Rethinking History: Returning to Archives and Documents: (Re-)Discovering the Firuzkuh Documents from Afghanistan

The Fīrūzkūh Papers are about one hundred documents in Persian from the 11th and 12th century AD (Ghurid era) which were found in 1991 in a cave by locals from the Ghalmīn area, 40 kms north of Fīrūzkūh, the centre of Ghūr province in Afghanistan. These documents were presented to the President of Afghanistan in 2020 and are currently kept in the National Archives of Afghanistan in Kabul. The corpus includes legal and administrative documents, tithes and taxes, personal and government letters, religious and mystical documents, and lists of goods. These documents were published in Afghanistan in 2009 by Nabi Saqee and Khwaja Muhammad. Reza Huseini, an Afghan scholar at Cambridge University, has published an article in English about Muqaddam’s role in these documents. Invisible East is currently translating, analysing, and digitizing these documents. The documents are to be published soon at the University of Oxford.

Nabi Saqee is a Document Research Assistant with the Invisible East programme, University of Oxford. He completed his BA in Persian Language and Literature from Kabul University, and his MA in Social Science from the American University of Afghanistan. For twelve years he taught Persian language and literature, teaching methods and the history of Afghanistan after Islam in Afghanistan. In addition to this, Saqee worked as a human rights activist and civil society activist in the Ghor province and as a researcher in the central office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Saqee has also published several articles in Afghan local and national newspapers and magazines in the fields of history, politics, Islamic studies, literature, human rights, and the ethnicities of Afghanistan. Saqee’s academic publications include several papers on the history of post-Islamic Ghor, Persian manuscripts, literature and folklore. He authored The Story of Firouzkoh City, Barghaayi az Yak Fasl, Ghor and Ghorjestan and two books of poetry, Lost Love and The Minute 90. His research interests include ancient history, Persian manuscripts, and the folklore and anthropology of old Khorasan.