1834.] Antiquities of Afghanistan. 323 



midn, in Vimiydn. Bakhtra, of which Balkh was the capital, is the 

 native cognomen which the Greeks modified into the more liquid sound 

 Bactria or Bactriana. Bakhtar* is applied to Kabul to this day, 

 and occurs in the histories of those countries ; but if this proves any 

 thing, it is that the Greeks retained the appellation, and did not bestow 

 it. Peshdwer is known as a district of Baigram, which was a pro- 

 vince of Bakhtar ; in short, a philologist coming into those regions 

 would find synonymes at every step, and could not fail to elucidate 

 etymologies, which we at present receive as vitiated beyond the limits 

 of analysis, and inaccessible by synchronotic induction. In this view, 

 the Afghan or Pashtu language may furnish us with many idioms, and 

 especially the local dialects of districts which have resisted Muhammedan 

 conquest, and are comparatively in a state of primitive simplicity. The 

 vernacular dialects of the Tajiks (simply crowned heads or descended 

 of kings,) the aborigines of the country, may be expected to elucidate 

 something ; for it is there we can hope to find traces of far antiquity ; 

 and if sepulchres alone are the result, they may at least enable us to 

 connect local affinities, and fix the situs of some monarchs whom we 

 already know to have been extant, but of whose reigns and institu- 

 tions no vestiges have hitherto been discovered ; and though the infer- 

 ence is, that they perished by the sword of the Khalifs, which swept 

 away almost every written memorial of a prior epoch, it would be an 

 extreme conclusion that some annals of the dynasties which followed 

 the Grecian empire, if not those of the original settlers in Balkh, may 

 not exist. The period of 1200 or 1500 years is far from incompati- 

 ble with the expectation of finding inscribed legends either in stone or 

 metal. Coins, the representatives of nations, are already in our pos- 

 session, and obnoxious as they are to Islamism, as the types of idolatry, 

 they have survived both the ravage of time, and the intolerance of 

 bigotry, and still mock the prejudices of religious zeal ; we may there- 

 fore expect to find remains that will afford local illustrations the more 

 interesting to anticipate from the very obscurity of the subject, the 

 total absence of research at any former period, and the barrenness of 

 history and tradition concerning such events. 



The topes or tombs which appear in the environs of Kabul are 

 planted along the skirt of the mountain ridges, which support that 

 elevated plain, and this peculiarity is common to almost all of them : 

 the adjacent level has obviously been the basin of a lake or sheet of 

 standing water, till drained away by the course of rivers, and it still 

 continues more or less a quaggy marsh. The first settlers seem to have 



* I don't know if it occurs in Baber's Memoirs, but I think it does in theTimur 

 Nama. 



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