1 1 Balkh and the Sasanians: Economy and Society of Northern Afghanistan as Reflected in the Bactrian Economic Documents Khodadad Rezakhani In study of ancient history, seldom does it happen that one can find sources directly related to everyday life of the ordinary people. The regular tools of the historians, texts, stop short of commenting the life of the people and concern themselves most often with politics or religion. Economy is mostly glanced upon by the study of coins, which mostly indicat commerce and market activity and tell us less about production of goods and the non-market oriented economy. Archaeology can be exceptionally useful in understanding the exploitation of land by people and the way they lived, grew their food, or manipulated their environment. This, sadly, has been done less for Afghanistan, where archaeology is most often interested in finds of more conventional archaeological goods such as art objects and monumental architecture 1 . This is why it has been an extra-ordinary event, at least for the history of the Iranian World, for a large collection of primary material relating to economy to have surfaced. These documents, dubbed the “Bactrian Documents” 2 are a collection of records of economic transactions, marriage contracts, slave manumissions, tax lists, and correspondence that have 1 D. W. MacDowall and M. Taddei, “The Pre-Muslim Period,” in The Archaeology of Afghanistan: From Earliest Times to the Timurid Period, edited by F. R. Allchin and Norman Hammond (London: Academic Press, 1978), 255. 2 Sims-Williams, Nicholas. Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, I. Legal and Economic Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 (BD1). & ibid. Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan II: Letters and Buddhist Texts. London, 2007. (Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, Vol.2, pt. 4) (BD2). I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to Prof. Sims-Williams who has been very kind in providing me with the information I have needed, including unpublished articles and an electronic copy of the earlier version of BD2.