1875.] H. G. Raverty — Who were the Pathdn Sultans ofBihli? 31 



placed himself among the Afghans of Roh, and was the father of the tribe 

 of Soor, who was esteemed the noblest among them." 



Firishtah's account is vastl}- different. He says : " The name of Sher 

 Shah was Farid, and his father's name Hasan, who is (sic) of the people 

 of the Afghans of Roh. When Sultan Buhlul Ludi attained dominion, 

 the father of Hasan, the Sur, who was named Ibrahim, having evinced a 

 desire of obtaining service, came to Dihli." He then describes Roh, as 

 mentioned above, and adds : " The Afghans there are of several tribes, 

 among which is the clan of Sur. They account themselves of the posterity 

 of the Sultans of Ghur, and say that one of their sons [a son of one of that 

 family] who was called Muhammad Suri [not Muhammad Sur, but son of 

 Suri], in former days, having been made an exile from his native country, — 

 [If the xlfghans were Ghuris, or the Ghuris Afghans, as it is pretended, and 

 dwelt in Ghur, how could this person be an exile from his country among 

 his own people, in his own country ?] — came among the Afghans of Roh, 

 and, as the correctness of his descent was verified to [the satisfaction of] 

 one of the Afghan chiefs, notwithstanding it is not the custom of Afghans 

 to give their daughters to strangers, that person [chief or head-man] gave 

 his daughter to Muhammad-i-Suri, and made him his son-in-law ; and, from 

 him offspring having sprung, they became known as the Sur Afghans [lit. 

 Afchanan-i- Sur], and may be the greater of the tribes of the Afghans." 



This is all Firishtah says on the subject, but he has himself misunder- 

 stood or confused the Afghan tradition about this son of a Ghuri chief, 

 with the other tradition about the Ghuris, related by several authors, which 

 I have referred to in note 7, page 321 of my translation of the Tabakat- 

 i-Nasiri, which see ; and is himself quite wrong in his account of the 

 Afghan tribe of Sur. 



The earliest authority known on the descent of the Afghans, written by 

 Afghans themselves, is a work, said to have been composed by Shaikh 

 Mali, a distinguished person among the Yusuf-zi tribe, between 816 H. 

 and 828 H. [Buhlul Ludi only came to the throne of Dihli in 850 H.], and 

 another composed by, or more probably at the command of, Khan Kaju, 

 the celebrated Yusuf-zi chief of the 100,000 spears "some time after 900 

 H., nearly half a century before Sher Shah's obtaining sovereignty, and 

 which two works, written in Pushto, are the basis of the Tarikk-i-Hafiz 

 Rahmat Khani and the Klvulasat-ul-Ansab of Hafiz Rahmat himself, both 

 of which I have translated ; and in those works there is no mention of the 

 Ghuri connection. The other works are : The Tazkirat-ul-Abrar of A'khund 

 Darwezah, a Tajik like the Ghuris, not an Afghan ; the Tawarikh-i-Ibia- 

 him Shahi ; the Tarikh-i-Nisbat-i-Afaghinah of Shaikh 'Abd-ur-Razzak 

 Mati-zi, styled also Bila Pir, son of the great Shaikh Kasim, whose fine 

 mausoleum may still be seen near the walls of Chanar-garh, as that of Ka- 



