'The lands of the Eastern Caliphate Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem conquest to the time of Timur' [‎350] (393/586)

35°
[chap.
camels, known as Bactrian (Bukhti), the best in all central Asia.
Ibn Batiitah. who visited Kabul in the next century, says that it
had then sunk to be a mere village, inhabited by the tribe of
Persians known as Afghans (Al-Afghan).
The Kabul river is an affluent of the Indus, and is formed by
the junction of two streams coming down from the Hindii Kush
range, the mountains to the north of Kabul 1 . At the eastern
source are the celebrated silver mines, known to the Arabs as
Banjahir (for Panj-hir, or c Five Hills/ in the dialect of the country),
from which large quantities of the precious metal were obtained,
and Banjahir became a mint city under the Saffarid princes in the
3rd (9th) century, the dirhams, of course, bearing the name also
of the Abbasid Caliph. Banjahir city is described by Ibn Hawkal
as standing on a hill, and inhabited by 10,000 miners, who w r ere
an unruly folk, much given to evil living. Jarbayah was a neigh
bouring town, also lying on the Banjahir, or Kabul river, which
thence flowed out towards the plains of India, past Far wan,
a large town w T ith a mosque. Mukaddasi further mentions the
town of Shiyan in the district of Askimasht, where there was
a wondrous spring, and a fine mosque built by the Arab general
Kutaybah-ibn-Muslim, who had commanded the troops at the
time of the first Moslem conquest. Yaktlt gives us a long account
of these silver mines with their population of riotous miners. He
says that the whole mountain side was hollowed out in caverns,
where men worked in the bowels of the earth by torch-light. The
people were given over entirely to a species of gambling, men
found themselves rich one day and paupers on the morrow; they
would recklessly spend 300,000 dirhams (^i 2,000) in the mere
digging of a new shaft. The ruin of the place was due to Changiz
Khan • and when Ibn Battitah, who speaks of the blue waters of
the neighbouring stream, came here in the 8th (14th) century, he
found no silver mine, but only the disused tunnels of the former
workings.
1 Hindu Kush, in Persian, means (the Mountain that) 'kills the Hindus/
Ibn Batutah (iii. 84) is one of the first to give this name, which is unknown to
the earlier Arab geographers. He explains that the range was so called
because many Indian slaves died in crossing it when journeying to Persia.