"You see that big hole over there," he says, gesturing. "During the civil war, some people were working it and they took out a lot of things." Still, there is more to find, he says. Abdul Wahid is showing me around the tepe, or hill, across the dirt lane from his compound in Balkh—a city in northern Afghanistan that ancient Arab explorers once called Umm Al-Belaad or "Mother of Cities" for its great antiquity. For decades he and his family have looted this site inside the much larger urban complex of ancient Balkh, believed to have been a spiritual center of Zoroastrianism, and wealthy enough to have been deemed worthy of sacking by both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Indeed, over the millennia, Afghanistan has been a crossroads of both cultures and armies, resulting in chaos and opportunity.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 10:51:35 +0000
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