The Graeco-Bactrians were the heirs of Alexander’s Central Asian conquests. They forged a powerful, independent kingdom, centered in northern Afghanistan, which endured for over two centuries, At its height, this remarkable Hellenistic State encompassed an area comprising all of Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and some parts of Pakistan. Much of the history of the Graeco-Bactrians has been lost. Only fragments remain of the treatises of ...
The Hunzakutz, a high people in the western Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan, possess a shamanistic tradition centered around religious specialists known as bitan. These practitioners inhale the smile of burning juniper branches, dance to a special music, drink blood from a freshly severed goat’s head, enter into ecstatic trances, and converse with supernatural beings. An ethnographic and historical analysis of this little-known shamanistic tradition is ...
The people of Hunza who inhabit the western Karakoram mountains, live in one of the most formidable upland regions on earth. For centuries, they have met their subsistence requirements through a mixed agricultural pastoral economy based on the utilization of attitudinally defined and vertically arranged productive zones. Isolated in their remote, inhospitable, and resource-scare high-mountain environment, the Hunzakut have had to find practical solution to such ...