The new discovery by archaeologists comes from decades of spy satellites and drones.
Among the findings include huge caravanserai or outposts used by Silk Road travellers that were buried by the desert sands.
The archaeological sites are too dangerous to explore in person so the new approach, which is funded by a $2 million grant from the US State Department, enables researchers to study Afghanistan’s archaeological heritage safely, experts said in November at a meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Washington, DC.
David Thomas, an archaeologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia said: “I’d expect tens of thousands of archaeological sites to be discovered. Only when these sites are recorded can they be studied and protected.”
Some of the sites are caravanserai used by Silk Road travellers which date back to the 17th century.
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These mudbrick waystations had the potential of housing hundreds of people and their livestock and were interspersed every 12 miles Science reported.
The Silk Road was a network of routes from around the world, from Japan and Korea in the East to the Mediterranean Sea in the West.
According to UNESCO luxuries such as tea, precious gems, perfume, spices and of course, silk, from the East made their way west along these land-based routes for centuries.
Afghanistan sat at the centre of these ancient trade routes and therefore profited from all the trade that flowed through the region.
According to the United Nations Assistance Missions in Afghanistan (UNAMA), when the Silk routes were thriving, empires in the region amassed great wealth.
Once sea routes opened between India and China and the West in the 15th and 16th centuries, these routes, and the once-wealthy empires that benefited from them started to decline.
However, the new spy satellite imagery reveals that these trade routes were still flourishing centuries later.
The effort is also uncovering lost history from other periods of time.
Images collected in the 1970s are being reexamined to reveal hidden canals that thread through the Helmand and Sistan provinces of the country.
These canals were most likely built during the Parthian Empire and helped agriculture to develop.
The satellite images have also revealed the melting pot of religions that once thrived in the area, from Zoroastrian fire temples to Buddhist stupas.
The discoveries promise to expand scholars’ view of long-vanished empires while giving the nation a needed chance to protect its cultural heritage.