St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

48 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике СЕКЦИЯ 2 Письменные традиции, литература и фольклор Афганистана и трансграничных регионов афганской культурно-лингвистической ойкумены PANEL TWO Written Traditions, Literature and Folklore of Afghanistan and the Liminal Areas of the Afghan Linguistic and Cultural Oecumene Nile Green (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA) Writing History in Mid-Century Afghanistan: From Tarikh to Archaeology Until as late as 1930, historical writing in Afghanistan continued the conventions of the Persian tarikh genre, drawing the sources for its genealogical and dynastic accounts of the Afghan past from previous Arabic and Persian texts and chancery documents. Even as prominent a historian as Fayz Muhammad Katib (1862–1931) conformed to this pattern, despite his closer and more critical scrutiny of his written sources. However, under the auspices of the Anjuman-i Adabi-yi Kabul (Kabul Literary Society) and the Anjuman-i Tarikh-i Afghanistan (Afghan Historical Society), the genres and contents of historical writing changed rapidly in the mid- 1930’s and early 1940’s. The key shifts were temporal and methodological. In temporal terms, in line with nationalists elsewhere across Eurasia, the new historians pushed back their historical gaze into the ancient past. For Afghanistan, here this crucially involved a re-evaluation of the pre-Islamic (and specifically Buddhist) past. In methodological terms, the key shifts involved the incorporation of numismatic and archaeological evidence, primarily by means of reliance on the writings of European scholars. Through their interactions with French archaeologists in particular, who arrived in Afghanistan in the early 1920’s, Afghan historians thereby formulated a new