Home | Introduction | Security | President Karzai | Ministry of Tourism | Expeditions
Slide shows | Community Support | 2004 Expeditions | Dates & Prices 2005 | Books
Map | Guides | Contact | Buy Guidebook
BooksThe place to start one’s reading is my and Bijan Omrani’s book Afghanistan: a Traveler’s Companion, which can be purchased on this website. We have surveyed all the literature on Afghanistan and digested it in a form that should make dusty searching in the library unnecessary. Many of the books recommended below are excerpted there, plus our own history of the country. They are all available in modern reprints from Indian and Pakistani publishers.
Afghanistan has produced some of the best travel writing in English and it will be seen that two of the authors listed below won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This list is by no means exhaustive, but simply gives the books I have enjoyed and learned things from. This is a more general list. Books more specifically related to individual Expeditions are listed on their pages.
At the very top of any list of great travel books in English would come Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana and Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. I would also put Peter Levi’s The Light Garden of the Angel King very high up. This book is finally receiving the recognition it deserves.
A number of journalists produced books on the Russian jihad. At the top of this list I would group are a number of writers: Sandy Gall’s books, Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation, Behind Russian Lines and Salang. Gall travelled with Ahmed Shah Massoud’s mujihadeen. Radek Sikorski’s Dust of the Saints, which records travels with Ismael Khan’s troops and a visit to Herat in wartime, is also excellent. Another very fine book, though not by a journalist but a barrister and poet, is Peregrine Hodson’s Under a Sickle Moon.
On the history and ethnography of Afghanistan Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan is definitive. He was a prehistoric archaeologist and discovered many Neolithic remains. Pre-eminent amongst books on the classical period is Robin Lane Fox’s Alexander the Great, one of the great biographies in English. A lesser known book by Lane Fox relates the history of Alexander to his exhaustive travels in Iran and Afghanistan; The Search for Alexander, published only in America, is fascinating on Ai Khanoum and illustrated with pictures that have never been published elsewhere. Mortimer Wheeler’s Flames Over Persepolis is also excellent on the archaeology of the Bactrian Greek kingdom. For a modern roundup of academic knowledge on the Bactrian kingdom today, Frank Holt’s Thundering Zeus is unsurpassed. Holt writes extremely well and this book transcends the academic milieu. So does Toynbee’s Between Oxus and Jumna, a fascinating overview and interpretation of the movement of peoples through Afghanistan, which he described – accurately – as one of the great roundabouts of history.
The Taliban war provoked a spate of books by journalists who rediscovered the country in 2001. Top of the list must come Christina Lamb’s The Sewing Circles of Herat, a personal account of the history of the jihad and the Taliban war.
On the First Afghan War, the first volume of the memoirs of Flashman VC, the Rugby fag-roaster, are essential and based on meticulous historical reconstruction. The book is Flashman by George Macdonald Fraser. Another eyewitness account is Lady Sale’s Account of the Recent Disasters in Afghanistan by one of the few people to survive the war. An interesting book, which throws a previously unknown sidelight on the war is Ben Macintyre’s Josiah the Great, an account of the American adventurer appointed Prince of Ghor just before the Afghan War whose story inspired Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. His journey across the Hindu Kush is followed by our Expeditions to Ajar and Bamiyan.
Other books on the First Afghan War and its background are: ‘Bokhara’ Burnes’s Cabool: Being a Personal Narrative of a Journey to and a Residence in that City (1842) which is interesting not least because Burnes provoked the riot that led to his death and the war. The First Afghan War and its Causes (1867) by Sir Henry Durand is authoritative on the war.
The British learned little from the disaster of the First Afghan War and it was replayed again in 1879. The best contemporary book on this is Howard Hensman’s The Afghan War of 1879-80. Hensman was a journalist covering the war. Colonel R A Mitford’s To Caubul with the Cavalry Brigade is great fun, too.
The North West Frontier remained a flashpoint on the British Empire’s boundary and Winston Churchill’s first book An Account of the Malakand Field Force (1898) contains some pertinent remarks about the bloodthirsty habits of the Pathan tribesmen and it should not be forgotten that its author went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Slightly later, Arnold Keppel’s Gun Running on the North West Frontier (1907) is illuminating.
On the Great Game, Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game and Meyer and Brysac’s Tournament of Shadows are essential. As is Kipling’s Kim, as well as being one of the great books in English by another Nobel Prize winner.
Muslim rulers were in the habit of writing memoirs. The most famous is the Babur-nama, the autobiography of the first Moghul Emperor of India, who is buried in Kabul, containing stories of war, poetry, hunting and picnics. Tamerlaine also wrote a memoir, the Mulfizat i Timur. Abdur Rahman, the late-nineteenth century Amir of Afghanistan wrote a fascinating set of Memoirs of which the editor says ‘if you like Babur, you will love Rahman.’
Books by H W Bellew are always worth reading. He is a neglected writer, probably because he is simply too politically incorrect for today. His account of a Muslim-Hindu riot in Afghanistan over the forcible circumcision of a Hindu boy had to be cut from the Traveler’s Companion but is one of the funniest and most true to life passages I have read in a nineteenth-century travel book.
One of the first English books on Afghanistan is Mountstuart Elphinstone’s Account of the Kingdom of Kabul first published in 1815. Elphinstone was ADC to Wellesley in the First Mahratta War and in 1806 became the first envoy to Kabul, charged with securing a treaty of friendship. It is the definitive picture of Afghanistan before the changes of the nineteenth-century. Next came Charles Masson with A Narrative of Various Journeys in Baloochistan and Afghanistan and the Panjab including a Residence in those countries from 1826-1838. Masson’s eye missed very little (except Ai Khanoum, which he almost discovered) and he rediscovered the Greek kingdom of Bactria from coins collected in Afghanistan. His Legends of Afghan Countries is interesting, too. The other essential book from this period is Ariana Antiqua by Wilson and Masson – a compendium of their knowledge of Afghanistan, subtitled A Descriptive Account of the Antiquities and Coins of Afghanistan with a Memoir of the Buildings called Topes (1841). Their work on the Bactrian coins was only superseded in the 1980s by Frank Holt’s brilliant reclassification.