PATHAN, the name applied in India to the Afghans, though Rohilla (q.v., Rohela, "hillman") is a synonym. The early history of this highly composite race is obscure. Farishta imagined they were Copts. He may have meant Guptas, but his history is un convincing. It is difficult to trace any clear mention of them before A.D. I000 and then they seem to have been obscure moun taineers of the hills about Ghazni. The derivation of the name is obscure.
The name Afghan is in literature much older than Pathan (un known to writers earlier than the 16th century), though it can hardly be a Pushtu word as that speech has no f, but it was not until the I 8th century that the Afghans established their independ ence and founded Afghanistan as a state.
The land of the Pathans is bounded on the south by the country of the Baloch (see Baluchistan), extending northwards from the southern boundary of Dera Ismail Khan district up to and includ ing Dir, Swat and Bajaur on the left bank of the Kabul. In these Khanates the name Pathan, however, no longer connotes Pathan by race, as it is applied only to a share-holder in tribal land, op posed to Fakir (q.v.), a landless man, and loss of his land reduces a man to that status. Westwards the Pathan country projects into Afghanistan, and eastwards to and across the Indus, while Pathan colonies, often military as in Rohilkhand, old Afghan garri sons, fiefs, dynasties and settlements, are found all over northern India and even in the south. The true Afghanistan is indeed de
fined as extending from the Kashi-ghar or Shawal, the Afghan name for the Takht-i-Sulaiman, "Sulaiman's throne," the tra ditional cradle of the race, a lofty peak of the Koh-i-Syah, "Dark Mt." to the border of Kandahar. On this throne is a place of pilgrimage. The Sulaimiin range covering an area of fully z,600tn.
from north to south and about 200M. from west to east may how ever be regarded as the earliest seat of the Afghans. But the Pathans do not admit that they originated in this area.
On their conversion to Islam, which belief must have been accepted by most of them at an early period, they discovered that they were of far more exalted ancestries, varied according to tribal caprice. Thus the Orakzai here claim Persian descent, but in the 16th century, a daring genealogist compiled an Afghan thesaurus for an Afghan patron and made all Afghans descendants of Afghana, son of Jeremiah, son of Malik Saul, Solomon's com mander-in-chief. The Pathans comprise many tribes such as the Afridis, Orakzais, Mohmands (qq.v.), and in the Pathan area dwell such tribes as the Turis (q.v.), and the Dilazaks, not of Pathan origin. A termination—zai (Pers.—zdda, Pash, zoe "Son") —is a patronymic, which clan as well as tribe names have. The sept or family is styled khel, a word used widely in India and probably not borrowed from the Arabic kheyl.