About
An independent historical archive of the Pashtun belt
پوھان کا تعارف
POHAN Foundation collects, preserves, digitises and publishes the documented history of the Pashtun belt, beginning with Waziristan. Clarity depends on citing where knowledge comes from.
Our mission
Document the region as one connected record
People, places, events, books, documents, photographs and maps are catalogued as linked entities rather than separate pages. Opening a person shows the places they acted in, the events they appear in, and the books and documents that name them.
Our vision is to become the most trusted and comprehensive historical archive of the Pashtun belt, and a working centre for research, education and cultural preservation. That means holding ourselves to archival practice rather than publishing convenience: nothing enters the archive without a source, and nothing is presented as settled when it is not.
“History is not just the past — it is the foundation of our identity and our future.”
What we do
Five working commitments
Collect
Rare books, documents, photographs, maps and oral histories, from local and international sources.
Preserve
Physical material handled and stored to archival standards, with condition recorded.
Digitise
High-resolution scanning with metadata, so the record survives independently of any one copy.
Research
Support for students and scholars with citations, finding aids and downloadable metadata.
Educate
Publishing referenced history for a general readership in four languages.
Verification
What our confidence marks mean
Every record in POHAN carries one of three marks. They are not decorations — they are instructions for how far a reader should rely on the entry.
- Verified source
- The claim rests on a document or publication held or directly cited here, and the citation names archive, series and page.
- Partially verified
- A credible source exists but is incomplete, second-hand, or unconfirmed by a second independent record.
- Unverified / oral history
- Testimony or tradition preserved for its own value, published with its status stated so it is never mistaken for documentary proof.
On copyright: POHAN publishes full text only for public-domain material and documents we are legally permitted to reproduce. For books still in copyright we hold bibliographic records, tables of contents and references — never unauthorised scans.
Researcher resources