Thus we have a wide field before us for inquiry into the early history of ethnographical movement in Asia, as it affected the relation between Europe and Afghanistan. Afghanistan (which is a modern political development) has ever held the landward gates of India. We cannot understand India without a study of that wide hinterland (Afghan, Persian, and Baluch) through which the great restless human tide has ever been on the move: now a weeping nation of captives led by tear-sodden routes to a land of exile; now a band of merchants reaching forward to the land of golden promise; or perchance an army of pilgrims marching with their feet treading deep into narrow footways to the shrines of forgotten saints; or perchance an armed host seeking an uncertain fate; a ceaseless, waveless tide, as persistent, as enterprising, and infinitely more complicated in its developments than the process of modern emigration, albeit modern emigration may spread more widely.
Living as we do in fixed habitations and hedged in not merely by narrow seas but by the conventionalities of civilized existence, we fail to realize the conditions of nomadic life which were so familiar to our Asiatic ancestors. Something of its nature may be gathered to-day from the Kalmuk and Kirghiz nomads of Central Asia. A day's march is not a day's march to them—it is a day's normal occupation. The yearly shift in search of fresh pasture is not a flitting on a holiday tour; it is as much a part of the year's life as the change of raiment between summer to winter. Everything moves; the home is not left behind; every man, woman, and child of the family has a recognised share in the general shift. Perhaps that of the Kirghiz man is the easiest. He smokes a lazy pipe in the bright sunshine and watches his boys strip off the felt covering of his wicker-built "kibitka," whilst his wife with floating bands of her white headdress fluttering in the breeze, and her quilted coat turned up to give more freedom to her booted legs, gets together the household traps in compact bundles for the great hairy camel to carry. Her efforts are not inartistic; long experience has taught her exactly where every household god can be stowed to the best advantage. Meanwhile the happy, good-looking Kirghiz girls are racing over the grass country after sheep, and ere long the little party is making its slow but sure way over the breezy steppes to the passes of the blue mountains, which look down from afar on to the warmer plains. And who has the best of it? The free-roving, untrammelled child of the plain, quite godless, and taking no thought for the morrow, or the carefully cultured and tight-fitted product of civilization to whom the motor and the railway represent the only thinkable method of progression? That, however, is not the point. What we wish to emphasize is the apparent inability on the part of many writers on the subject of ancient history and geography to realize the essential difference between then and now as regards human migratory movement.
There is often an apparent misconception that there is more movement in these days of railways and steamers and motors than existed ten centuries before Christ. The difference lies not in the comparative amount of movement but in the method of it. In one sense only is there more movement—there are more people to travel; but in a broader sense there is much less movement. Whole nations are no longer shifted at the will of the conqueror across a continent, trade seekers no longer devote their lives to the personal conduct of caravans; armies swelled to prodigious size by a tagrag following no longer (except in China) move slowly over the face of the land, devouring, like a swarm of locusts, all that comes in their way. Colonial emigration perhaps alone works on a larger scale now than in those early times; but taking it "bye and large," the circulation of the human race, unrestricted by political boundaries, was certainly more constant in the unsettled days of nomadic existence than in these later days of overgrown cities and electric traffic. If little or nothing is recorded of many of the most important migrations which have changed the ethnographic conditions of Asia, whilst at the same time we have volumes of ancient philosophy and mythology, it is because such changes were regarded as normal, and the current of contemporary history as an ephemeral phenomenon not worth the labour of close inquiry or a manuscript record.
Such a gazetteer as that presented to us by Herodotus would not have been possible had there not been free and frequent access to the countries and the people with whom it deals. It is impossible to conceive that so much accuracy of detail could have been acquired without the assistance of personal inquiry on the spot. If this is so, then the Persians at any rate knew their way well about Asia as far east as Tibet and India, and the Greeks undoubtedly derived their knowledge from Persia. When Alexander of Macedon first planned his expedition to Central Asia he had probably more certain knowledge of the way thither than Lord Napier of Magdala possessed when he set out to find the capital of Theodore's kingdom in Abyssinia, and it is most interesting to note the information which was possessed by the Greek authorities a century and a half before Alexander's time.
One notable occurrence pointing to a fairly comprehensive knowledge of geography of the Indian border by the Persians, was the voyage of the Greek Scylax of Caryanda down the Indus, and from its mouth to the Arabian Gulf, which was regarded by Herodotus as establishing the fact of a continuous sea. This voyage, or mission, which was undertaken by order of Darius who wished to know where the Indus had its outlet and "sent some ships" on a voyage of discovery, is most instructive. It is true that the accounts of it are most meagre, but such details as are given establish beyond a doubt that the expedition was practical and real. The Persian dominions then extended to the Indus, but there is no evidence that they ever extended beyond that river into the peninsula of India. The Indus of the Persian age was not the Indus of to-day, and its outlet to the sea presumably did not differ materially from that of the subsequent days of Alexander and Nearkos. Thanks to the careful investigations of the Bombay Survey Department, and the close attention which has been given to ancient landmarks by General Haig during the progress of his surveys, we know pretty certainly where the course of the Lower Indus must have been, and where both Scylax and Nearkos emerged into the Arabian Sea. The Indus delta of to-day covers an area of 10,000 square miles with 125 miles of coast-line, and it presents to us a huge alluvial tract which is everywhere furrowed by ancient river channels. Some of these are continuous through the delta, and can be traced far above it; others are traceable for only short distances. Without entering into details of the rate of progression in the formation of Delta (which can be gathered not only from the abandoned sites of towns once known as coast ports, but from actual observation from year to year), it may be safely assumed that the Indus of Alexander and Scylax emptied itself into the Ran of Kach, far to the south of its present debouchment. The volume of its waters was then augmented by at least one important river (the Saraswati), which, flowing from the Himalayas through what is now known as the Rajputana desert, was the source of widespread wealth and fertility to thousands of square miles where now there is nothing to be met with but sandy waste. As far as the Indus the Persian Empire is known to have extended, but no farther; and it was important to the military advisers of Darius that something should be known of the character of this boundary river.
Wherever the ships sent by Darius may have gone it is quite clear that they did not sail up the Indus, or there would have been no objective for an expedition which was organised to determine where the Indus met the sea by the process of sailing down that river. Moreover, the voyage up the Indus would have been tedious and slow, and could only have been undertaken in the cold weather with the assistance of native pilots acquainted with the ever-shifting bed of the river, which, so far as its liability to change of channel is concerned, must have been much the same in the days of Darius as it is at present. The possibility, therefore, is that Scylax made his way to the Upper Indus overland, for we are told that the expedition started from the city of Carpatyra in the Pactyan country. This in itself is exceedingly instructive, indicating that the Pactyans, or Pathans, or Pukhtu speaking peoples have occupied the districts of the Upper Indus for four-and-twenty centuries at least; and coincident with them we learn that the Aprytæ or Afridi shared the honour of being resident landowners. Nor need we suppose that the beginning of this history was the beginning of their existence. The Afridi may have rejoiced in his native hills ten or twenty centuries before he was written about by Herodotus. We need not stay to identify the site of Carpatyra. The Upper Indus valley is full of ancient sites. A century and a half later Taxilla was the recognized capital of the Upper Punjab, and Carpatyra meanwhile may have disappeared. Anyhow we hear of Carpatyra no more, nor has the ingenuity of modern research thrown any certain light on its position. It is, however, probably near Attok that we must look for it. Scylax made his way down the Indus in native craft that from long before his day to the present have retained their primitive form, a form which was not unlike that of the coast crawling "ships" of Darius. He proved the existence of an open water-way from the Upper Punjab to the Persian Gulf, and incidentally his expedition shows us that the chief lines of communication through the width of the Persian Empire were well known, and that the road from Susa to the Upper Indus was open. The outlying satrapies of the Persian Empire could never have been added one by one to that mighty power without definite knowledge of the way to reach them. It was not merely a spasmodic expedition, such as that of Scylax, which pointed the way to the conquests of the Far East; it was the gathered information of years of experience, and it was on the basis of this experience (unwritten and unrecorded so far as we know) that Alexander founded his plans of campaign.
The detailed list of peoples included in the satrapies of the Persian Empire, whilst it is more ethnographical than geographical in its character, is sufficient proof in itself of the existence of constant movement between Persia and the borderland of Afghanistan, which assuredly included commercial traffic. This enumeration has been compared with a catalogue of tribal contingents which swelled the great army of Xerxes, an independent statement, and therefore a valuable test to the general accuracy of Herodotus; and it is still further confirmed by the list of nations subject to the Persian king found in the inscriptions of Darius at Behistan and Persepolis. We are not immediately concerned with the satrapies included in Western Asia and Egypt, but when Herodotus makes a sudden departure from his rule of geographical sequence and introduces a satrapy on the remotest east of the Persian Empire, we immediately recognize that he touches the Indian frontier.
The second satrapy most probably corresponds with that part of Central Afghanistan south of the Kabul River, which lies west of the Suliman Hills and north of the Kwaja Amran or Khojak. Every name mentioned by Herodotus certainly has its counterpart in one or other of the tribes to be found there to this day, excepting the Lydoi (whose history as Ludi is fairly well known) and the Lasonoi, who have emigrated, the former into India and the latter to Baluchistan.
The seventh satrapy, again, comprised the Sattagydai, the Gandarioi, the Dadikai, and the Aparytai ("joined together"), an association of names too remarkable to be mistaken. The Sattag or Khattak, the Gandhari, the Dadi, and the Afridi are all trans-Indus people, and without insisting too strongly on the exact habitat of each, originally there can be little doubt that the seventh satrapy included a great part of the Indus valley.
The eleventh satrapy is also probably a district of the Indian trans-frontier, although Bunbury associates the name Kaspioi with the Caspian Sea. It is far more likely that the Kaspioi of Herodotus are to be recognized as the people of the ancient Kaspira or Kasmira, and the Daritæ as the Daraddesa (Dards) of the contiguous mountains. All Kashmir, even to the borders of Tibet (whence came the story of the gold-digging ants), was well enough known to the Persians and through them to Herodotus.