His face is aged because his jawbone is shattered and sunken like that of an old man without his dentures in place. His name is Maulavi Abdul Wakil. He is a mullah and an Afghan mujahed. Even prior to the Soviet invasion, he fought the Taraki and Amin regimes. Now he is left with only two dreams: he wishes to travel to Mecca and to die as a martyr in the jihad for Afghanistan.
But in this land that has been a chessboard for invading tribes and conquerors from the earliest Aryans to Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan, the face could easily have been another - perhaps even the first Afghan face known to history. On an oblong limestone pebble from the upper- Paleolithic era some 20,000 years ago is fixed the stoic gaze of an old man. Little seems to have changed in the features over the centuries.
Afghanistan, historians are revealing, turns out to be the earliest settled homeland of the ancestors of the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples. The Celts of Britain, Ireland, and Spain, the Norsemen of Scandinavia, the ancient Goths and modern Germans, the Slavs, the Greeks and Romans, the Hindus and Persians - all, it seems, can trace their origins to the same momentous valleys of the Oxus River in present-day Afghanistan.
This earliest recorded invasion of Afghanistan, that of the Aryans crossing the ancient Oxus River, is reported as follows: "Yama the king, son of Vivasvat, the assembler of men, departed to the mighty streams and explored the way for many. Yama was the first who found for us the way. This home is not to be taken from us." This hymn is contained in the Rig-Veda, the oldest of Indian scriptures and now considered scruti (revealed truth) by Hindus. The hymn clearly describes a very literal hero as emigrating across the great river with a body of Aryan followers. The last line seems to foreshadow the continual invasions of centuries to come.
Through the figurative language of the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of Zoroastrianism and of the great Persian Empire, we find further historical facets of this same legend; "Then I, who am Ahura Mazda [God], created for him the instruments of conquest, a golden plough and a spear of gold. Yima is to be ruler there." Thus, by cultivation of the new lands and subjugation of native tribes, was born Aryana, ancient Afghanistan. And Yima (Yama in the Vedas) ruled from his capital of Bakhtar, "beautiful city of high flags."
According to scholar Albert Pike, "Yima is a genuine historical … hero, entitled to be named The First." And, Yima's Bakhtar, "mother of cities," continued to play a prominent role for centuries.
From this cultural hub emanated a life-style still embedded in modern Afghan society. These early Aryans were noted as a proud and martial race emerging from a herding society into a more settled agrarian life. They were essentially democratic with a tribal structure organized around elected chiefs. But foremost in importance was the family unit, which was patrilineal and patriarchal. Each family patriarch offered milk, soma, (a liquor) and animal sacrifices at the sacred fire of his own hearth - the center of domestic life. In their religious hymns the Aryans boasted of their valor and prayed to their gods for success in battle, new lands to plow, and numerous sons and
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