Geography and Destiny For centuries, scarce resources and difficult terrain have required people in the Hindu Kush region to develop unique solutions to survive. But while geography has brought challenges, it has also offered opportunities. In Afghanistan, geography is a multi-sided destiny.
Identity and Perception Local, tribal, and religious identities in the Hindu Kush region have always shifted depending on one’s point of view. As Afghanistan decides what it means to be Afghan, it faces a kaleidoscope of moving perspectives.
Tradition and Modernization Afghans have always had to be flexible. At times, this flexibility has brought people together, and at other times it has torn them apart. Reconciling tradition and modernization means making sense of what’s at stake when people change--and when they don’t.
Traces and Narratives History is not always written. Much of what we know about Afghanistan comes from scattered artifacts, symbols, and oral traditions. Understanding these traces means piecing together the narratives that history leaves behind.
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Traces & Narratives
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Producer: Alexis Menten
Afghanistan can appear to be a country without resources. But in fact, one of its natural resources was so valuable in ancient times that it was traded far and wide—as it still is today.
Afghanistan did have some resources that were highly sought after by others.
The most famous being lapis lazuli, the famous blue semi-precious stone which we find archeologically all the way over from Egypt over to China.
There was only one known source of lapis lazuli in ancient times – the highlands of the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan. There, people have been mining lapis for many thousands of years.
Lapis comes almost exclusively from Afghanistan. And so the presence of lapis means that you must have been having trade with Afghanistan.
Lapis turns up already in the Bronze Age, in tombs in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and that’s evidence that already by the Third Millennium, we were having trade from Afghanistan to the West.
The blue pigment ultramarine is made from ground lapis lazuli, and historically, ultramarine was the second most expensive pigment after gold.
As soon as you see a painting that’s full of lapis, your eyes should flash and you should see dollar signs. Why is the Virgin’s robe always blue in Italian painting? Because it was expensive.
During more modern times in the 1980s and 90s, the Northern Alliance took control of the lapis lazuli mines. They used the profit from export sales to purchase weapons to fight the Soviets, and later, the Taliban.
Indeed if we look at most of history we find that people that are engaged in the trade of goods often do better economically than the people who make the goods. And we can tell archeologically in Afghanistan that it was a center for this kind of transit trade which could be very, very profitable. And if it was profitable then you had the money to import what you wanted as well.
History has shown that sometimes trade itself is as profitable as the value of the objects that are traded.
King Tut's tomb contained a beautiful blue stone—from Afghanistan. How did it get there?
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