Afghanistan history...information please

Everyone is talking about Afghanistan, but before September 11, most Americans did not even know where it is. Our knowledge of that whole area is very thin. I erred when I said that the Pashtuns used to be called Parthians. In fact they were Pathans, a neighboring tribe. What the relationship is between these two tribes with almost identical names in I do not know. I suspect that they may be the same. Today the Pathans are known as Pashtu in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In all, the Pathans constitute one of the largest tribal groupings in the world.

All this brings back one of the unpleasant experiences of my childhood. We had to study a long poem by an English 19th century poet about an ancient heroic episode which took place in that area. I could not figure it out, and the teacher could not explain it. I suspect that the poet had been trained in classics at Oxford, since it took place in the area, mentioned by Herodotus, of the Oxus River, now known as the Amu Darya. It is one of the great rivers of Central Asia; its headwaters are in the very area of northern Afghanistan where fighting has been taking place.. I looked for Oxus in the Academic American Encyclopedia but found nothing. I then consulted my old faithful, the 11th edition of the Britannica, which is the same age as I and almost as battered. There I found a very long article saying that it had been much discussed in the 19th century because of the argument about its serving as an international boundary. The dispute may have inspired the poet. I remember too that the Pathans were famous because they could fire their arrows over the shoulders as the ran away. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Which seems to conflict with the Britannica statement that they are good fighters. This does not solve the problem as to the identity of the poet and the poem, Perhaps some Oxford WAISer can enlighten us,

Scavenging through the garbage of my memory, I dragged up the names of Ruslan and Ludmilla. John Heelan of the UK has an uncanny ability to find the text of things, so he kindly downloaded the text of the R&L story. It is a Finnish fairy tale as told by Pushkin, and has nothing to do with the Oxus. On reading the Pushkin text, several questions returned to my mind. I cannot understand why Russians swoon over Pushkin as their greatest writer. R&L is a crazy story of magic, much crazier than the magical Harry Potter story, a film I do not intend to see. I am more convinced than ever that fiction is dead, replaced by faction. When I first ran into Russians in Paris, they impressed me as being sincere but crazy. The Russian painter, Marine Timoshenko Goodier, who painted the Hercules Room in "The Hesperides" was a marvellous person, but also a crazy mystic to whose sermons I listed with my usual patience. Let me reassure you. I am sane, it's the other guy who's crazy.

Ronald Hilton - 11/23/01