Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan Book

I picked this book up in, of all places, Loreto, Baja California Sur, MX in the only store I've seen in Mexico totally devoted to books, and most of them were in English. Loreto is a small town on the shores of the Gulf of California that caters to tourists and has an American ex-pat community.

Bones is a discourse on not only on Alexander's time in what was then known as Bactria, but also an extended essay on the difficulties of gaining information on this period. In so doing, you learn a lot about the roots of current Afghanistan problems: the closed tribal culture, a nationally counterproductive distrust of authority, the conflicts of tribal warfare, a sizable drug economy, and corruption in government.

One of the things I learned from this book is the important role numismatics played in relaying the history of this area. With Alexander's army came historians who wrote about Alexander and his campaigns. But the time before and after Alexander are largely bereft of illumination. If it were not for the durability of coinage, the existence of Afghanistan kingdoms may have never come to light.

It is unfortunate that so many of the treasures that would have informed us about the events and personalities of that period have been plundered, mostly by the Afghans themselves.