8 unbelievable secrets about Afghanistan

Do you think Afghanistan is just a country from the evening news? news? Then there are the mines that are 7,000 years old, and they are still operating directly Now using the same methods as the ancient Egyptian pharaohs? Or a city where the Greeks built their quarters over older ones of an ancient city, and the other stood above yet another – a contemporary of the pyramids? Today we will look into the country through which everyone has passed. great civilizations of the ancient world, and each left Something in this land. We will see the minorite, whose geometry anticipated Western mathematics for 8 centuries Learn about the caves where monks hid the library from All the conquerors, and she might still be there. And in the finale — a place that could be the homeland of three of world religions at once. Ready? We are starting. Afghanistan lies at the crossroads of all major migration routes. routes of the ancient world. The Persians marched through it toward the east. The Greeks — right after Alexander. The Arabs brought Islam here in the seventh century. The Mongols reduced the blooming cities to the ground in the thirteenth century. And they left. Each left a layer. In the stone, in the architecture, in the genes of the people living here. The French archaeological mission working here from the 1920s to the 1970s, managed to investigate a few percent of the known objects. And this alone revolutionized historical science. Then came the war. And one more. And one more thing. Fifty years of continuous war have closed off this country. almost entirely for science The last major international expedition was interrupted the Soviet invasion of 1977 In the ninth year. Since then, only brief excursions, only the surface, only what managed to be recorded before the next one explosion. During this time, the rest of the world thoroughly explored its lands from end to end. across and lengthwise. Afghanistan remains a closed book. The book, the one whose appearance from the outside, judging by what we've seen, Very many pages. Satellite images over the past twenty years have recorded geometrically correct throughout the entire territory of the country Contours beneath the soil surface, characteristic features urban structures. In the province of Ghor, in Zabul, in Badakhshan. Instruments see cities. Scientists know they are there. No one is digging. The eight secrets you will see today are merely what they managed to notice before the doors closed. First stop – Bamiyan Province. Altitude – three thousand meters above sea level. A place that local residents call "God's own work." And this is not just pretty words. Six lakes, each of a different color. Cobalt blue, turquoise, emerald, pale blue Blue-gray and almost black in the central part. Not because of the lighting, but because of the chemistry. Each feeds from separate underground sources with different mineral compositions. They are separated by natural dams and travertines. mineral sediment that the water deposited over thousands of years layer upon layer, until she had built walls reaching ten meters in height. Bant-e-Amir means "Dams of the Lord" in translation. Geologists date their formation to several thousand years. Long before Islam. Long before any civilization known to us in this region. According to local legend, the lake is attributed to Caliph Ali. the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad They say he erected dams with a single wave of his hand, to irrigate barren land. Geology says otherwise. But neither legend nor geology provides an answer to this. A precise map of underground water flows feeding the lakes has not yet been compiled. Where does all this water with such diverse characteristics come from beneath this high-altitude plateau? Hydrologists explain in general terms. There is no specific diagram. There is one more detail that standard descriptions tend to overlook. During drought periods, the water level in lakes drops unevenly. One remains full while the adjacent one becomes half-empty. This means that underground sources feed them independently. Everyone has their own system, their own depth, their own horizon. What is exactly happening beneath this plateau has not been thoroughly investigated. The depth of the central part of the largest, Band-Ekhaybat, has not been reliably measured with accuracy. Local fishermen say that the nets never reached the bottom. Echo soundings taken in different years yielded varying results. The seabed seems to change depending on the season. Something exists beneath these lakes. What exactly? Open question Now several kilometers farther south. To the place where two giant Buddhas stood in the rock. And the real mystery was not in the statues, but behind them. The smaller Buddha is 38 meters tall. Greater than 55. This is the height of an 18-story building carved into the rock. The Taliban blew them up in March 2001. The whole world was watching the explosions. But what the news didn't mention was that the statues were merely a ceremonial facade. Behind and around it is an entire mountain, pierced by a system of tunnels and caves on multiple levels. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who visited Bamiyan in 632 CE, Described a monastic complex with thousands of monks living directly inside the rock. In 2008, Japanese and European restorers discovered oil frescoes on the walls of the caves. dated from the 5th to the 9th centuries CE Oil painting 500 years before it appeared in Europe. This discovery rewrote the history of visual art. But something else is more important. The total number of cavities in the rock mass has not yet been determined. Each new expedition discovers entrances that did not appear on any previous map. The system goes deep into the mountain, and no one knows how far. Local residents have been talking about this for several centuries. Somewhere inside the mountain there is a cave called the library. The monks hid the manuscripts there before the invaders arrived. Probably before the arrival of Genghis Khan's army in the 13th century. No expedition has found it. But neither one refuted it. Only a small part of the system has been studied. If this library exists, texts may lie within it, those who would rewrite the history of Buddhism, the Silk Road, and medieval Asia all at once. The mountain has kept silence for 800 years. The more, the better. Hindu Kush mountain system 800 kilometers of mountain ranges, through which all of humanity has passed. At the Khavak Pass, at an altitude of 3,550 meters, coins are washed out of melting snow every spring. Greek, Kushan, Sasanian, Arab Shepherds have collected them for generations, simply because they lie beneath their feet. No expedition, no excavations. Only the snow that melts, and the metal that remains. It is a multi-layered archive spanning millennia. Winter seals it shut, spring opens it again. In 329 BCE, Alexander's army passed through this mountain pass. And his soldiers' coins are still being washed out of the snow alongside the coins of Arab merchants and Kushite traders. They are all in one land, layer upon layer. But the Hindu Kush preserves something far more alive than coins. The Nuristanis live in mountain valleys beyond the main mountain range. The people whose language linguists have classified as a separate branch of the Indo-European family neither closely related to Persian, nor to Pashto, nor to Dari, nor to any other neighboring language. Genetic studies have detected markers of ancient Central Asian populations in them. which in other regions have long since dissolved into later waves of migration. Their mythology – gods, rituals, conceptions of the world – has direct structural parallels with the Vedic and ancient Iranian tradition. Parallelisms that cannot be explained by random coincidence. The oral tradition of the Nuristanis says their ancestors came from the west in very ancient times. Where exactly does this west point to, and when did the migration take place? Linguists and geneticists are still uncovering this. The Nuristanis are a living archive of an era for which we have not a single written source. And this archive disappears. There are fewer and fewer people who carry on the traditions with each generation. Most of it is not recorded. When it closes, we will lose the direct voice from the world that existed before all the history we know. Let's move on. There, beneath a Greek city, they found another, and beneath that one, yet another. Alexander the Great founded no fewer than 12 cities on the territory of modern-day Afghanistan. One of them, presumably Alexandria Caucasus, was located at the site of modern-day Bagram, north of Kabul. French archaeologists excavated a major Hellenistic-Bactrian city there in the 1930s and 1940s. and immediately hit layers extending significantly deeper. Below the city of Aleksandrovsky, another one; below that one, yet another. The lowest ones are dated to the third millennium BCE. Stop at this figure. When Alexander arrived here in 329 BCE, Ruins of cities that were two thousand years old already lay beneath his feet. While the Egyptians were placing blocks in Giza, cities already stood here, in the heart of Afghanistan. What was this civilization? What was it called? Where did it disappear to? The excavations raised a question and were interrupted by the war. Artifacts from Bagram were partially relocated to the Kabul Museum. which was looted twice in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of the items surfaced on the art markets in London and New York. The lower layers of the hill remain untouched. And there, perhaps, lies a response from a civilization about which we know absolutely nothing. Now – mathematics. The one that Western science discovered in the 1970s of the 20th century, they laid out in brick here in the 12th century. In the province of Ghor, in a remote canyon of the Hari Rud River A minaret stands 65 meters tall, equivalent to a 20-story building rising from a rocky ravine. The Jam Mosque minaret was built during the reign of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Ghuri. in an era when this territory was the center of one of the most brilliant medieval Islamic civilizations. It is impossible to reach him for much of the year due to floods. UNESCO has included it in the list of World Heritage Sites. In 2007, mathematician Peter Lu from Harvard University published a study that triggered a wave of reaction in the scientific community. Geometric brick ornament covering the surface of the minaret turned out to be a quasicrystalline pattern upon detailed analysis – a mathematical structure with periodic symmetry, which never repeats exactly. Western science discovered and described it only in the 1970s of the 20th century. The Nobel Prize for quasicrystals was awarded in 2011. In the 12th century, the master builders constructed this structure using fired bricks. 800 years before mathematicians gave it a name. How did they do it? Did they understand the mathematics they were building? Or felt her out through a generation of practice, through hands, through the feeling of the right pattern? Or through knowledge that existed and left no other traces? Minorit Jamm stands in the gorge amid floods. and is not in a hurry to provide explanations. Balkh He was called "the mother of cities." And this is not a poetic metaphor. Continuous settlement of this place is documented for at least 3,500 years. Balkh was the capital of Zoroastrian Bactria. later part of Alexander's Greek kingdom, then the Arab Caliphate, then the Timurid Empire. Each civilization was built upon the previous one. like geological strata. Today, blue domes rise above the ruins of Balkh, the mosque of Hazrat Ali. One of the most revered Islamic sanctuaries in Afghanistan. A pilgrimage site for millions. The Persian manuscript tradition refers to Balkh as the homeland of Zoroaster. the founder of Zoroastrianism, the religion, arising no later than the second millennium BCE. If so, then it was precisely here that the concept originated, without which there would be neither angels nor demons in Vedic traditions neither the idea of the Last Judgment, nor the resurrection of the dead, not the struggle between good and evil as the center of the universe. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam inherited these ideas. through direct contact with the Zarathustrian tradition during the period of Persian domination. Three religions followed by more than half of humanity Perhaps they trace their roots back to a single Afghan city. French archaeologists of the mid-20th century findings were recorded in Balkh, which were not fully documented. They were displaced by war. Some of the reports are located in the Paris archives. What exactly lies beneath Balkh, deeper than the already excavated layers? No living scientist today knows. Official science throws up its hands. The earth is silent. In the mountains of Badakhshan, in northeastern Afghanistan, at an altitude of more than three thousand meters The lapis lazuli deposit is located here. It has been operating continuously for at least 7,000 years. One of the oldest operating mining enterprises in the history of humanity. Lazurite from these mines was found in the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs of the 18th dynasty, in the ornaments of the Sumerian queens Izuna, in the mosaics of Mesopotamia from the 3rd millennium BCE. Ultramarine, a blue pigment from lapis lazuli In medieval Europe, it cost more than gold. Its price per ounce exceeded the value of silver. They sent them mantles of the Virgin Mary on the most significant altarpiece images of the Renaissance. Raphael, Botticelli, Titian. All this blue came from one single place, from one gorge in the inaccessible mountains of Afghanistan. There is still no road to these mines. The mountain passes are closed for several months in winter. How exactly is the heavy stone reached Egypt and Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago from these mountains No complete reconstruction of the routes exists. Ancient lapis lazuli trade routes Only partially restored to date. The mines are still operating today. The rock heats up from the fire and cracks from cold water. The technology remained unchanged for millennia. Workers say the same things their grandfathers and great-grandfathers said. The mountain decides on its own how much stone to release this season. Seven thousand years. One technology. One stone. And the blue color in paintings throughout Europe. And finally. Panjshir Valley A narrow gorge north of Kabul, well known today for its military impregnability. But before politics arrived here, They came here for silver. The Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal, writing around 980 described the Pandshir as one of the largest sources of silver in the Islamic world. Coins made of Pandsheri metal were found from Spain to China. From Scandinavia to India. A mountain corridor several kilometers wide supplied silver to half of the known world. Geological structure of the deposit Making the acquisition of resources extremely difficult using traditional methods. The mineral veins dip sharply downward. Medieval miners without explosives and mechanical drills They extracted huge volumes of metal here. How exactly did they drive the tunnels through this geology? Researchers have not fully reconstructed it. And this is what the local miners have been repeating from generation to generation. Silver is growing in Pandshere. Wires that appeared to be completely worn out After a few years, they give metal again. Geologists explain this through hydrothermal processes. Hot solutions from deep strata They move the metal into already used areas. This is a documented fact. But the rate of re-deposition specifically under Panchshila conditions No one has systematically measured it. And how literally true is the popular observation about metal, Which returns by itself, remains open. The mountain gives way. Takes it. It gives back again. And so a thousand years. Pandshir means "five lions" in Persian. by the names of the five brothers, which, according to legend, guarded this passage in ancient times. For five thousand years, people have called this place by the name of its guardians. And all this time, the mountain here was accumulating metal, I gave it away and saved up again. Now let's look at the picture as a whole. Amir's gangs with six colored lakes and the bottom, which the fishermen's nets had never reached. The Bamiyan Caves with the world's oldest oil paintings and a library that has been sought for centuries. Havak Pass where every spring brings forth the coins of Greeks, Cossacks, and Arabs right under the shepherds' feet Bagram with cities of the third millennium BCE, lying beneath the Greek quarters. The Jameh Mosque minaret with quasicrystalline mathematics in brickwork 800 years before the Nobel Prize. Balkh, the possible birthplace of ideas, without which there would be no three world religions. Lazurite from Badakhshan, the most beautiful blue in the robes of the Madonna on Renaissance paintings. Pansher silver, which, according to the miners, grows back into the veins. 8 places, 8 layers of the same earth. And this is less than 5% of what exists here. According to researchers' estimates, during the entire period of systematic expeditions to Afghanistan Less than 5% of known archaeological sites are covered. That means 95% of what is lying here Not a single shovel has touched it. Behind each of the places we saw today There are still dozens of such ones standing. Nameless, without a map, without a single photograph. Just because no one has gotten there yet. Afghanistan is not a country without history. It is a country whose history is richer than that of any other place on Earth. We haven't read it yet, not a single page to the end. What do you think, if one day this land is fully explored, What discovery will be the most unexpected? Write in the comments. If the release has opened something new for you, A like helps the channel move forward. And don't forget to subscribe. There are still many places ahead that history has deliberately hidden from us.