Nancy Dupree dedicated her life to the country’s heritage

American historian Nancy Hatch Dupree, who dedicated most of her life to preserving Afghanistan’s heritage, died in a Kabul hospital on Sunday aged 89.

Ms. Dupree first arrived in the Afghan capital in 1962 as the wife of a diplomat. In the city she met her second husband, the late American archaeologist Louis Dupree, and developed a lifelong passion for the Muslim country.

Over the next five decades she travelled throughout the country, wrote five guidebooks and documented the war-torn nation’s past.

Her death was confirmed by Waheed Wafa, executive director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University where tens of thousands of documents preserved by the Duprees are kept.

“Very saddened by the death of #NancyDupree. Afghans value and respect her services of decades for #Afghanistan. Nancy will be missed! RIP,” wrote Afghanistan’s Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.

Ms. Dupree and her husband lived in Afghanistan until the late 1970s.

Her husband died in 1989 and she moved back to Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the ruling Taliban in 2001.

With the help of the new government, Ms. Dupree created a centre to preserve the couple’s priceless collection of records for researchers.

The Afghanistan Center houses more than 1,00,000 documents in the country’s two official languages, Dari and Pashto, as well as English and other European languages.

The centre also provides reading materials to hundreds of libraries around the country, a reflection of Ms. Dupree’s belief that knowledge was key to Afghanistan’s recovery from decades of conflict.