1 BILOCH, PATHAN, AND ALLIED RACES. 59
2 from his neighbours of the same religion as himself. The Pathans are
3 extraordinarily jealous of female honovu-j and most of the blood feuds for
4 which they are so famous originate in quarrels about women. As a race
5 they strictly seclude their females, but the poorer tribes and the poorer
6 members of all tribes are prevented fi'om doing so by their poverty. Among
7 the tribes of our territory a woman's nose is cut off if she be detected in
8 adultery ; and it is a favoiu'ite joke to induce a Pathan woman to unveil
9 by saying to her siiddenly " You have no nose ! " The Pathan pretends
10 to be purely endogamous and beyond the border he probably is so ; while
11 even in British Territory the fii-st wife will generally be a Pathan, except
12 among the poorest classes. At the same time Pathan women are beyond
13 the Indus seldom if ever married to any but Pathans. They intermarry
14 very closely, avoiding only the proliibited degrees of Islam. Theii- rules
15 of inheritance ai'e tribal and not ^Mahomedan, and tend to keep property
16 within the agnatic society, though some few of the more educated families
17 have lately begun to follow the Musalman law. Theii- social customs differ
18 much from tribe to tribe, or rather perhaps from the wilder to the more
19 civilised sections of the nation. The Pathans lieyond and upon our frontier
20 live in fortified villages, to which are attached stone towers in commanding
21 positions which serve as watch-towers and places of refuge for the inhabitants.
22 Small raids from the hills into the plains below are still common ; and beyond
23 the Indus the people, even in British Territory, seldom sleep far from the
24 walls of the village.
25 The figm-es showing the distribution of Pathiins are given in Abstract
26 No. 65 on page 191.* They are the dominant race throughout ' the whole
27 tract west of the Indus as far south as the southern border of the tahsil
28 of Derah Ismail Khan, which roughly divides the Pathan from the Biloch.
29 On this side of the Indus they hold raiich of the Chach country of Hazara
30 and Rawalpindi, they have considerable colonies along the left bank of
31 the Indus till it finally leaves the Salt-range, and they hold the northern
32 portion of the Bhakkar thai. Besides those tracts which are territorially
33 held by Patlians, there are numerous Pathan colonies scattered about the
34 Province, most of them descendants of men who rose to power during the
35 Patlian dynasties of Dehli, and received grants of land-revenue which their
36 children often increased at the expense of their neighbours duiing the tui-moil
37 of the 18th century.
38 392. Origin of the Pathan. — The Afghans proper claim descent from
39 Saul, the first Jewisii King, and there is a formidable array of weighty
40 authority in favour of their Semitic origin. The question of their descent
41 is discussed and authorities quoted in Chapter VI of the Peshawar Settlement
42 Report, and in Dr. Bellew's Races of Afghanistan} JNfr. Thorbiu-n quotes
43 in support of their Jewish extraction, " some peculiar customs obtaining
44 "among the tribes of pm-est blood, for instance the Passover-like practice
45 " of sacrificing nn animal and smearing the doorway with its blood in order
46 "to avert calamity, the offering up of sacrifices, the stoning to death of
47 ■•' blasphemers, the periodical distribution of land, and so forth ; " and he
48 1 Dr. Bellew suggests that tlie origiual Afjihaus were tlie Sulymi of Herodotus, and were
49 Qui'eslii Ai'abs who Uved in Syria and there became iutermiugled with the Jews, or who
50 migrated to Ghor where the fugitive Jews took refuse with them. This supposition would explain"-
51 the name Suleniani which is often applied to the Afghans, and their own assertion that Khalid nbi
52 Wttid the Qureshi was of the same stock with themselves.