'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎228] (263/714)

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PERSIA
with demons and jins as well as against the pagan hordes of
Turan and Afrasiab. Perhaps our Saint George of the Dragon
would be a nearer parallel; and just as we stamp the record of
his matchless daring upon our coinage, so do the Persians emblazon
the great feats of Rustam upon gateway and door and pillar.
Seistan emerges into the clearer light of ascertained history in
the time of Alexander the Great, when it was known as Drangiana
E uly (identical with the land of the Herodotean Sarangians).
He probably passed this way on his march eastwards to
India ; whilst on his return therefrom, though he pursued a more
southerly line himself, through Gedrosia (Mekran) to Carmania
(Kerman), he despatched a light column under Craterus through
Arachotia and Drangiana. 1 Under the Sassanian monarchs Seistan
was a flourishing centre of the Zoroastrian worship, and hither
came the last sovereign of that dynasty, Yezdijird, flying from
the victorious Arabs on his way to his fate at Merv. It was
under the succeeding regime that the province attained the climax
of its material prosperity; and to this—the Arab—period are to
be attributed the vast ruins of which I have previously spoken. 2
In the ninth century a native dynasty known as the Sufari or
Coppersmiths, 3 was founded by one ^ akub bin Leith, a potter and
a robber, but a soldier and a statesman 4 who won by arms a short
lived empire that stretched from Shiraz to Kabul, but collapsed
before the iron onset of Mahmud of Ghuzni in the succeeding
century. El Istakhri, visiting Seistan at this epoch, described it
1 The great authority on the early history and inhabitants of Seistan is Sir H.
Rawlinson's essay, entitled ' Notes on Seistan,' published in the Journal of the
Il.G.S., vol. xliii. pp. 272-294 (1873). Compare also the excellent and accurate
summary of Dr. Bellew, From the Indus to the Tigris, pp. 248-262, and Inquiry
into the Ethnography of Afghanistan, 1891. The chief modern inhabitants of
Persian Seistan are the Seistanis, who occupy a servile position among other and
dominant tribes ; the Kaianis claiming descent from the Kai dynasty of Cyras ;
the Kurd Galis, a branch of the Kurds of Kurdistan, who emigrated and estab
lished the Malik Kurd dynasty of Ghor, 1245-1383, A.D. ; Iranian elements known
as Tajik; and Beluchis, of whom the principal tribes in Seistan are the Sarbandi,
who were transported by Timur to Hamadan, but brought back by Nadir Shah,
and the Shahreki.
2 For an account of them, and particularly of Peshawaran, vide Bellew,
pp. 241, 246-247.
3 Vide an article entitled ' The Kings of the Saffariun Dynasty of Nimroz, or
Sijistan,' by Major H. G. Ra verty, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. liv.
(1885) p. 139.
4 Vide Malcolm's History, vol. i. pp. 148-152.