Herat is one of the great ancient cities of Central Asia. Located in modern Afghanistan at the western end of the Hindu Kush extension of the Himalayas in ancient Khorasan, it commands a sweep of lowland reaching north into the Oxus (Amu-darya) basin, westward towards Mashad and the Persian deserts, and south towards the Helmand basin and Sistan. The Hari-Rud, flowing out of the mountains and then turning north into Turkmenistan (where it becomes the Tedzhen, with many prehistoric sites), is Herat’s lifeline and one of the few permanent watercourses in the region. Known as Haraiva to the Achaemenids, the city has long been assumed to be the site of one of the Hellenistic Alexandrias founded by the Macedonian conqueror, although hard evidence has been curiously lacking. Laid waste by the Mongols, Herat saw a resurgence under Tamerlane’s son Shah Rukh, who moved the capital of his realm there from Samarkand. Most of the city’s stunning Islamic buildings date from this fifteenth-century Timurid period. Under Persian Safavid rule until its incorporation into Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, it was pivotal in the contending expansions of Tsarist Russia and British India.

There had been no serious archaeological research at Herat, however, until the post- (and subsequently pre-) Taliban government of Afghanistan invited the existing German-Afghan Archaeological Mission to establish a programme of survey and excavation there in 2004. Excavations in the city, notably around the citadel, ran from 2005–2008 and the local museum’s collections were reinstalled from 2008–2012. The three volumes of the report have come out in reverse order: no. 3 on the museum (Franke & Müller-Wiener Reference Franke and Müller-Wiener2016); no. 2 on the city excavations (Franke & Urban Reference Franke and Urban2017); and finally, this survey of sites and monuments in the hinterland in 2025. It covers fieldwork from 2004–2006, after which “even trips to the neighbouring districts of the city were no longer possible due to security concerns” (p.3). The history of research and the resulting urban chronology from the mid-first millennium BC onwards are detailed in Volumes 2 and 3, along with the pottery sequence which underpins both urban and hinterland research.

The catalogue of monuments and archaeological sites in each of 12 (of 15) districts in Herat Province—which stretch from the Iranian and Turkmenistan frontiers east along the Hari Rud into the mountains—outlines the topography, environment, population and economy, followed by the site descriptions; seven areas are covered by Franke, five by Urban. They take up some 755 of the 906 pages of this splendidly produced volume, which weighs in at 3.4kg. Landscapes, sites and sherds are illustrated in colour, augmented with line drawings of pottery and site plans and aerial photographs placing sites in context. The almost 1850 illustrations and the 34 pages of bibliography make this book and its two precursors milestones in Central Asian archaeology.

Within a largely arid area of some 55 000 sq km, some used for pasture, the Herat oasis covers around 115 × 25km and is one of the most fertile places in Afghanistan. The surveys were pragmatic rather than systematic, getting broad coverage of a large area while the security situation allowed. Some 400 sites and standing monuments were documented, 270 being new discoveries (another 58 have been added to the distribution maps from Ball’s 2019 revised gazetteer but not otherwise analysed): one broad revelation, as Bernard O’Kane notes in his Foreword, is the extent of fortifications of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries AD, essentially the Ghaznavid and Ghorid imperia; another is the “remarkable range of buildings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries whose existence has not been signalled before” (p.1); and a third is the saddening extent of looting in recent decades. Erosion has also played its part: Franke illustrates how a large caravanseray enclosure, a standing ruin in 2005, had become invisible even from the air by 2022 (figs. 1807–1810).

In a summary section, Franke examines the cultural landscape around Herat in terms of common structural types: cisterns, often barrel-vaulted or with a dome; isolated towers and forts from 300 to 80 000 sq m in area and with high perimeter walls and towers; caravanserays set along routes as waystations for travellers, similarly walled but with different internal organisation to accommodate large groups of people and animals; habitation sites, some of them mounded tepes. Almost all date from the Islamic period of the tenth century onwards, although some may conceal earlier occupations. They are concentrated, as might be expected, along the course of the Hari Rud. The four largest are spaced some 65–75km from the regional focus of Herat city, with the landscape dominated by small villages clustering around them.

Early pottery is often plain, with long-lived forms, fabrics and techniques, which makes dating in the absence of excavation difficult (as we found in the Helmand valley; see Hammond Reference Hammond1970). Much Islamic pottery, in contrast, is highly decorated by carving, moulding, glazing and painting (among which is a “Pseudo-Prehistoric Ware” which can be misleading, see pp.850–55). Dating can be assigned from stratigraphic data in the Italian excavations at Ghazni and the French work at Lashkari Bazar, further south and east in Afghanistan, and from sites north beyond the Oxus such as Termez and Otrar; Franke gives a summary of the vast ceramics literature (p.856, note 194). Very few sites, except Gu4 and Kh2 on branches of the Gulran River, can be shown to date before 1000 BC, and Franke surmises that even with “a low population density during the pre-Islamic period and until the 8^th/9^th century … this paucity of data was unexpected” (p.842). This book, on the other hand, offers not a paucity but a largesse of information on an underexplored part of Central Asia.