178 Account of the Lower ~D era] lit. [No. 3. 



months' journey. The northern boundary of it is Kashkar,* and 

 the Southern Beluchistan. It therefore lies between Iran, Turan,f 

 and Hind ; and the inhabitants of it are called Eohilahs." 



So writes Mahabat Khan ; but with regard to the east and west 

 he appears to have confounded the south-west and north-east ; and 

 with respect to the river Iilmand, or Helmand as it is erroneously 

 called, he is wholly in error. The Iilmand rises in the mountain of 

 Koh-i-Baba, some twenty or thirty miles west of Kabul, and from 

 thence takes a south-westerly course, flowing about seventy miles 

 west of Ghuzni to Ghiritikh in Long. 64° 20/ and eighty or a 

 hundred miles to the west of Kandahar, from which taking a sweep 

 almost due west through Siestan, empties itself into the Zarrah lake 

 some five degrees south of Hirat. 



With this exception, and what he calls the northern boundary, 

 the description will almost agree, both as regards extent and posi- 

 tion, with the Arachosia of the Greeks and other classical authors, 

 which was the most eastern satrapy of Persian India, and would have 

 comprised within it the whole of the country now known as Afghan- 

 istan, and a large portion of Beluchistan also. Professor Heeren 

 in his work on the " Asiatic Nations," remarks, that " The western 

 and northern boundaries of India were not then the same as at 

 present, To the west, it was not then bounded by the river Indus, 

 but by a chain of mountains, which under the name of Koh (whence 

 the Grecian appellation of Indian Caucasus) extended from Bac- 

 triana to Makran, or Gedrosia, enclosing the kingdoms of Kandahar 

 and Kabul, the modern kingdom of Eastern Persia or Afghanistan." 

 I am, for the above reasons, inclined to consider, that from the 

 word Koh, which in Persian signifies a mountain, the name Eoh is 

 derived. 



Some of the Afghan writers, who have described so graphically 

 and so well, the events which happened in India and Afghanistan 

 under the sway of the Moghals and the Afghans or Patans, always 



* Kashkar or Ckitral is a country of Hindu Khush to the east of the Sfah 

 Posh Kafirs, west of Panjkorah and north of Bajour, known as the country of 

 Shah Kutor. 



f Turan — The ancient dominion of Afrasiab to the north and east of the 



river Oxus. 



