NOMADE. The pastoral tribes of Central and Southern Asia migrate from place to place at seasons of the year, to obtain forage for their flocks. The Persian word numnd or felt, of which the tents of the wandering tribes of Central Asia are composed, has supplied the root to the word yO,u.coloco;. In British India there are many small migratory tribes living iu tents of mats or cloth, encamping in the outskirts of towns, all of them poor and mostly predatory ; and there are fowler, hunter, and forest races who move from place to place within a recognised area ; and the movements of the more settled, Dhangar and Ahir or cowherd races of the Peninsula of India, are restricted to the forest and open tracts. But the nomades of S. Asia move for some hundred miles to their Garm-sair and Sard-sair The summer station is also called Mink, and the winter station Kishlauk, words which the Afghans and l'ersians have borrowed from the Tartars. Residents of British India who have witnessed a large 13anjara camp migrating, will have seen a true picture of the nomade life of Central Asia. The principal feature in which the Western Afghans differ from the Eastern, is formed by the numerous pastoral tribes. The tent used among the Afghans arid Persians is of coarse black cam let. It is called Kizhdi in the Afghan language, Siali-chadar in Persian, and Karra-ooee in Turkish, meaning black tent. The tents of the tribes that move little are larger and better than those of the very migratory. The Latter have often fine tents, which they leave at the stations where the climate is most severe, carrying lighter ones on their journeys to the places where shelter is less required. Much land is wasted in this mode of life. A nomadic family of Upper Asia requires for its support 300 head of cattle, for which not less is necessary than one-sixth of a geographical square mile of pasture. A tribe of 10,000 requires 200 or 300 square miles of pasture land.
The nomado Turkoman tribes are the repre sentatives of a family which has existed from times anterior to history, and are occupying at the present day the immense steppes of Tartary. The Turkoman, out of whom the Turks of the towns and cities of Southern and Western Asia sprung, were apparently those of the Persian frontier, the ancestors of the present Yarnud, Goklan, Tekke, and Emit tribes, who lie along the frontier of Persia, from the Caspian to the south-western feeders of the Oxus. Except on the valley of the Attrak, where they have de veloped an imperfect agriculture more akin to gardening than to farming, they are pomades, with no towns, with more tents than houses, and with pre-eminently predatory habits, as the Persians of Khorasan and Asterabad know to their cost. Unrivalled riders, with a breed of
horses that will endure any hardship, they have been infamous for their forays ; and-as they have a great robbing-ground to the south, where the occupants are other than Turk, they are more incorrigible plunderers than even the central Kirghiz and Uzbak. When settled in more favourable localities, they are slow to lay aside their original habits. So far as they are mixed in blood, it is the Persian element that has mixed. Such are the Turkomans. A true picture of Iliyat nomade life is expressed in Isaiah xl. 11 : He shall feed his flock like a shepherd : he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.' As the Iliyat move along, the women are seen with their spinning-wheels on their shoulders, some twisting woollen yarn, others bent forward, and advancing slowly with their children astride on their backs, clasping their little arms around their mother's neck, and twisting their little legs round her waist. The smaller ones are usually tied up in a bag behind the back, while infant babies, together with their clumsy cradles, are hoisted on the heads or shoulders of their fond mothers, sinking under the weight. The word 'Iliyat or Ilat is derived from Eel, a tribe. It is also expressed by Zem or Zim, which Ibit Ifaukal explains by the equiva lent Arabic, Kabilah. The whole of the Turk races, the Iliyats of Persia, and the great bulk of the Afghan races, and of the independent nations between Afghanistan and British India, are migratory at seasons. An Iliyat tribe whom Baron de Bode met belonged to a Lur stem, which had been transplanted into Fars by Aga Muhammad Khan, the uncle of Fat'h Ali Shah, from Luristan Kuchuk. After his death, many of them returned to their primitive encampments in the Zagros chain. When Nadir Shah overran Herat and Kandahar, he is said to have deported 18,000 Ghilzai with their families to Teheran, and to have distributed the lands of Kandahar amongst his Persian followers. Many pomades Met with by Vigne were of a sickly complexion, attributed to the pernicious alkaline quality of the water. The diseases to which they were most subject were fevers, cutaneous and nervous disorders, and especially blindness. It is the peculiar character of the seasons that compels these distant migra tions of Asiatic tribes in the lands they occupy, as in the Eastern Archipelago tribes of sea farers, the Ryot Laut or people of the sea, shift from the weather to the leeward sides of the islands with the changes of the monsoons. Lieut.-Col. MacGregor, p. 61 ; De Bode's Travels, pp. 118, 255 ; Ouseley's Tr. i. p. 307 ; Vigne, p. 83.