The Gates of India: Being an Historical Narrative — Background and Themes

as soon to arise the daystar of a new faith, a "light of Asia" for all centuries to come.

It is impossible to set a limit to the number and variety of the people who, in these early centuries, either migrated, or were deported, from West to East through Persia to Northern Afghanistan, or who drifted southwards into Baluchistan. Not until the ethnography of these frontier lands of India is exhaustively studied shall we be able to unravel the influence of Assyrian, Median, Persian, Arab, or Greek migrations in the strange conglomeration of humanity which peoples those countries. Baktra (Balkh), in Northern Afghanistan, must have been a city of consequence in days when Nineveh was young. Farah, a city of Arachosia in Western Afghanistan on the borders of Seistan, must have been a centre from whence Assyrian arts and industries were passed on to India for ages; for Farah lies directly on the route which connects Seistan with the southern passes into the Indus valley. The Indus itself seems to have been the boundary which limited the efforts of migration and exploration. Beyond the Indus were deserts in the south and wide unproductive plains of the Punjab in the north, and it is the deserts of the world's geography which, far more than any other feature, have always determined the extent of the human tidal waves and influenced their direction. They are as the promontories and capes of the world's land perimeter to the tides of the ocean. Beyond these parched and waterless tracts, where now the maximum temperatures of sun-heat in India are registered, were vague uncertainties and mythical wonders, the tales of which in ancient literature are in strange contrast to the exact information which was obtained of geographical conditions and tribal distributions in the basins of the Kabul or Swat rivers, or within the narrow valleys of Makran.

A recent writer (Mr. Ellsworth Huntington) has expressed in picturesque and convincing language the nature of the relationship which has ever existed between man and his physical environments in Asia, and has illustrated the effect of certain pulsations of climate in the movement of Asiatic history. The changing conditions of the climate of High Asia, periods of desiccation and deprivation of natural water-supply alternating with periods of cold and rainfall, acting in slow progression through centuries and never ceasing in their operation, have set "men in nations" moving over the face of that continent since the beginning of time, and left a legacy of buried history, to be unearthed by explorers of the type of Stein, such as will eventually give us the key to many important problems in race distribution. But more important even than climatic influence is the direct influence of physical geography, the actual shaping of mountain and valley, as a factor in directing the footsteps of early migration. Nowadays men cross the seas in thousands from continent to continent, but in the days of Egyptian and Assyrian empire it was that straight high-road which crossed the fewest passes and tapped the best natural resources of wood and water which was absolutely the determining factor in the direction of the great human processions; and although change of climate may have set the nomadic peoples of High Asia moving with a purpose more extensive than an annual search for pasturage, and have led to the peopling of India with successive nations of Central Asiatic origin, it was the knowledge that by certain routes between Mesopotamia and Northern Afghanistan lay no inhospitable desert, and no impassable mountain barrier, that determined the intermittent flow from the west, which received fresh impulse with every conquest achieved, with every band of captives available for colonizing distant satrapies. To put it shortly, there was an easy high-road from Mesopotamia through Persia to Northern Afghanistan, or even to Seistan, and not a very difficult one to Makran; and so it came about that migratory movements, either compulsory or voluntary, continued through centuries, ever extending their scope till checked by the deserts of the Indian frontier or the highlands of the Pamirs and Tibet, or the cold wild wastes of Siberia.

Thus Afghanistan and Baluchistan, the countries with which we are more immediately concerned, were probably far better known to Assyrian and Persian kings than they were to the British Intelligence Office (or its equivalent) of a century ago. The first landward explorations of these countries are lost in pre-historic mists, but we find that the first scientific mission of which we have any record (that which was led by Alexander the Great) was well supplied with fairly accurate geographical information regarding the main route to be followed and the main objectives to be gained.