Note 1396 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

Afghanistan, of disordered relief, set as a transit region between the plains of Mesopotamia, the Oxus and the Indus, has a confused ethnology in keeping with the tangle of dissected plateaus and mountain systems which constitute its surface. Here we find three distinct branches of the Indo-European race, divided up into various peoples of diverse tongues and subdivided further into countless tribes; and two branches of Mongol-Tartars scattered, as if out of a pepper box, from the Helmund to the Oxus, tossed in among diverse peoples of Iranic and Galcha origin in hopeless confusion. The various Afghan tribes, separated from each other by natural barriers and intervening alien stocks, though similar in physical type, speech, religion and culture, have no sense of unity, no common political aims, while the appalling list of tribes constituting the population of the country1396 offers little hope of Afghanistan ever developing national cohesion. Kafiristan alone, which lies in the Hindu Kush range for the most part at an altitude of 12,000 feet or more, harbors in its recesses many remnants of primitive peoples, speaking various languages and dialects, strangers alike to any native affinity or political union. It is a mere agglomeration of ethnic fragments, in which the people of one village are often unable to converse with those of the next.1397 Relief has fashioned the ethnology of the Caucasus in the same way. No other equally small area in the world contains such a variety of peoples and tongues, differing from one another in race, language, and customs so fundamentally as the Caucasus. From the heterogeneous survivals of extremely old ethnic stocks, lodged in the high valleys, to the intrusive Russians of the lower piedmont, the Caucasus might be called an ethnographical sample card.1398