Some light has been thrown on the connexion between the Tibetan race and certain tribes of central India, the Bhils and Kols; and it seems more probable that these tribes are the remnants of a Mongolian race which first displaced a yet earlier Negroid population, and was then itself shouldered out by a Caucasian irruption, than that they entered India by any of the northern passages within historic times. Mongolian settlements have lately been found very much farther extended into the border countries of north-west India than has been hitherto recognized. The Mingals, who, conjointly with the Brahuis, occupy the hills south of Kalat to the limits of the Rajput province of Las Bela, claim Mongolian descent, and traces of a Mongolian colony have been found in Makran.

The Malays, who occupy the peninsula and most of the islands of the Archipelago called after them, are Mongols apparently modified by their very different climate, and by the maritime life Malays. forced upon them by the physical conditions of the region they inhabit. As they are now known to us, they have undergone a process of partial civilization, first at the hands of the Brahminical Indians, from whom they borrowed a religion, and to some extent literature and an alphabet, and subsequently from intercourse with the Arabs, which has led to the adoption of Mahommedanism by most of them.

The name of Aryan has been given to the races speaking languages derived from, or akin to, the ancient form of Sanskrit, who now occupy the temperate zone extending from the Mediterranean, across the highlands of Asia Minor, Persia and Afghanistan, to Aryans. India. The races speaking the languages akin to the ancient Assyrian, which are now mainly represented by Arabic, have been called Semitic, and occupy the countries south-west of Persia, including Syria and Arabia, besides extending into North Africa. Though the languages of these races are very different they cannot be regarded as physically distinct, and they are both without doubt branches of the Melanochroi, modified by admixture with the neighbouring races, the Mongols, the Australoids and the Xanthochroi.

The Aryans of India are probably the most settled and civilized of all Asiatic races. This type is found in its purest form in the north and north-west, while the mixed races and the population referred to the Australoid type predominate in the peninsula and southern India. The spoken languages of northern India are very various, differing one from another in the sort of degree that English differs from German, though all are thoroughly Sanskritic in their vocables, but with an absence of Sanskrit grammar that has given rise to considerable discussion. The languages of the south are Dravidian, not Sanskritic. The letters of both classes of languages, which also vary considerably, are all modifications of the ancient Pali, and probably derived from the Dravidians, not from the Aryans. They are written from left to right, exception being made of Urdu or Hindostani, the mixed language of the Mahommedan conquerors of northern India, the character used for writing which is the Persian. From the river Sutlej and the borders of the Sind desert, as far as Burma and to Ceylon, the religion of the great bulk of the people of India is Hindu or Brahminical, though the Mahommedans are often numerous, and in some places even in a majority. West of the Sutlej the population of Asia may be said to be wholly Mahommedan with the exception of certain relatively small areas in Asia Minor and Syria, where Christians predominate. The language of the Punjab does not differ very materially from that of Upper India. West of the Indus the dialects approach more to Persian, which language meets Arabic and Turki west of the Tigris, and along the Turkoman desert and the Caspian. Through the whole of this tract the letters are used which are common to Persian, Arabic and Turkish, written from right to left.

Considerable progress has been made in the classification of the various races which occupy the continent to the west of the great Mongolian region. The ancient Sacae, or Scyths, are recognized in the Aryan population, who may be found Racial distribution. in great numbers and in their purest form in the more inaccessible mountains and glens of the central highlands. These Tajiks (as they are usually called) form the underlying population of Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Badakshan, and their language (in the central districts of Asia) is found to contain words of Aryan or Sanskrit derivation which are not known in Persian. They have been for the most part dispossessed of their country by Turkish immigration and conquests, but they still retain their original intellectual superiority over the Turkish and other mixed tribes by which they are surrounded. Uzbegs and Kirghiz have but small affinity with the Mongol element of Asia. They are the representatives of those countless Turkish irruptions which have taken place through all history. Of the two divisions (Kara Kirghiz and Kassak Kirghiz) into which the Kirghiz tribes are divided by Russian authorities, the Kassak Kirghiz is the more closely allied to the Mongol type; the Kara Kirghiz, who are found principally in the valleys of the Tian-shan and Altai mountains, being unmistakably Turkish. The Kipchaks are only a Kirghiz clan. The language of the Kirghiz is Turki and their religion that of Mahomet. As a nomadic people they have great contempt for the Sarts, who represent the town dwellers of the tribe. The Kalmucks are a Buddhist and Mongolian people who originated in a confederacy of tribes dwelling in Dzungaria, migrated to Siberia, and settled on the Lower Volga. From thence they returned late in the 18th century to the reoccupation of their old ground in Kulja under the Chinese. The Turkoman is the purest form of the Turk element, and his language is the purest form of the Turkish tongue, which is represented at Constantinople by a comparatively mongrel, or mixed, dialect. Ethnographers have traced a connexion between the Turkoman of central Asia and the Teutonic races of Europe, based on a similarity of national customs and immemorial usage. Evidence of an original affinity between Turkoman and Rajput has also been found in the mutual possession by these races of a ruddy skin, so that as ethnographical inquiry advances the Turk appears to recede from his Mongolian affinities and to approach the Caucasian. Turks and Mongols alike were doubtless included under the term Scyth by the ancients, and as Tatars by more modern writers, insomuch that the Turkish dynasty at Delhi, founded by Baber, is usually termed the Mogul dynasty, although there can be no distinction traced between the terms Mogul and Mongol. The general results of recent inquiry into the ethnography of Afghanistan is to support the general correctness of Bellew’s theories of the origin of the Afghan races. The claim of the Durani Afghan to be a true Ben-i-Israel is certainly in no way weakened by any recent investigation. The influence of Greek culture in northern India is fully recognized, and the distribution of Greek colonies previous to Alexander’s time is attested by practical knowledge of the districts they were said to occupy. The habitat of the Nysaeana, and the identity of certain tribes of Kafiristan with the descendants of these pre-Alexandrian colonists from the west, are also well established. To this day hymns are unwittingly sung to Bacchus in the dales and glens of Kafiristan. The ethnographical status of the mixed tribes of the mountains that lie between Chitral and the Peshawar plains has been fairly well fixed by John Biddulph, and much patient inquiry in the vast fields of Baluchistan by Major Mockler, G.P. Tate and others has resulted in quite a new appreciation of the tribal origin of the great conglomeration of Baluch peoples.

The result of trans-border surveys to the north and west of India has been to establish the important geographical fact that it is by two gateways only, one on the north-west and one on the west of India, that the central Asiatic tides of immigration have flowed into the peninsula. The Kabul valley indicates the north-western entrance, and Makran indicates that on the west. By the Kabul valley route, which includes at its head the group of passes across the Hindu Kush which extend from the Khawak to the Kaoshan, all those central Asian hordes, be they Sacae, Yue-chi, Jats, Goths or Huns, who were driven towards the rich plains of the south, entered the Punjab. Some of them migrated from districts which belong to eastern Asia, but none of them penetrated into India by eastern passes. Such tides as set towards the Himalaya broke against their farther buttresses, leaving an interesting ethnographical flotsam in the northern valleys; but they never overflowed the Himalayan barrier. Later most of the historic invasions of India from central Asia followed the route which leads directly from Kabul to Peshawar and Delhi.

By the western gates of Makran prehistoric irruptions from Mesopotamia broke into the plains of Lower Sind, and either passed on towards the central provinces of India or were absorbed in the highlands south of Kalat. In later centuries the Arabs from the west reached the valley of the Indus by their western route, and there established a dynasty which lasted for 300 years. The identification of existing peoples with the various Scythic, Persian and Arab races who have passed from High Asia into the Indian borderland, has opened up a vast field of ethnographical inquiry which has hardly yet found adequate workers for its investigation. To such fields may be added the yet more complicated problems of those reflex waves which flowed backwards from India into the border highlands.

(T. H. H.*)

History

1. The borders assigned to Asia on the west are somewhat arbitrary. The Urals indicate no real division of races, and in both Greek and Turkish times Asia Minor has been connected with the opposite shores of Europe rather than with the lands lying to the east. A juster view of early history is probably obtained by thinking of the countries round the Mediterranean as interacting on one another than by separating Palestine and Asia Minor as Asiatic.