322 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



EphthaliteS) or so-called "White Huns," of the Greek and Arab 

 writers, who about 425 A.D. overran Transoxiana, 

 Huns."' WhltC an( i soon afterwards penetrated through the moun- 

 tain passes into the Kabul and Indus valleys. Al- 

 though confused by some contemporary writers (Zosimus, Am. 

 Marcellinus) with Attila's Huns, M. Drouin has made it clear that 

 the Ye'-tha were not Huns (Mongols) at all, but, like the Yue-chi, 

 a Turki people, who were driven westwards about the same time 

 as the Hiung-nu by the Yuan-Yuans (see above). Of Hun they 

 had little but the name, and the more accurate Procopius was 

 aware that they differed entirely from "the Huns known to us, 

 not being nomads, but settled for a long time in a fertile region." 

 He speaks also of their white colour and regular features, and 

 their sedentary life 1 , as in the Chinese accounts, where they are 

 described as warlike conquerors of twenty kingdoms, as far as that 

 of the A-si (Arsacides, Parthians), and in their customs resembling 

 the Tu-Kiu (Turks), being in fact "of the same race." On the 

 ruins of the Indo-Scythian (Yue-chi) empire, the White Huns 

 ruled in India and the surrounding lands from 425 to the middle 

 of the sixth century. A little later came the Arabs, who in 706 

 captured Samarkand, and under the Abassides were supreme in 

 Central Asia till scattered to the winds by the Oghuz Turki 

 hordes. 



From all this it may perhaps be inferred that while the 

 Baktrian peasants entered India as settlers, and are now repre- 

 sented by the agricultural Jats the Yue'-chi and Ye-tha, both of 

 fair Turki stock, came as conquerors, and are now represented 

 by the Rajputs, "Sons of Kings," the warrior and land-owning 

 race of northern India. It is significant that these Thakur, 

 "feudal lords," mostly trace their genealogies from about the 

 beginning of the yth century, as if they had become Hinduized 

 soon after the fall of the foreign Ye'-tha dynasty, while on the 

 other hand " the country legends abound with instances of the 

 conflict between the Rajput and the Brahman in prehistoric 

 times'-." This "prehistoric" hostility shows that the Rajputs 

 entered India, not as "Aryans' of the Kshatriya or military 

 caste, as is commonly assumed, but as aliens (Turks), the 

 1 De Bella Persico, passim. - Crooke, op. cit. iv. p. 221. 



