Afghan Ethnology

Abstract

THE events now in progress on the north-western frontier of British India have for the third time in this century directed the serious attention of statesmen, historians, and ethnologists to the remarkable people who give their name, or rather one of their names, to the north-eastern division of the Iranian table-land. During the empire of the Sassanides the whole of this region, from Persia proper to the right bank of the Indus and from the Koh-i-Baba, Ghor and other western continuations of the Hindu-Kûsh to the Arabian Sea was known as Khorasan, that is, Khoristan, the Land of the Sun or the East. This term, with the gradual reduction of the Persian sway, has shrunk to the proportions of a province on the north-eastern frontier of the Shah's estates, and has been replaced further east by the ethnical expressions Afghanistan and Balochistan, the lands of tbe Afghans and Baloches. But these expressions, as so frequently happens, are so far misnomers and deceiving that the lands in question harbour many other peoples besides those from whom they are now named. In Balochistan, for instance, the most numerous, powerful, and influential element is not the Baloch at all, but the still unfathomed Brahûi, from which circumstance it has even been suggested that the country ought ratber to be called Brahuistan. A similar suggestion could not certainly well be made with regard to Afghanistan, for here there is no other people who can for a moment compare with the Afghans in numbers or political importance. Still the subjoined rough estimate of the population according to nationalities will sbow that it is very far from being homogeneous:—