Thursday 14 December 2017

Spy satellites are revealing Afghanistan’s lost empires


Among the team’s recent finds are 119 caravanserais from the late 16th and early 17th centuries spaced approximately every 20 kilometers—roughly a day’s journey with a large caravan—across Afghanistan’s forbidding southern deserts. The enormous mudbrick buildings typically extended the length of a U.S. football field on each side and housed hundreds of people and thousands of camels. They line routes that linked the capital of the powerful Safavid Empire, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, with the Mughal Empire that then dominated the Indian subcontinent.

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