Pata Khazana
Anthology of Pashto poetry
Pata Khazāna (Pashto: پټه خزانه, lit. 'Hidden Treasure') is the title of an old manuscript written by Mohammad Hotak in the Pashto language. According to its discoverer, the script contains an anthology of Pashto poetry, which precedes the earliest known works of Pashto literature by hundreds of years. Most experts consider it to be a forgery.
Discovery
The Afghan scholar Abdul Hai Habibi claimed to have discovered the manuscript in 1944. He claimed it was a 19th-century copy of an anthology of Pashto poetry written in 1729 in Kandahar by Shah Hussain Hotak. The anthology is a compilation of works of hitherto unknown poets dating back to the eighth century. Habibi published the manuscript as a facsimile in 1975 but did not make the original document available for historical testing due to the scholars not following the UN protocol. The original book resides at Afghan archives in Kabul for viewing.
Reception
Since the publication of the first edition of the book, some scholars have raised doubts about its authenticity. Habibi dismissed such critics, stating that their arguments were not "scientifically based".
“Pata Khazana” enters the record as anthology of Pashto poetry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pata, Khazana and Anthology can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1515449. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1729 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pata Khazana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.