inscriptions on Babur’s tomb, so did Nadvi likewise include in his book the Persian inscription by Jahangir on Babur’s grave.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Given Ghazni’s role as the fons et origo of India’s Islamic dynasties, the city’s monuments were even more important to Nadvi than to Godard, and his book featured a detailed discussion of their present state and illustrious past.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Briefly stopping off during the drive between Jalalabad and Kabul, he also noted down rapid observations about Afghan vernacular architectural styles, such as the use of “raw” (kham) mudbricks and the lack of minarets.Footnote ¹⁵² Yet like his European counterparts at the same time, Nadvi also recorded details on road conditions between the Khyber Pass, Kabul and Qandahar.Footnote ¹⁵³

Nadvi also wrote one of the earliest descriptions of the National Museum, which had opened in Kabul’s Darulaman district in 1931 to house the Afghan share of the partage agreement with the French Délégation.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Mentioning only briefly the Buddhist and “Greco-Afghan” (Yunani-Afghani) statues that the Délégation and Musée Guimet prioritized, he paid far more attention to the museum’s Islamic collections.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Primarily interested in material evidence of India’s Mughal past, Nadvi noted the lithic inscriptions by Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, a large stone ablution basin covered in Arabic inscriptions, and the display of Mughal armor and weaponry (bewailing that the dagger of Babur and the chainmail armor of the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid had been stolen during the 1929 Bacheh-ye Saqqa rebellion “and probably sent to Europe”).Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As a codicologist himself—Nadvi had recently published a biography of ʿOmar Khayyam that deployed Orientalist textual criticism to compare the various manuscripts of his purported quatrains—he recorded and published a list of the manuscripts, calligraphy specimens and miniature paintings kept in a special gallery at the museum.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Finally, echoing the religious concerns we have seen among the Indian visitors to Iran, Nadvi described another gallery, overlooked in Western accounts, known as the Tabarrokat-khaneh (“reliquary”).Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Here was kept a collection of early Quran manuscripts, including, he noticed from an old ownership seal, one from the Mughal imperial library during the reign of Farrokhsiyar (r. 1713–19).Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Travelling together with the famous poet Mohammad Iqbal (1877–1938) and the vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Ross Masood (1889–1937), Nadvi had come to Kabul to meet the new generation of Afghan intellectuals who had recently founded the Kabul Literary Society (Anjoman-e Adabi-ye Kabol). Their specific task was to offer advice on Kabul’s new university, founded two years before its counterpart in Tehran, whose campus was partly designed by the erstwhile Kabul resident, André Godard. Just as Anglophone scholars like Byron, Schroeder and Pope were sharing ideas through meetings and publications, Indian and Afghan intellectuals (many of whom had been educated in India) communicated in person in Kabul and in print through Urdu or Persian. As Nadvi recorded, his conversations with the Society’s members, such as the former education minister Sardar Fayz Mohammad Khan, focused on the Mauryans and the new archaeology-based conceptions of the deep history of Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Two years earlier, in 1931, the members of the Kabul Literary Society had established their flagship journal, Kabol, which would serve as Afghanistan’s earliest venue for publishing studies—and photographs—of archaeological and architectural history.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Nadvi was part of a larger contingent of Indian intellectuals who came to Kabul by car in the 1920s and 1930s. Five years before he set off, his fellow educationalist Mir Shams al-Din had taken a “motar” to Kabul from Peshawar for a fare of 200 rupees.Footnote ¹⁶² Like his European and Indian contemporaries, Shams al-Din also reported on the state of the country’s expanding road network.Footnote ¹⁶³ But while he enjoyed visiting the historic Muslim sites in Jalalabad, his primary interest in the region was, in an apt turn of phrase, to see “Afghanistan on the highroad to progress (shahrah-e taraqqi).”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ As in Iran, Urdu books of the 1920s were increasingly incorporating photography to replace the previous reliance on lithographic illustrations and Shams al-Din’s account of Afghanistan included two photographic portraits, of King Amanullah and himself, reproduced by the “Pictorial Engraving Picture Company, outside Mochi Gate, Lahore.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵

The Indian Sufi Hasan Nizami would use far more photographs in the Urdu account of Afghanistan “old and new (qadim-o-jadid)” that he published in 1933, which, as its subtitle emphasized, was ba Taswir (“with pictures”).Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Cars were also prominent in his account of his journey two years earlier, which began with Nizami describing in admiring prose the buwik (Buick) that carried him from Peshawar to Kabul.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The many photographs in his book included the Friday mosque, musallah and minaret of Gowhar Shad’s madrasa in Herat, as well as Byron’s final destination, the Timurid shrine of ʿAli at Mazar-e Sharif.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Yet like the Indian Shi ʿis we have seen writing books about Iran, for the hereditary Sufi author Nizami these buildings were sacred sites whose histories mattered because they were the holy lineages or silsileh of the Sufi orders that came from Afghanistan to India. Consequently, Nizami’s account of his visit to Herat not only preceded that of Byron by two years but went far deeper into the cultural foundations of its buildings by recording the sacred histories of the many shrines to the Naqshbandi and Chishti shaykhs who lay buried there.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ If Pope and his Iranian colleagues was creating an Iranocentric model of “Persian architecture,” and Afghan intellectuals were using key buildings to create their own “national” heritage, then Indians like Nizami and Nadvi inspected Afghanistan’s architecture and museum holdings as a venture in recovering their Indian heritage.

However, not all of the learned Indians who wrote about their tours of Iran and Afghanistan were Muslims. In 1927, the Parsi scholar of Sanskrit, Gushtaspshah Kaikhushro Nariman (1873–1933) took advantage of the “tolerable motor road links from Peshawar to Kabul [and] an enterprising Parsi agent Mr. Kekobad Gai, [who] arranges for the transport.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ As a result, Nariman “travelled hundreds of miles in motor,” not least the “enjoyable trip” to Bamiyan that a few years later would be described in the guidebook by the French Délégation members, Joseph and Ria Hackin.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Not that Nariman was competing with them: he cited with admiration Alfred Foucher’s study of the route taken by the Buddhist pilgrim, Xuanzang.Footnote ¹⁷² Having long corresponded with European scholars, Nariman had recently published his Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism as part of the Indo-British intellectual collaborations that two years earlier had seen Xuanzang’s travelogue—the effective blueprint of Buddhist archaeology—re-translated from English into Urdu.Footnote ¹⁷³ Now Nariman hoped to collaborate with Afghan scholars. He met with Gholam Mohyi al-Din, the curator of the National Museum in Kabul, who had taken photographs of inscriptions in an Indian script found on a mountainside. Nariman took back to India copies of Mohyi al-Din’s photographs “for translation with the help of my colleagues.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ On his return home, Nariman published a report on his road journey in the first issue of Islamic Culture, the new scholarly journal based in the princely state of Hyderabad which would serve, inter alia, as an early venue for art historical research.

Nariman engaged even more closely with Iranian scholars, including the ancient historian and decipherer of Old Persian inscriptions, Ebrahim Pourdavoud (1885–1968).Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Among the non-Muslim Indians who visited Iran in this period was the celebrated poet and art theorist, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941).Footnote ¹⁷⁶ A key figure in the revival of Indian art, and its recovery through the study of art history, back in 1919 Tagore had founded the Kala Bhavana (Institute of Fine Arts) as part of the Visva-Bharati University he gradually established at Shantiniketan in Bengal. Tagore made two tours of Iran, in 1932 and 1934. And like his various contemporaries, Tagore wrote an account of his journey that was published in the same year as Byron’s Road to Oxiana.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ After arriving in Bushehr by airplane, he was taken along the country’s new road network, describing how he reached Shiraz in a five-car motorcade by means of “the rough, desolate road” from Bushehr.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ But thereafter his motorcade followed the “comparatively wide and smooth” road linking Shiraz with Isfahan and Tehran.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Touring what was already a road-linked canon of key architectural and archaeological sites, he visited the mausoleums of Sa ʿdi and Hafez, was guided by Herzfeld around his excavations at Persepolis, and inspected the same mosques in Isfahan that Byron and Pope were identifying as the acme of Persian architecture.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Attracted by the same color that Byron would celebrate, Tagore declared “it is impossible to recreate the splendid old blue shade.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ But while for Byron the car was a necessary evil that destroyed the romance of Persepolis (“In the old days you arrived by horse … You saw Asia as the Greeks saw it … Today you step out of a motor, while a couple of lorries thunder by in a cloud of dust”), for Tagore, remarking on the same road up to the ruins, the new technology presented an opportunity to compare the rival universalisms of a spiritual East and materialist West (“the modern motor car and the Persepolis ruins are separate entities, nothing common between them, yet both are universal”).Footnote ¹⁸² Like the other Indian, European and Iranian intellectuals of the time, Tagore continued his road trip on to Baghdad via Kermanshah, where like his Muslim compatriot ʿAskari, Sir Aurel Stein and just about everyone else, his car stopped to look at the ancient reliefs at Taq-e Bostan and Bisotun.Footnote ¹⁸³ After his return to Calcutta, the journey would feed into the article on the spiritual purposes of the study of art history which he published in the first issues his journal, the Visva-Bharati Quarterly.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Subsequent issues of the journal would feature many other articles on Asian art, often illustrated by photographs.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

During this first visit to Iran, Tagore met many of the new Iranian intellectuals with similar interests and as a result of these meetings successfully brought Ebrahim Pourdavoud to India to teach at his Visva-Bharati University.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Just as we have seen Sulayman Nadvi’s Indian party driving into Afghanistan to meet with the members of the recently formed Kabul Literary Society (Anjoman-e Adabi-ye Kabol), Tagore met with the members of its Tehran-based counterpart, the Anjoman-e Adabi-ye Iran, which had been founded in 1920.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In 1934, Tagore undertook his second visit to Iran to attend the opening of Ferdowsi’s new tomb as part of the Ferdowsi Millennial Congress in Tehran and Mashhad that culminated in the unveiling of the new mausoleum for the poet jointly designed by Hertzfeld, Godard and the German-trained Iranian architect, Karim Taherzadeh Behzad.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Overseen by scholarly revivers of the ancient Iranian past like Pourdavoud, the Congress was attended by a hundred scholars from India, Europe and the United States (including Friedrich Sarre, the erstwhile director of the “Islamic department” at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin). Heading east from the conference to the new mausoleum at Tus, the delegates followed the same drivable road to Mashhad that Byron would document a month later in the diary that fed into The Road to Oxiana.

Cameras too were key to these celebrations, not least those used by the pioneering Iranian filmmaker ʿAbd al-Hosayn Sepanta (1907–69) to make his sixty-minute film that sought to bring Ferdowsi and his Ghaznavid era back to visible life.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Attracted by the rediscovery of Iranian antiquity, as a student in Tehran in the 1920s ʿAbd al-Hosayn had given himself the Avestan sobriquet Sepanta (“pure”) before travelling to Bombay to learn the nascent technical skills of filmmaking and direct Iran’s first “talkies,” all of them set in the medieval Persian past.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ In 1931 Sauvage and Sivel, the French filmmaker and sound recordist for the Croisière Jaune expedition, had driven their Citroëns along the same road between Tehran and Mashhad, shooting film along the way of architectural sites such as mosques and caravanserais.Footnote ¹⁹¹ But while Sepanta’s films were shot in India, and partly in studios, Sauvage and Sivel were able to film in Iran and en plein air, as Sivel put it in his memoir of the journey, by using generators linked to their vehicles.Footnote ¹⁹² As they drove on east beyond Mashhad under the guidance of their companion Alfred Foucher, director of the Musée Guimet, the same motor-enabled methods would allow them to set on celluloid the Timurid monuments of Herat and the Ghaznavid towers at Ghazni.Footnote ¹⁹³

Automotive and Photographic Auto-Histories

While the new road connections allowed increasing numbers of European and Indian scholars to access Iran and Afghanistan, for many of the new generation of Afghan and Iranian modernist and nationalist intellectuals, cars and cameras became tools for conceiving novel “auto-histories” in the dual sense of self-histories born of automotive research. The new drivable roads offered a means to travel in and out of, as well as around, their home countries, allowing the easy inspection of the emerging canon of archaeological and architectural historical sites. Thus, in September 1925, the erstwhile Iranian undersecretary of education ʿAbdollah Bahrami set off from Tehran for America via the same road to Beirut via Baghdad that would subsequently bring in Byron and Pope.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ In the book he published on his return, Bahrami described in precise detail his travels along the new motor routes that now connected Iran with Beirut and thence Marseilles and New York. He travelled with the Kettaneh brothers’ Eastern Transport Company, remarking in the first of many automobilic notes that they “use an American car by the name of Dodge, which is comfortable.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶

Echoing his European counterparts, Bahrami vividly evoked the dangers of crossing the desert, recounting an attack on his convoy by Arab raiders.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ But his details of car journeys segued into accounts of the historical sites that drivable roads now laid open. Describing how his convoy of Dodges reached Baghdad and then crossed the Syrian desert, Bahrami summarized the Islamic history of the former ʿAbbasid capital and the dramatic remains of the Roman past at Palmyra, by this time being excavated by the recently established Service des Antiquités.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ In Damascus, he visited the Umayyad mosque (just as French archaeologists were beginning their work there), paid his respects at the tomb of John the Baptist, then admired the craftwork of the wooden minbar and pietradura mihrab.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Like the Indian ʿAskari in Mashhad a year earlier, Bahrami used his visit to Baghdad to make a conveniently rapid one-day pilgrimage to the Shi ʿi ʿatabat.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Even so, for the most part Bahrami’s Az Tihran ta Niyu Yurk (“From Tehran to New York”) was primarily devoted to the distinctly modernist monuments of the United States, like an inverse of the New Yorker Alexander Powell’s By Camel and Car to the Peacock Throne, published two years earlier.Footnote ²⁰¹

For other Iranians of the period, access to Europe and America leant the opportunity to acquire new intellectual methods for studying and publicizing their own heritage. The results were more professionalized (and photographically precise) research than the earlier amateur endeavors (and lithographic drawings) of Qajar-era antiquarians such as Forsat-e Shirazi. This was the case with the aforementioned Ebrahim Pourdavoud, who in 1924 returned from Berlin to promote the study of Avestan texts and inscriptions and a decade later would travel partly by road to Calcutta as the guest of Rabindranath Tagore.Footnote ²⁰² Another case was Ali-Akbar Siasi (1885–1990), who completed his PhD at the Sorbonne in 1931 then returned home to assume a position in government and then take charge of founding Iran’s first university in 1935. That same year, Siasi travelled to Russia to present a paper on Iranian art at the decisive Leningrad congress alongside Byron and his European colleagues. Siasi’s paper appeared together with Byron’s account of the Timurid monuments of Afghanistan in the published conference proceedings.Footnote ²⁰³ Two years later, Siasi and Reza Shah established Tehran University’s Department of Archaeology, where Pourdavoud would serve as a professor, along with the Muzeh-ye Melli-ye Iran (National Museum of Iran).Footnote ²⁰⁴ As the younger counterpart to the Muzeh-ye Melli-ye Afghanistan (National Museum of Afghanistan), the museum in Tehran was designed after a Sasanian model by André Godard, former member of the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, the organization whose excavations had provided the Kabul museum with most of its pre-Islamic holdings. Before moving to Tehran, Godard had also helped design Kabul's new Darulaman district, where the Afghan National Museum was established.

Much of the new Iranian nexus of archaeological, architectural and art historical activity was associated with the Anjoman-e Asar-e Melli (Society for National Heritage), to whose members Herzfeld and Pope delivered various lectures after it was founded in 1922. Pope was soon collaborating with Iranian scholars, particularly the epigraphist Farajollah Bazl, whom he brought to New York with a fellowship and whom Byron also consulted in Tehran.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Over the next decade, the Society coordinated the construction of the Ferdowsi memorial in 1934 and the mausoleum of Ebn Sina in Hamedan a decade later, as well as establishing a publishing branch.Footnote ²⁰⁶ One of its co-founders was the politician-turned-historian Hasan Pirniya (1872–1935), who in 1932 published a hugely influential three-volume study of ancient Iran which drew heavily on European scholarship as well as the work of Iranian researchers like Pourdavoud.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Monumental in all senses, Pirniya’s study included over 170 illustrations of archaeological sites, art objects and inscriptions. But given the sheer expense of printing so many images, most of these were engravings (gravur)—often reproductions of drawings by the nineteenth-century likes of Eugène Flandin—rather than photographs.Footnote ²⁰⁸

In visual terms at least, Pirniya’s Iran-e Bastan was not, then, a nationalist rival to the photographic abundance of Pope’s Anglo-American Survey of Persian Art. But official publications were already making fuller use of photographic printing by 1930, particularly the Salnameh-ye Pars (“Fars Annual”), founded in 1925 and published by the official Majles Press in print-runs of a thousand copies.Footnote ²⁰⁹ While Iranian publications from the 1920s, including Berlin-based journals such as Kaveh and Iranshahr, rarely featured photographs, Salnameh-ye Pars was at the start of a larger trend towards the adoption of photographic printing that gathered pace during the following decade. For example, the state-sponsored Iran-e Emruz, the state-influenced Ettela ʿat, and the German-funded Iran-e Bastan, founded in 1933, featured similar kinds of photographs, particularly towards the end of Reza Shah’s reign.Footnote ²¹⁰ While Salnameh-ye Pars was by no means primarily a historical publication—as a popular almanac it included articles on just about every subject considered of value to the modernizing nationalist Pahlavi public—it did include articles and photographic images on archaeological sites in Iran. For example, the forty-page article on “Scientific Excavations in Iran (Hafriyat-e ʿElmi dar Iran)” that appeared in the 1933 issue contained high-quality photographic images of excavated objects on almost every page.Footnote ²¹¹ The article was a translation of an essay by André Godard, who we will see below featuring prominently in the Afghan counterpart to the Iranian annual, Salnameh-ye Kabol.

Further enabling the spread of photography, the Salnameh-ye Pars also featured full-page advertisements for supplies of cameras (durbin) and film (film). Promising purchasers that the film and lenses were “clean” (pak) and “delicate” (zarif), in one such advertisement the Tehran merchant Qasem Shirazi promoted cameras “manufactured by the biggest German factory, Orion, whose fame is unrivalled all round the world.”Footnote ²¹² Meanwhile, Shirazi’s rival in Tehran, the Armenian shopkeeper Petrossian, supplied Dresden-made Mimosa cameras.Footnote ²¹³ Aptly, in the 1929 issue, the adjacent page to the camera advertisement featured another for New York-manufactured Stewart Motor Trucks, which were marketed as having “continuous speed—power—capacity: a unique truck (davam sor ʿat—qovvat—liyaqat—yeganeh kamiyuni ast).”Footnote ²¹⁴ Echoing the cultural concerns that these new technologies carried with them, the journal also featured an article on “the madness of speed” (jonun-e sor ʿat) that traced the history of speed from the first steam train in 1834 to the recent world speed record set by the British racing driver George Eyston in 1937.Footnote ²¹⁵ The article concluded by declaring that “virtuous and fortunate are those who use these remarkable tools on the road to happiness for future generations and so register their names in the history of human progress.”Footnote ²¹⁶ Nor were these unique concerns in the region. At the other end of the Nairn Way in Beirut, Arabic journals such as al-Muqtataf similarly featured advertisements for new handheld Kodaks, in which cameras were likewise linked to automobiles as what Stephen Sheehi has termed the twin “technological hallmarks of the mechanical age.”Footnote ²¹⁷

While the quick image-making work of the camera shutter was a key component of this age of speed, Salnameh-ye Pars nonetheless featured far more studio portraits than field photography, as well as a good many engravings (including, somewhat ironically, as the advertising images for cameras). In terms of the printed archaeological and architectural photograph, the major turning point came with the founding of Athār-é Īrān (“Monuments of Iran”) in 1936 as the periodical counterpart to the National Museum of Iran (Muzeh-ye Melli-ye Iran, now the Muzeh-ye Iran Bastan), which opened the same year.Footnote ²¹⁸ Established under the aegis of the Edareh-ye Koll-e ʿAtiqat (or Service Archéologique de l’Iran, as it was otherwise known), Athār-é Īrān was published twice-yearly under the editorship of the archaeologist and architect of the museum, André Godard, who had relocated to Tehran after his earlier work with the Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan.Footnote ²¹⁹ Every volume of the journal featured copious numbers of high-quality photographic images. While in line with the interests of the new Iranian nationalist intellectuals, Athār-é Īrān paid due attention to pre-Islamic sites, its earliest volumes prioritized Islamic monuments, in Afghanistan as well as Iran. Among its earliest articles were Godard’s reports on Iran’s earliest mosques, such as the Tari-Khana at Damghan, and on the Ghaznavid towers at Ghazni, which we have seen Indian scholars visiting and photographing a few years earlier.Footnote ²²⁰ Although published on behalf of the Service Archéologique de l’Iran, the journal was actually printed in Paris by the long-established “Orientaliste” publishing house of Paul Guenther. By 1937, the early Iranian historian of Islamic art Mehdi Bahrami (1905–51) was also publishing his first book in Paris, before contributing his photographically rich study of Persian ceramics in Athār-é Īrān the following year.Footnote ²²¹

While the journal relied on the technologically superior publishers of Paris, the same was not true of its Afghan counterpart, the Kabol journal established by the Anjoman-e Adabi-ye Kabol (Kabul Literary Society) in 1931. This was issued by the government press in Afghanistan itself, albeit, as we will see below, with German technical assistance. In addition to the monthly journal, from 1932 the Anjoman-e Adabi also published the Salnameh-ye Kabol, which was likely modeled on the Iranian Salnameh-ye Pars. Though by no means solely devoted to historical, still less art historical matters, as Afghanistan’s leading cultural periodical, Kabol, included in its pages everything from traditional poetry to popularizations of modern science. But the journal and annual were also the primary venue for both the new Afghan engagement with ancient history, particularly by means of archaeology, and the re-conception of Islamic architecture as a national heritage that was a worthy focus of state-sponsored study. As a consequence of governmental support, even though printing was still just emerging from its infancy in Afghanistan, the journal boasted photographic reproductions from its inception. Echoing the article on speed in the Salnameh-ye Pars, one of the most vividly illustrated articles in the Salnameh-ye Kabol was a history of the motor car.Footnote ²²² Its translator was the journal’s editor, Qasem Khan Rishtiya, who in 1933, as Byron drove towards Kabul, translated an article by André Godard of the French excavations. That same year, a long article by Godard was also translated for the Iranian Salnameh.Footnote ²²³ Linking India with this cycle of translations, four years later Rishtiya published a report by Joseph Hackin on the Buddhist site of Khayr-Khaneh outside Kabul that had also been translated by the French-trained Bengali scholar Kalidas Nag (1892–1966) for the newly-founded Journal of the Greater Indian Society.Footnote ²²⁴ Around the same time, the Francophone Ahmad ʿAli Kohzad (1907–83), who went on to become Afghanistan’s preeminent ancient historian and director of the National Museum, published a translation of Godard’s Les antiquités bouddhiques de Bamiyan.Footnote ²²⁵ With government funding, it was issued in two volumes that included scores of photographic illustrations.

To understand how Kohzad’s translation and the Kabol annual and journal were able to feature so much costly photography, we can return to the Urdu travelogue written by Sulayman Nadvi in 1933. As himself the editor of Ma ʿarif, a comparably wide-ranging Urdu cultural journal, Nadvi took a special interest in the practical business of publishing Kabol, making an inspection tour of the government printing office where it was published and thereby leaving a description that provides unique insight into the infrastructure supporting Afghanistan’s first modern cultural and historical journal.Footnote ²²⁶ The printing office comprised several buildings. One contained eight new electric-powered machines, on which Kabol was printed alongside official documents, stamps and the government newspaper Eslah (“Reform”). Another building contained special machines for zincographic, photographic and fine art printing, along with a dedicated dark room. Building on what we have already seen were the intertwined political, economic and intellectual connections with Germany, this equipment, Nadvi went on, had been imported from Germany, along with two German technicians to operate it, though (building on earlier Ottoman collaborations) the zincographer was a Turk and the remainder of the staff were Afghan. Given the fact that many of the photographs that featured in the Kabol annual and journal were the work of Sahebdad, the Afghan photographer who had studied photography in Berlin, it seems possible that the Sahebdad was involved in the procurement of the equipment from Germany, though Nadvi did not directly mention him.Footnote ²²⁷ Such were the collaborative foundations of the journal in which Afghanistan’s first modern studies—and photographs—of archaeological and architectural history would appear.

Back in India, Nadvi’s own journal Ma ʿarif similarly featured articles on Asian and Islamic art history, as well as the architectural history of Iran and Afghanistan. These publications were very much part of a conversation with European scholarship, not least through the key conceptual loanword—art—which was often used in conjunction with the older Arabic-derived Urdu term, fan.Footnote ²²⁸ For example, in 1925 the journal published a review entitled “Ayshiyaʾi Fonun,” which focused on the newly published catalogue by the British Museum curator, Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), entitled Asiatic Art.Footnote ²²⁹ With its sixty-four photographic plates, Binyon’s catalogue was issued by the same publisher—G. van Oest—as Godard’s book on the Buddhist art of Bamiyan, which we have seen being translated into Persian in Kabul.Footnote ²³⁰

Ma ʿarif’s art historical attention to Iran effectively began with a 1931 Urdu review of the recent bumper crop of twenty-three books and journal issues devoted to “Persian art” by Pope and his circle, including the landmark edited volume that accompanied the 1931 International Exhibition of Persian Art at the Royal Academy in London (itself reported in a separate article).Footnote ²³¹ But there was one important difference between the articles in the Urdu journal and the English publications they drew on: Ma ʿarif did not feature photographs. Emerging as it did from the Nadvat al- ʿUlama religious movement, Nadvi’s journal instead emphasized the lithographic reproduction of elegant Arabic script, with words alone sufficing to study the visual past. But this was not the case with Kabol, whose editors consistently included photographs of not only Islamic monuments, but also many Muslim personages, as in the case of the photographs that accompanied articles on the history of Aya Sofia in Istanbul and supposed portraits of Ebn Sina, who was at the same time being claimed by Iranian nationalists.Footnote ²³² Completing the circle of shared architectural interests, before his turn to the monuments of Afghanistan, Byron had also extensively discussed “St. Sophia” in his 1929 book The Byzantine Achievement (including three photographs), before going on to draw comparisons with its dome and those of “medieval Persia” in The Road to Oxiana.Footnote ²³³

As suggested by its technological basis of imported equipment, Kabol by no means occupied a discrete intellectual realm from European scholarship. When the items excavated by the French Délégation went on display in the landmark exhibition at the Musée Guimet, it was reported in the Afghan journal.Footnote ²³⁴ Moreover, many European studies (particularly those written by members of the Délégation) were cited, summarized or fully translated in its pages, just as they were in Iranian publications at the same time. Archaeological reports by Hackin and Godard were a particularly prominent feature of both Kabol and its companion annual Salnameh, as well as the occasional book series overseen by the Kabul Literary Society.Footnote ²³⁵ In each case, these were accompanied by photographic illustrations.Footnote ²³⁶ Correspondingly, if to an admittedly lesser degree, the Kabol journal was referenced by its European and American counterparts: a photograph from Kabol of the minaret of Hazrat Saleh, north of Balkh, was cited by Eric Schroeder in a 1936 article for Pope’s survey, for example.Footnote ²³⁷ A few years later, work by European and American scholars would be published in the bilingual English–French journal Afghanistan, founded in 1946 by the Literary Society’s successor, the Afghan Historical Society (Anjoman-e Tarikh-e Afghanistan), as a means of further fostering such intellectual collaborations.

We have already mentioned in passing not only the photographically illustrated geographical journals but also the more popular venues such as L’Illustration and Country Life in which the likes of Byron and Pope found outlets for their investigations—and photographs—of Islamic (or, more appealingly, “Persian”) art.Footnote ²³⁸ Like the Citröen motor company and the wealthy enthusiasts who supported Pope, such commercial magazines point again to the role of private rather than state sponsorship of research. But the academic field of Islamic architectural history was now coming of age. In 1931, the same year that the state-sponsored Kabol was established in Afghanistan, the first issue of Pope’s privately funded Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology was printed in New York, with its early issues featuring reports and photographs that drew heavily on the motor expeditions made by Wilbur, Byron and of course Pope himself. Three years earlier, in 1928, the first volume of Eastern Art had appeared in Philadelphia, followed in 1934 by the first volume of Ars Islamica, published by the Detroit Institute of Arts in the period’s motor city par excellence. When the infrastructure builder Norman Nairn made his car-buying visit to Detroit back in 1923, he had pledged to put Baghdad within fifteen days’ journey from New York and Tehran within thirteen days of London.Footnote ²³⁹ Little could he have imagined the implications for scholarship, as researchers and their writings were similarly put into quicker circulation between these distant cities. Rich in the photographic reproductions that had become the sine qua non of serious scholarship, the first issues of both Eastern Art and Ars Islamica contained articles by Ernst Diez, whose weighty volumes on Timurid architecture Byron blamed for breaking the axle of his car outside Damghan.