Lane, George

English

SOAS Research Online

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and AfricanStudieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/BSOAdditional services for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereWILLEM VOGELSANG: The Afghans. (The Peoples of Asia.) x, 382 pp. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.GEORGE LANEBulletin of the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies / Volume 66 / Issue 01 / February 2003, pp 100 ­ 101DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X03380061, Published online: 03 July 2003Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X03380061How to cite this article:GEORGE LANE (2003). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 66, pp 100­101 doi:10.1017/S0041977X03380061Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 195.195.176.1 on 30 Oct 2012100 do with these technical aspects of book production. His book is roughlydivided into two parts—the first three chapters, giving the background, takeup 73 pages, while his last two chapters on the major themes and aestheticscover 65, and it is here in the second part that the book springs to life, for itallows his wide, first-hand experience of the paintings to be displayed. Grabarclearly loves his subject; he has written on it for years in many articles (howrefreshing that he does not make reference to these by title, but only byinference!) and has thought long and deep on the implications. He touches onthe question of a mystical dimension to the paintings, a subject extensivelyresearched by Anne-Marie Schimmel and Christoph J. Bürgel, but remainsuneasy because of the lack of knowledge of the circumstances in which thepaintings were created. The huge amount of work still to be done on thesubject springs off the page so that a student should be inspired to see areasfor future research. And this too is wonderfully refreshing—it is only a scholarwho truly loves his work who can admit to gaps in his knowledge and pointthe way forward. The many references within the text to studies by others inthe subject read almost like a report on Grabar's ability as a teacher, for mostof the new generation he quotes learned their craft at his feet. It must beadmitted, as a word of criticism, that the book is not always easy to digest—at times where a survey is made of, say, the manuscripts and collections,someone less familiar with the cited documents can get bogged down in thereferences. It is hard, however, to see how this could be avoided in such anambitious and comprehensive book; it is only a word of warning to thosewho expect the subtitle to indicate a superficial approach. On the contrary,the reader, whether new to the subject or not, will be asked to think long andhard. His text, as Grabar explains is the case in the subject of his book, is theprimary concern, and just as essential to allow an understanding of thetreasure-trove of images.  :The Afghans.(The Peoples of Asia.) x, 382 pp. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.Willem Vogelsang's study of Afghanistan and the Afghans went to press justbefore the events of September 11 2001, and the subsequent repercussions forAfghanistan are addressed only briefly in the preface. However, this in noway detracts from the value of this book, by an eminent Leiden scholar, as acomprehensive overview of Afghanistan's history and peoples from ancienttimes to the modern era.Vogelsang's deep knowledge of and interest in archaeology and ancient‘Iran’ are reflected in the chapters he devotes to the Indo-Iranian invasionsof the second millennium , the Persian Achaemenids, and the advent ofHellenism in the wake of Alexander the Great. For Vogelsang, Alexander'scampaigns in Afghanistan were particularly important in view of the numberof ‘geographers, botanists, historians, biographers and others [who] collecteda wealth of information about the campaign itself and about the terrain andthe people the Macedonians encountered’ (p. 116). Forty per cent of the bookis devoted to pre-Islamic Afghanistan, a period often marginalized in studiesof medieval and modern history.The opening chapters of this book look firstly at the geography and101geology of the Hindu Kush and secondly at the ethnic patchwork thatconstitutes modern Afghanistan. The term ‘Afghan’ is first unambiguouslyrecorded in the tenth-century Persian work, the Hudud al-"A9 lam, and itbecomes a common term in the histories and travelogues of the medievalperiod. It would seem generally to refer to the Pathan tribes, though itsometimes encompasses all tribes inhabiting the Hindu Kush mountain region.Vogelsang commits more space to examining the Pathans than to the otherethnic groups that make up Afghanistan no doubt because the Pathans havealways been the dominant group in the area and account for between 40 and50 per cent of the population. However, space is given to such little-knowngroups as the Aymaq and Pasha'i speaking Dihga:n.Post-Islamic conquest history and the modern era are covered in nine wellfootnoted chapters, while the advent of Islam is discussed in one revealingchapter depicting Afghanistan from the mid-seventh century until the mid-ninth century as a battlefield shared by Arabs, Chinese, and Tibetans fightingfor control of the ‘Silk Road’ and the passes between east and west. It isoften forgotten that Afghanistan is more a Central Asian rather than a MiddleEastern state.The chapters covering the Islamic period and the modern era are ofnecessity narrative in style and afford only an outline of events—footnotesare provided for scholars interested in additional research and the amplethirty pages of bibliography supply much food for further scholarly pursuit.However, for what is in many ways an historical account there is a noticeablelack, either listed or cited, of primary source material, much of which is nowreadily available in edited and translated form.Willem Vogelsang has written a comprehensive overview of a region nowvery much in the public eye and the welcome result is a readable, lucid andeasily accessible guide to what in many ways is a painfully complex subject.   :Pa: li: a grammar of the language of the Therava:da Tipit1aka, with aconcordance to Pischel's Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen.(Indian Philology and South Asian Studies, 3.) 385 pp. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter, 2001. €128.Since the early 1990s, indological research has produced a number of signalreference works pertaining to Pali and Middle Indo-Aryan philology andliterature. In some cases, these publications were revised, edited and updatedreprints of earlier achievements, such as Oskar von Hinüber's Das ältereMittelindisch im Überblick (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademieder Wissenschaften, Phil-Hist Klasse, 467, 2001, first published in 1985) orK. R. Norman's emended version of Batakrishna Ghosh's English translationof Wilhelm Geiger's Pa: li Literatur und Sprache (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner,1916) produced for the Pali Text Society (Oxford, 1994) under the title A Pa: ligrammar. Other works contain expositions of important new research. Twonotable publications of this category are Oskar von Hinüber's A handbook of

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