[Tavernier writes: "The remainder of the people, who do not belong to either of these four castes, are called Pauzecour." This word Mr. Ball (ii. 185) suggests to be equivalent to either [pariah] or [phansigar]. Here he is in error. Pauzecour is really Skt. Pancha-Gauḍa, the five classes of northern Brahmans, for which see Wilson, (Indian Caste, ii. 124 seqq.).]

TIBET, n.p. The general name of the vast and lofty table-land of which the Himālaya forms the southern marginal range, and which may be said roughly to extend from the Indus elbow, N.W. of Kashmīr, to the vicinity of Sining-fu in Kansuh (see [SLING]) and to Tatsienlu on the borders of Szechuen, the last a distance of 1800 miles. The origin of the name is obscure, but it came to Europe from the Mahommedans of Western Asia; its earliest appearance being in some of the Arab Geographies of the 9th century.

Names suggestive of Tibet are indeed used by the Chinese. The original form of these (according to our friend Prof. Terrien de la Couperie) was Tu-pot; a name which is traced to a prince so called, whose family reigned at Liang-chau, north of the Yellow R. (in modern Kansuh), but who in the 5th century was driven far to the south-west, and established in eastern Tibet a State to which he gave the name of Tu-pot, afterwards corrupted into Tu-poh and Tu-fan. We are always on ticklish ground in dealing with derivations from or through the Chinese. But it is doubtless possible, perhaps even probable, that these names passed into the western form Tibet, through the communication of the Arabs in Turkestan with the tribes on their eastern border. This may have some corroboration from the prevalence of the name Tibet, or some proximate form, among the Mongols, as we may gather both from Carpini and Rubruck in the 13th century (quoted below), and from Sanang Setzen, and the Mongol version of the Bodhimor several hundred years later. These latter write the name (as represented by I. J. Schmidt), Tūbet and Tōbōt.

[c. 590.—"Tobbat." See under [INDIA].]

851.—"On this side of China are the countries of the Taghazghaz and the Khākān of Tibbat; and that is the termination of China on the side of the Turks."—Relation, &c., tr. par Reinaud, pt. i. p. 60.

c. 880.—"Quand un étranger arrive au Tibet (al-Tibbat), il éprouve, sans pouvoir s'en rendre compte, un sentiment de gaieté et de bien être qui persiste jusqu'au départ."—Ibn Khurdādba, in J. As. Ser. vi. tom. v. 522.

c. 910.—"The country in which lives the goat which produces the musk of China, and that which produces the musk of Tibbat are one and the same; only the Chinese get into their hands the goats which are nearest their side, and the people of Tibbat do likewise. The superiority of the musk of Tibbat over that of China is due to two causes; first, that the musk-goat on the Tibbat side of the frontier finds aromatic plants, whilst the tracts on the Chinese side only produce plants of a common kind."—Relation, &c., pt. 2, pp. 114-115.

c. 930.—"This country has been named Tibbat because of the establishment there of the Himyarites, the word thabat signifying to fix or establish oneself. That etymology is the most likely of all that have been proposed. And it is thus that Di'bal, son of 'Alī-al-Khuzā'ī, vaunts this fact in a poem, in which when disputing with Al-Kumair he exalts the descendants of Ḳaṭḷān above those of Nizāar, saying:

"'Tis they who have been famous by their writings at the gate of Merv,

And who were writers at the gate of Chīn,