338 Supplementary account of the Hazarahs. [No. 161. 



nally brought from Persia by Shah Abbas the Great ; they are of the 

 divisions Ruzbyanee, Zanganah, Burbur and Siah Mansoor. 



During the early wars of the Hazarahs and Ghiljyes, the latter burnt 

 the dead bodies of the former that came in their possession, and only 

 discontinued the practice (disgraceful to both parties as men and Mosul- 

 mans) on the former retaliating. The system of offering indignity to 

 dead bodies is a favorite one with the Afghans.* 



The Hazarahs as well as Ghiljyes do not eat fish, although they agree 

 it was made lawful food by their prophet. 



In going down the river Arghandah we were struck with the fine fish 

 in that clean part of the stream, and desired to have some ; no one in 

 the whole tribe could be found who knew how to catch them : at last a 

 dyer who poached for his own use, (he was an inhabitant of Candahar, 

 not an Afghan) volunteered his services with small pea-like balls of 



* On the very first day that I entered Afghanistan (the Khyber Pass in the autumn 

 of 1837,) I observed that all the bodies of the Sikhs who had been killed near the Pass, 

 (in the battle of Jamrood between Mahammad Akbar-khan and Huree Sing) had 

 been heaped together. 



On the breast of the corpse of Goda-khan Momaod Afghan, they lit a fire ; he having 

 been killed in our service. 



The grave of the first officer who was buried after the army reached Candahar (he 

 was murdered) was being dug into, when the resurrectionists were disturbed by my 

 gardener going to turn water off into the garden, and a repetition of the attempt was 

 alone prevented by my making the owner of the field responsible for the preservation 

 of the tomb. 



During the siege of Kalat-i-Ghiljye, the fire that had been kindled to consume the 

 corpse of a Hindoo native officer was extinguished by the besiegers, and the bodies of 

 the camp followers they had cut up were the next day hacked with their spades by the 

 cultivators who came to the spot to turn water into their fields. 



The graves of those who were killed in 1839 at Ghuznee were in 1842 found defiled. 

 It became at last necessary on the march to bury under cover of tents, and to use 

 every ingenuity to conceal the spot which in many cases was of no avail, and no pre- 

 ventative against exhumation. I have lately heard that all the graves at Candahar 

 have been opened by Umar-khan, the son of Sardar Kobudil-khan, who intended to 

 burn the mouldering bones with horse litter; but the Mullas obliged him to content 

 himself with scattering them about the plain. 



Graves of Mohammadans in Afghanistan are opened for the sake of the shrouds, by 

 a set who are thence called Cafan Kash, and great excitement was occasioned in the 

 winter of 1837 in Cabool, by a young married woman of rank having opened a newly 

 made grave. She had been persuaded that, if she succeeded in giving to her rival (hus • 

 band's second wife) to eat halwah cooked on the breast of a corpse, she would become 

 the sufed-bakht (white-fortuned) or favorite. Hog's lard rubbed in the hair is considered 

 a specific for estranging affection, 



