Finally will we mention hospitality, in which the Turks are better versed than the Iranian and Semitic nations, and certainly for very simple causes. As acknowledged, hospitality is observed in proportion to the degree in which a nation advances from a nomadic condition to a settled manner of living, and as Asia is generally far more prominent in this virtue than Europe, so are the Turks, the majority of whom are incarnate nomads, to be distinguished from the rest of Asiatics, who, long settled there, rejoice in an older civilisation. This must be considered a mere sketch of the common character of the Turks. Concerning the gradation of different races, we find the Buruts wilder, more savage than the remaining nomadic fellow races.[46] They are more superstitious, but also less malicious than, for example, the Kirghis and Turkomans, because, without having wholly deserted Shamanism, they know but little of Islam; and it is well known that the weaker a nomadic people's ideas of that religion are, the fewer are its vices, and the more tractable are they with strangers. The Kirghis, on the contrary, are in the chief features of character less warlike, although they can easily make up their minds to undertake a baranta (pillaging expedition). They form the greater part of Turkish nomads, are for the most part devoted to a wandering life; and whilst the Turkomans are in many places to be met with in a half settled state, for example, along the left shore of the Oxus, from Belkh as far as Tchardjuy, and in Khiva, one can only find very few examples among the Kirghis. They are easier to subjugate than other nomads, because they, as already stated, are more peaceable and less brave, still their colonization appears almost verging upon impossibility; at least it will require a gigantic task of Russia, if such be her design. The Karakalpaks, through their remarkable simplicity, are often considered foolish and dull. They represent the idiot among Central Asiatic nations, and many droll anecdotes are composed at their cost. In bravery they are even inferior to the Kirghis; they have seldom appeared as conquerors, and are seldom employed by others even as mercenaries. As they occupy themselves chiefly in breeding cattle, and like best to sojourn in woody regions, they are called by the Œzbegs, ayik (bear). Still, activity, benevolence and faithfulness, are everywhere adjudged to them. The Turkomans are notorious among all the races of Central Asia as the most restless adventurers, and rightly; for not only there, but throughout the whole globe, hardly can a second nation be found of such a rapacious nature, of such restless spirit and untameable licentiousness as these children of the desert. To rob, to plunder, to make slaves, is in the eye of the Turkoman an honourable business, by which he has lived for centuries. He considers those who think otherwise as stupid or mad, and yields in such a manner to this passion that he often commences plundering his own tribe, indeed, often his own family, in case he is baulked in foreign forays. As a very weak apology, it may be argued that they inhabit the wildest and most savage countries, where even keeping of cattle gives only a scanty revenue: still the fruits of their detestable trade hardly ever alleviate their pressing poverty, for they are just as dirty niggards, as avaricious, and starve often in the possession of riches as much as the poorest being. The Œzbegs play the fashionable among their fellow-races in Turkestan. They are not a little proud of the education which, through Islamitish civilisation, they obtained, and, starting from this point of superiority, wish to govern their nomadic brethren. Highly praiseworthy with them is their tenacious adherence to so many good points of their national character; which, in other places, is too easily transformed and disgraced by Islam. With the Œzbeg, there is, in spite of the hypocrisy and pretended holiness, which endeavour to spread themselves by Mohamedanism, still always very much honesty, uprightness, and Turkish open-heartedness, in which qualities they are considerably to be distinguished from the reprobate and vicious Tadjiks, and are truly worthy to govern the latter. The Œzbeg is, as far as personal knowledge has shown to me, the only Turk, from China to the Danube, who represents all the best side of the national character of the Turks.
CHAPTER XVII.
IRANIANS.
The Turanian people, but especially the already mentioned Turko-Tartaric tribes, have made themselves renowned in antiquity by their warlike disposition, and the wild untractable rudeness of their habits; but the Iranians, in strong contrast with these, have always been known for the delicacy of their habits and a brilliant state of civilisation. The former have ever appeared among their neighbours as spoilers, destroyers, and plunderers; the latter, on the contrary, as civilisers, propagators of the arts, and milder social relations.
For it is not only the whole Mohamedan region which embraced Persian civilisation, but even we Europeans have borrowed much from these wonderful people, which, partly through the channel of the ancient Greek and Byzantine culture, partly by a later contact of the Western with the Eastern countries, as, for example, in the Crusades, has naturally always reached us second hand. Iran from time immemorial was the seat of civilisation, and in the entire record of the civilisation of mankind we could in vain seek for a nation which, notwithstanding grand political revolutions, notwithstanding the copious foreign influx of the ancient spirit of its civilisation, could preserve so long and faithfully the character of its national existence as the Persian. There is a great difference between the doctrine of Zoroaster and that of the Arabian Prophet, and yet in the modern Persian almost all the features of the former character may be discovered, which the Greek historians trace out in the ancient Persian. In a hasty superficial glance this will not strike the eye so easily, for, according to outward appearance, it would be most difficult, amidst the agglomeration of tribes in the Persia of to-day, to find out the genuine Iranian. Yet a deeper insight would soon convince us of the truth of what has been said, and we should see that the Iranian has not only borrowed nothing in his customs and manner of thinking from the Semitic and Turanian elements, which for more than a thousand years have endangered his nationality, but has rather exerted over the latter a powerful influence. The cradle of the Iranian nation, as asserted by a modern ethnographer, namely, the learned Russian traveller, M. de Khanikoff, in his Memoirs, "Sur l'Ethnographie de la Perse," is the Eastern portion of modern Persia, and especially Southern Sigistan or Sistan, and Khorassan, which stretches out to the north-east. It is not only ethnography, but also history, which accords with this assertion. As Sigistan, the native place of Rustem, and other celebrated Iranian heroes of the classical age, is used as the scene of action by the narrators of fiction at this day, whenever they wish to describe something highly potent and ancient, so the old Belkh in Khorassan is declared to be the original source of religion and polite education, and Merv is pointed out as the spot where Adam received from the angel the first lesson in agriculture. In a word, whatever refers to the early ages is to be met with in the East, but never in the west.
The Iranian race, on its dispersion, as has been already remarked in a foregoing paragraph, took a direction from East to West; the Turanian scattered from South to North, and in two directions, one towards the North-East the other towards the North-West. The emigration occurred in those very ancient ages, of which we can have hardly the faintest conception; yet even here there are features of a common type which guide us like glittering stars through a night of uncertainty, and though the Iranian race has suffered much in modern times from the Turko-Tartar tribes, so superior to themselves in number, one can nevertheless detect in the groups lying scattered around, the separate rings of the former chain; precisely also as one recognises in the Western remnants, though in continual contact with Turanian and Semitic elements, the avowed Mede, so in the Eastern remnants one may recognise the primitive genuine Iranian.
This preceding opinion formed from personal conviction, and every one who carefully observes the Persian of modern Iran and Central Asia must perceive the same, receives a further confirmation in the learned investigations of our arrow-headed writings;[47] and it is chiefly the Iranian catalogue of people in the arrow-headed writings at Persepolis which enumerates all the nations of Iran, starting from the centre of the empire, Persepolis, and continuing in a west and eastern direction. Of course nothing positive will be perceived in these with reference to higher or lower antiquity concerning the physiognomical distinctions of one or another branch of the families, but that a substantial difference existed already in the early ages is hardly to be doubted. "The Semitic influences in the west," says Fr. Spiegel, "began very early during the existence of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdom, and lasted through the whole Achœmenian period. After the overthrow of the Achœmenian kingdom occurred the amalgamation with Greeks as well as Semitics, and so forth,"[48] As is rightly observed, for in the Southern provinces of Farsistan, Laristan, and Luristan, where the contact of the Iranian and Semitic elements from the earliest ages has remained undisturbed, we find in the person of the modern Persian the same physical characteristics that were described to us in these people by Herodotus, and later Greek authors. The spare form, which is more natural to the Western than to the Eastern, strongly reminds one of the principal feature of the Arabian, who is represented by Unsemitic tribes as nahif, haggard, and thin, whilst the Turk is kesif, blunt, and stout, the genuine Persian zarif, noble, and elegant.