HURTAUL, s. Hind. from Skt. haritalaka, hartāl, haritāl, yellow arsenic, orpiment.
c. 1347.—Ibn Batuta seems oddly to confound it with camphor. "The best (camphor) called in the country itself al-ḥardāla, is that which attains the highest degree of cold."—iv. 241.
c. 1759.—"... hartal and Cotch, Earth-Oil and Wood-Oil...."—List of Burmese Products, in Dalrymple's Or. Reper. i. 109.
HUZĀRA, n.p. This name has two quite distinct uses.
(a.) Pers. Hazāra. It is used as a generic name for a number of tribes occupying some of the wildest parts of Afghanistan, chiefly N.W. and S.W. of Kabul. These tribes are in no respect Afghan, but are in fact most or all of them Mongol in features, and some of them also in language. The term at one time appears to have been used more generally for a variety of the wilder clans in the higher hill countries of Afghanistan and the Oxus basin, much as in Scotland of a century and a half ago they spoke of "the clans." It appears to be merely from the Pers. hazār, 1000. The regiments, so to speak, of the Mongol hosts of Chinghiz and his immediate successors were called hazāras, and if we accept the belief that the Hazāras of Afghanistan were predatory bands of those hosts who settled in that region (in favour of which there is a good deal to be said), this name is intelligible. If so, its application to the non-Mongol people of Wakhān, &c., must have been a later transfer. [See the discussion by Bellew, who points out that "amongst themselves this people never use the term Hazārah as their national appellation, and yet they have no name for their people as a nation. They are only known amongst themselves by the names of their principal tribes and the clans subordinate to them respectively." (Races of Afghanistan, 114.)]
c. 1480.—"The Hazāra, Takdari, and all the other tribes having seen this, quietly submitted to his authority."—Tarkhán-Náma, in Elliot, i. 303. For Takdari we should probably read Nakudari; and see Marco Polo, Bk. I. ch. 18, note on Nigudaris.
c. 1505.—Kabul "on the west has the mountain districts, in which are situated Karnûd and Ghûr. This mountainous tract is at present occupied and inhabited by the Hazâra and Nukderi tribes."—Baber, p. 136.
1508.—"Mirza Ababeker, the ruler and tyrant of Káshghar, had seized all the Upper Hazáras of Badakhshán."—Erskine's Baber and Humáyun, i. 287. "Hazáraját báládest. The upper districts in Badakhshán were called Hazáras." Erskine's note. He is using the Tarīkh Rashīdī. But is not the word Hazáras here, 'the clans,' used elliptically for the highland districts occupied by them?
[c. 1590.—"The Hazárahs are the descendants of the Chaghatai army, sent by Manku Ḳáán to the assistance of Huláku Khán.... They possess horses, sheep and goats. They are divided into factions, each covetous of what they can obtain, deceptive in their common intercourse and their conventions of amity savour of the wolf."—Āīn, ed. Jarrett, ii. 402.]
(b.) A mountain district in the extreme N.W. of the Punjab, of which Abbottābād, called after its founder, General James Abbott, is the British head-quarter. The name of this region apparently has nothing to do with Hazāras in the tribal sense, but is probably a survival of the ancient name of a territory in this quarter, called in Sanskrit Abhisāra, and figuring in Ptolemy, Arrian and Curtius as the kingdom of King Abisarēs. [See M‘Crindle, Invasion of India, 69.]