The Warehouse of Bamiyan . opens an entirely new chapter in the economic, social and linguistic history of Khurasan in the heyday of the Mediaeval age. It is a first and . elaborate attempt at analyzing the Persian part of the "Bamiyan Papers". The features of rural economy and local tax system, in a region remote from the great urban centres which had monopolized the attention of chroniclers and, consequently, of modern historiography, are elucidated with a degree of precision unequalled in any part of the Iranian world of that time. Far from enduring stereotypes, we discover a society where rural communities manage to build strategies to circumvent tax oppression, where women sometimes manage farms, and where ongoing religious diversity can be suspected, at least in the case of the Jews whose great impact in the pre-Islamic period is more and more documented by a variety of sources . For us archaeologists, this area of the central Hindukush had long been associated with the now lost Buddhas of Bamiyan and the fossilized landscape of mountain castles. It now returns to real life.