Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

The Kurds.—A line drawn obliquely across Persia from Biluchistan towards the north-west brings us to another frontier population; a population conterminous with the Semitic Arabs of Mesopotamia, and the unplaced Armenians. These are mountaineers—the Kurds of Kurdistan. Name for name, they are the Carduchi of the Anabasis. Name for name, they are the Gordyæi. Name for name, they are, probably, the Chaldæi and Khasd-im—a fact which engenders a difficult complication, since the Chaldæi in the eyes of nine writers out of ten—though not in those of so good an authority as Gesenius—are Semitic. The Kurd area is pre-eminently irregular in outline. It is equally remarkable for its physical conditions. It is a range of mountains—just the place wherein we expect to find old and aboriginal populations rather than new and intrusive ones. On the other hand, however, the Kurd form of the Persian tongue is not remarkable for the multiplicity and difference of its dialects—a fact which suggests the opposite inference. Kurds extend as far south as the northern frontier of Fars, as far north as Armenia, and as far west as the head-waters of the Halys. Have they encroached? This is a difficult question. The Armenians are a people who have generally given way before intruders; but the Arabs are rather intruders than the contrary. The Kurd direction is vertical, i.e. narrow rather than broad, and from north to south (or vice versâ) rather than from east to west (or vice versâ), a direction common enough where it coincides with the valley of a river, but rare along a mountain-chain. Nevertheless it reappears in South America, where the Peruvian area coincides with that of the Andes.

The Afghans.—The Afghan area is very nearly the water-system of the river Helmund. The direction in which it has become extended is east and north-east; in the former it has encroached upon Hindostan, in the latter upon the southern members of a class that may conveniently be called the Paropamisan. In this way (I think) the Valley of the Cabul River has become Afghan. Its relations to the Hazareh country are undetermined. Most of the Hazarehs are Mongolian in physiognomy. Some of them are Mongolian in both physiognomy and language. This indicates intrusion and intermixture—intrusion and intermixture which history tells us are subsequent to the time of Tamerlane. Phænomena suggestive of intrusion and intermixture are rife and common throughout Afghanistan. In some cases—as in that of Hazarehs—it is recent, or subsequent to the Afghan occupation; in others, it is ancient and prior to it.

Bokhara.—I have not placed the division containing the Tajiks of Balkh, Kúnduz, Durwaz, Badukshan, and Bokhara, on a level with that containing the Afghans, Kurds and Biluch, because I am not sure of its value. Probably, however, it is in reality as much a separate substantive class as any of the preceding. Here the intrusion has been so great, the political relations have been so separate, and the intermixed population is so heterogeneous as for it to have been, for a long time, doubtful whether the people of Bokhara were Persian or Turk. Klaproth, however, has shown that they belong to the former division, though subject to the Uzbek Turks. If so, the present Tajiks represent the ancient Bactrians and Sogdians—the Persians of the valley and water system of the Oxus. But what if these were intruders? I have little doubt about the word Oxus (Ok-sus) representing the same root as the Yak in Yaxsartes (Yak-sartes), and the Yaik, the name of the river flowing into the northern part of the Caspian. Now this is the Turanian name for river, a name found equally in the Turk, Uguari, and Hyperborean languages. At any rate, Bokhara is on an ethnological frontier.

But Bactria and Sogdiana were Persian at the time of Alexander’s successors; they were Persian at the very beginning of the historical period. Be it so. The historical period is but a short one, and there is no reason why a population should not encroach at one time and be itself encroached upon at another.

All the parts enumerated, and all the divisions, are so undoubtedly Persian, that few competent authorities deny the fact. The most that has ever been done is to separate the Afghans. Sir W. Jones did this. He laid great stress upon certain Jewish characteristics, had his head full of the Ten Tribes, and was deceived in a vocabulary of their languages. Mr. [Norris] also is inclined to separate them, but on different grounds. He can neither consider the Afghan language to be Indo-European, nor the Persian to be otherwise. His inference is true, if his facts are. But what if the Persian be other than Indo-European? In that case they are both free to fall into the same category.

But the complexities of the Persian population are not complete. There is the division between the Tajiks and the Iliyats; the former being the settled occupants of towns and villages speaking Persian, the others pastoral or wandering tribes speaking the Arab, Kurd, and Turk languages. That Tajik is the same word as the root Taoc, in Taoc-ene, a part of the ancient country of Persis (now Fars), and, consequently, in a pre-eminent Persian locality, is a safe conjecture. The inference, however, that such was the original locality of the Persian family is traversed by numerous—but by no means insuperable—difficulties. In respect to their chronological relations, the general statement may be made, that wherever we have Tajiks and Iliyats together, the former are the older, the latter the newer population. Hence it is not in any Iliyat tribe that we are to look for any nearer approach to the aborigines than what we find in the normal population. They are the analogues of the Jews and gipsies of Great Britain rather than of the Welsh—recent grafts rather than parts of the old stock. In Afghanistan this was not so clearly the case. Indeed, the inference was the other way.

The antiquities and history of Persia are too well-known to need more than a passing allusion. The creed was that of Zoroaster; still existent, in a modified (perhaps a corrupted, perhaps an improved) form, in the religion of the modern Parsis. The language of the Zoroastrian Scriptures was called Zend. Now the Zend is Indo-European—Indo-European and highly inflected. The inflexions, however, in the modern Persian are next to none; and of those few it is by no means certain that they are Zend in origin. Nevertheless, the great majority of modern Persian words are Zend. What does this mean? It means that the philologist is in a difficulty; that the grammatical structure points one way and the vocabulary another. This difficulty will meet us again.

India.—In the time of Herodotus, and even earlier, India was part of the Persian empire. Yet India was not Persia. It was no more Persia in the days of Darius than it is English now. The original Indian stock was and is peculiar—peculiar in its essential fundamentals, but not pure and unmodified. The vast extent to which this modification implies encroachment and intermixture is the great key to nine-tenths of the complexities of the difficult ethnology of Hindostan. Whether we look to the juxtaposition of the different forms of Indian speech, the multiform degrees of fusion between them, the sections and sub-sections of their creeds—legion by name,—the fragments of ancient paganism, the differences of skin and feature, or the institution of caste, intrusion followed by intermixture, and intermixture in every degree and under every mode of manifestation, is the suggestion.

And now we have our duality—viz. the primitive element and the foreign one—the stock and the graft. Nothing is more certain than that the graft came from the north-west. Does this necessarily mean from Persia? Such is the current opinion; or, if not from Persia, from some of those portions of India itself nearest the Persian frontier. There are reasons, however, for refining on this view. Certain influences foreign to India may have come through Persia, without being Persian. The proof that a particular characteristic was introduced into India viâ Persia is one thing: the proof that it originated in Persia is another. They have often, however, been confounded.

In the south of India the foreign element is manifested less than in the north; so that it is the south of India which exhibits the original stock in its fullest form. Its chief characteristics are referable to three heads, physical form, creed, and language. In respect to the first, the southern Indian is darker than the northern—cæteris paribus, i. e. under similar external conditions; but not to the extent that a mountaineer of the Dekhan is blacker than a Bengali from the delta of the Ganges. Descent, too, or caste influences colour, and the purer the blood the lighter the skin. Then the lips are thicker, the nose less frequently aquiline, the cheek-bones more prominent, and the eyebrows less regular in the southrons. The most perfect form of the Indian face gives us regular and delicate features, arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, an oval contour, and a clear brunette complexion. All this is Persian.