Parution : Arezou Azad, The Warehouse of Bamiyan. Economic Life in Medieval Afghanistan, Edinburgh University Press, 2026

The Warehouse of Bamiyan
Economic Life in Medieval Afghanistan

Arezou Azad
Contributions by Pejman Firoozbakhsh

Uncovers the untold history of rural life in medieval Bamiyan

• Provides a new, bottom-up history of eastern Khurasan
• Reveals the operations of a medieval warehouse, offering insights into the daily lives and interactions of local communities with the state
• Based on newly discovered documents from Bamiyan, with a focus on scholarly methods for reading historical records ‘against the grain’
• Highlights eastern Khurasan’s significance in the Islamicate world, offering a fresh perspective on the diverse and often overlooked roles of agricultural societies in medieval history
• Offers insights into the development of early New Persian as a legal and administrative language

Bamiyan, in present-day Afghanistan, is famous for its giant Buddhas, but what was life like for its rural inhabitants 500 years after the Muslim conquest? The Warehouse of Bamiyan uncovers the untold history of the region’s warehouse, revealing the lives of farmers, landholders, the taxes they paid, and their role in the economy. Based on newly discovered documents studied since the late 2010s, Arezou Azad details the reconstruction of the archive and the scholarly methods used behind the scenes to read medieval documents ‘against the grain.’ The book offers a fresh perspective on the medieval eastern Islamicate lands through the lens of medieval Bamiyan, highlighting the significance of agricultural societies and shedding light on the diverse roles of rural communities often overlooked in royal narratives.

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