despairing tribes? Possibly we may find something to remind us of them also in the northern Afghan hills.

It was probably about the same era that some pre-Hellenic race, led (so it is written) by the mythical hero Dionysos, trod the weary route from the Euxine to the Caspian, and from the southern shores of the Caspian to the borderland of modern Indian frontier, where their descendants welcomed Alexander on his arrival as men of his own faith and kin, and were recognised as such by the great conqueror. Now all this points to an acquaintance with the geographical links between East and West which appears nowhere in any written record. Nowhere can we find any clear statement of the actual routes by which these pilgrims were supposed to have made their long and toilsome journeys. Just the bare facts are recorded, and we are left to guess the means by which they were accomplished. But it is clear that the old-world overland connection between India and the Black Sea is a very old connection indeed, and further, it is clear that what the Greeks may not have known the Persians certainly did know. When Herodotus first set solidly to work on a geographical treatise which was to embrace the existing knowledge of the whole world, he undoubtedly derived a great deal of that knowledge from official Persian sources; and it may be added that the early Persian department for geographical intelligence has been proved by this last century's scientific investigations to have collected information of which the accuracy is certainly astonishing. It is only quite recently, during the process of surveys carried on by the Government of India through the highlands and coast regions of Baluchistan and Eastern Persia, that anything like a modern gazetteer of the tribes occupying those districts has been rendered possible. Twenty-five years ago our military information concerning ethnographic distributions in districts lying immediately beyond the north-western frontier was no better than that which is contained in the lists of the Persian satrapies, given to the world by Herodotus nearly 500 years before the Christian era. Twenty-five years ago we did not know of the existence of some of the tribes and peoples mentioned by him, and we were unable to identify others. Now, however, we are at last aware that through twenty-four centuries most of them have clung to their old habitat in a part of the Eastern world where material wealth and climatic attractions have never been sufficient to lead to annihilation by conquest. Oppressed and harried by successive Persian dynasties, overrun by the floatsam and jetsam of hosts of migratory Asiatic peoples from the North, those tribes have mostly survived to bear a much more valuable testimony to the knowledge of the East entertained by the West in the days of Herodotus than any which can be gathered from written documents.

The Milesian colonies founded on the southern and western shores of the Euxine in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., whilst retaining their trade connection with the parent city of Miletus (where sprang that carpet-making industry for which this corner of Asia has been famous ever since), found no open road to the further eastern trade through the mountain regions that lie south of the Black Sea. Half a century after Herodotus we find Xenophon struggling in almost helpless entanglement amongst these wild mountains comparatively close to the Greek colonies; and it was there that he encountered the fiercest opposition from the native tribes-people that he met with during his famous retreat from Persia. It is always so. Our most active opponents on the Indian frontier are the mountaineers of the immediate borderland—the people who know us best, and therefore fear us most. It was chiefly through Miletus and the Cilician gates that Greek trade with Persia and Babylon was maintained. There were no Greek colonies on the rugged eastern coasts of the Black Sea—sufficient indication that no open trade route existed direct to the Caspian by any line analogous to that of the modern railway that connects Batum with Baku. On the north of the Euxine, however, there were great and flourishing colonies (of which Olbia at the mouth of the Borysthenes, or Dnieper, was the most famous) which undoubtedly traded with the Skythic peoples north and west of the Caspian. From these sources came the legends of Hyperboreans and Griffins and other similar tales, all flavoured with the glamour of northern mystery, but none of them pointing to an eastern origin. Recent investigations into the ethnography of certain tribes in Afghanistan, however, seem to prove conclusively that even if there was no recognised trade between Greece and India before Miletus was destroyed by Darius Hystaspes, and Greek settlers were transported by the Persian conqueror to the borders of the modern Badakshan, yet there must have been Greek pioneers in colonial enterprise who had made their way to the Far East and stayed there. For instance, we have that strange record of settlements under Dionysos amongst the spurs and foothills of the Hindu Kush, which were clearly of Greek origin, although Arrian in his history of Alexander's progress through Asia is unable to explain the meaning of them.

There is more to be said about these settlements later. The first actual record of settlement of Greeks in Baktria is that of Herodotus, to which we have referred as being affected by Darius Hystaspes in the sixth century before Christ, and the descendants of these settlers are undoubtedly the people referred to by Arrian as "Kyreneans", who could be no other than the Greek captives from the Lybian Barke. Their existence two centuries later than Herodotus is attested by Arrian, and they were apparently in possession of the Kaoshan pass over the Hindu Kush at the time of Alexander's expedition. Another body of Greeks is recorded by Arrian to have been settled in the Baktrian country by Xerxes after his flight from Greece. These were the Brankhidai of Milesia, whose posterity are said to have been exterminated by Alexander in punishment for the crimes of their grandfather Didymus. The name Barang, or Farang, is frequently repeated in the mountain districts of Northern Afghanistan and Badakshan, and careful inquiry would no doubt reveal the fact that surviving Greek affinities are still far more widely spread through that part of Asia than is generally known. All these settlements were antecedent to Alexander, but beyond these recorded instances of Greek occupation there can be little doubt that (as pointed out by Bellew in his Ethnography of Afghanistan and supported by later observations) the Greek element had been diffused through the wide extent of the Persian sovereignty for centuries before the birth of Alexander the Great. It is probable that each of the four great divisions of the ancient Greeks had contributed for a thousand years before to the establishment of colonies in Asia Minor, and from these colonies bands of emigrants had penetrated to the far east of the Persian dominions, either as free men or captives. Amongst the clans and tribal sections of Afghans and Pathans are to be found to this day names that are clearly indicative of this pre-historic Greek connection.

Persia at her greatest maintained a considerable overland trade with India, and Indian tribute formed a large part of her revenues. All Afghanistan was Persian; all Baluchistan, and the Indian frontier to the Indus. The underlying Persian element is strong in all these regions still, the dominant language of the country, the speech of the people, whether Baluch or Pathan, is of Persian stock, whilst the polite tongue of Court officials, if not the Persian of Tehran or Shiraz, is at least an imitation of it. It is hardly strange that the Greek