FERRIER'S HISTORY OF THE AFFGHANS.*

IT seems scarcely worth while for Captain Jesse to have translated this History of the Alfghans unless he thinks the characters and crimes of some of their chieftains, and a diseussional narrative of English and Russian policy in relation to Persia and the countries between Persia and the Indies from a French militaire's point of view, are worth the space of some five hundred pages. In itself iffghan history is neither very attractive or instructive. It is not to begin with the history of a country, and scarcely of a people_, but the story of different tribes, frequently settled in fo- reign lands, but rarely either abroad or at home rising beyond civil feuds or resultless conquests. Not much even is preserved of these things ; and what we have is as much biographical as historical. From Mahmood of Ghuznee to Dost Mohammed, the Affghans have never risen above tribal quarrels or attained a national character, save when occasionally headed by some re- markable man. Doubtless there are national characteristics lurking under .Affghan story, which a philosophical historian could develop, so as to give unity to his history, if he thought fit to undertake the task ; but this power is beyond the reach of the ci decant ohasseur d'Afrique, and military -adventurer in the Persian service. In the customs, passions, and barbarism of the people, as well as in the sternly sublime character of their country * History of the Afghans. By J. P. Ferrier, Author of " Caravan Journies and Wanderings in Persia, Affgbanistan, kc " • formerly-of the Chasseurs D'Afrique, and late Ackjutant-General of the Persian Army. Translated from the original un- published Manuscript by Captain William Jesse. Published by Murray. tlikdbseftlfiliittegabgi 'uWy;B.4491-) valet* .A3,10341i.itorapegif qt# tha fLitibi0 *fit 441 ot a literky:ItiittpOessttry'fort a -pie- deAtiFtlie fek%1!L.-the eareer, the pit gi ' undeis olieracters

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a t Itteariti4eb init4 tkib- "I.bloodshed, sim sititell itiftt ifbillitig bilitoevillbaii follow indtt 'It biaJefet ttInd4rIfil Affghitif', suecess so it:'Iii armies, tional existedee bf 'Affebtini ueit, brtkthilr over running only after .fa e bpt vietoryl 411Agttee'dbniitti the nit- rimning of Psid in the earlier part JaflifW, lattentreib. by Mir MahmOod.' This able and un;eruptilinisimnitwittii)torideatly de- ranged by the intoxication of his •girst itti6e4§boliir Eehreff, the moderate and politic chief who subceOdetlPhintlad 41ittlities that might have 'ochisedidated conqu6sti, 'fit least have iretitined the , throne Fblibig his own life; but be Could not Struggle 'against the effects of the bloody madness of Mir liahmood, the barbarism of the Affghan nathrei, 'And the rising-s' tar bf Nadir. The follow- ing sunimary exteibith in a 'small Why; • What the downfall of the first Napoleon illustrated on a gigantic scale ; that nature her- self Opposes obstacles to the triumphs of lawlessness and force, and that the"stecesses of mere conquest only lead to ruin by the

ruin of the consviered. • ' -

"The Afghanti'ailvanced to meet the .enemy [the Persians under Nadir] as fin- as Peulee Khan, a bridge over the ,Bondemir, ten Miles south of Per- sepolis, - and disputed with tenacity and fury the passage, of that river ; but they were again xlefeated and ay. , retired M bbir in the greatest confusion. Nadir doggedlyy pursued them step by step, invested the city, and informed the'beleaguererthopt that, if Echreff Was not delivered up to him within forty-eight hours, ' he would put* every soldier to death, and with torture. The Afghans agreed to his conditions, on ascertaining which the Mir pre- pared for flight, and, accompanied by two hundred brave men who remained faithful to his fallen fortunes, cut his way sword in hand through the in- vesting army, taking in hot haste the road to Afghanistan—a portion of his army fell under the swords of the Persians, who gave their adversaries no quarter, and the remainder dispersed. As to Echreff, he was so rapidly pur- sued that he was obliged to-abandon his baggage and treasure to avoid being made prisoner : hula followers, seeing that they could no longer be of the least service left him. When he reached the beistan, he had only two ser- vants with him, and they, as well as the Mir' , fell by the hand of Abdullah Khan, a Belooch chief, who sent his head and two large brilliants which were found on him to the Shah Thamasp. "Thus terminated the dominion of Afghans in Persia. If any individual was capable of maintaining it for a longer period, it was certainly Mir Echreff, who to extraordinary courage united great talents of every kind; but the elements on which his power rested were too unstable for it to be possible that he could eventually come forth victorious from the conflict which arose between himself and the robber chieftain [Nadir Shah]. This extraordinary invasion of Persia ended in the extermination of all those who had taken part in it—a just retribution for the crimes and atrocities with which they had sullied their cause. During the seven years that the Afghans held Persia, that empire lost more than a third of its population ; the soil remained without cultivation, the canals and watercourses for irrigation were dried up, and the greater portion of the public buildings completely destroyed. l'he invaders had to contend against a people enervated, effemi- nate, and devoid of every sentiment of honour and national feeling; they triumphed, therefore, by an obstinate determination to succeed, and, in spite of their inferiority in numbers, they did so. Such examples are, it is true, rare in history ; but the Afghans were better quilified to fight than to go- vern. To appropriate, wherever they went, and without any reason or pre- text whatsoever, money or money's worth, was their practice ; revolts and disturbances naturally ensued, and necessitated the employment of a large army. They were in the end weakened by twenty combats, and found it impossible to recruit in Afghanistan, except in the small and scarcely or- ganized state of Kandahar, which ceased to provide them with further rein- forcements; they were, therefore' obliged to admit foreign soldiers within their ranks, whose fidelity was at least doubtful, and who rarely acted with vigour; but they maintained themselves seven years in Persia, much more by the terror which their first victories and their cruelty inspired, than by the material means at their disposal. If Eehreff vanquished the Turks, it was because he had the support ot the Persians, who detested them much more than they did the Afghans, and served voluntarily against them ; but directly Nadir appeared, this unreal and unstable dominion was dissolved and over- thrown in four successive battles. Shunned and dreaded everywhere for their turbulence and barbarity, they were repulsed on all sides, and found, with great difficulty, an asylum or even a shelter in those desert wastes; the greater number of thorn were tracked like wild beasts, and killed like them, or perished from misery and hunger, and it is doubtful whether more than a few hundred Afghans ever returned to their own country."

To understand clearly what M. Ferrier has done it is necessary to have an inkling of what he had to do. The history, as we have just said, was that of a race rather than a country ; but how or where this race originated was matter of dispute. Some main- tain that they are descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel, and we believe their physiognomy as well as their habits of settling down wherever a prospect of advantage offers, forms an argument in favour of this theory. Other ethnographers say that they were a tribe of mountaineers transported from the vicinity of the Black Sea, according to the policy of the ancient Persian monarchs, which aimed at breaking the strength of hostile tribes by separa- ting them from their country and their neighbours : and these writers ascribe an Albanian origin to the Affghans. This theory of origin is admitted by a third party, but the name of" Albanian" is denied. There are writers who argue that the Affghans are na- tives of their own mountains, but demur as to where the natives came from unless they were sons Of the soil. A fifth class con- sider the Affghans a cross between the natives then and there, and the Greeks under Alexander, with those who subsequently form- ed the Bactrian kingdom. Their country is as much a matter of from -Rtad4taritifiNakml, yng , .109.49145h4c34 cities. 1hIgspl3PimidAriPtio4A .4mis exUaldilkg 0:V111411 fit* Agteefli-49 te.4 RifeRG r 1.1 elairk.C1Vgreff7-6047■11041°X01C101114 41P JP% th9-n€1144mR4 liprior A., vAutk

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74,41 AllitnoCAINtJ4 4.1111011fler tlyrAffelan Tager ?rle,P,';, erodueoilvAia&Aiimita gRIPtiiTellelYe"Aegier, !TM Iowa: ritP Meg tlieOxu,14.14,41P,, mountanis oft Xiaffkrletft,udi . ,t141091Ath ; t 8,44e. et Persian Cittlftoithe ,t in j4te lee SiitlejA - and the bailee ;and It4Alie -t y,Kbewasnan. mutt and Ker- man.,: Btit,thie,isnterannaeAllkhain,s,tan than apoleon s king- ship* r41-1deited14telyA ipattref 49,139Pc _ The hietery of ,thelAketamp.tie, tre,ated. by M. Ferrier extends overt 4101.e **41,twewa4 31ears , beginning with the expedi- tion ofieilexander the Greatypand,, goraing down to 18,50. In realitYcoilly -two out of the twonty centuries receive much of his notine, or indeed are worth it Between. Alexander and gah- meod,f of Ghunee there is nothing to tell. The story of the great Mallometait zealot, Moore's "lie oferazna, fie.rce, in wrath," is ra- ther a history of the man than of his people, and ia not told, very fully, by M.IFerrier,nior does he truly appreciate the man. gore partioulars are preserved, of the next seven hundred years, but they.are.ehiefly dynastic ; though great. names turn up in con- nection with overrtuming the country,—Genghis Khan, Tamer- lane, and Baber. The .Alfghans did. not emerge , from a. position very like that of the highlanders of Scotland in their most barbarous state, or the Koords now, till 1720, when Mir Mah- mood commenced his expedition against Persia. The .Aighans were so far conquered by Nadir Shah as to join in his -cele- brated invasion of India and sack of Delhi, an Afghan " con- tingent" accompanying him to Persia. After the assassina- tion of Nadir in 1747 the Aftghans had to retreat, getting home as they could. The Indian and Persian experience had some- what .opened the minds of their leadMg Sirdars, and on their re- turn to Candahar they determined to elect a chief over them ; for the nearest approach of an 'Afghan leader to monarchy was that of a King of Scotland during the middle ages. The man elected was Ahmed Shah ; and it was he who first gave to the Afghans a really national existence. His dynasty, only endured through two descents, his son Timoor Shah leaving twenty-three sons, more than one of whom attained the crown in the anarchy that followed. One of these was the once celebrated Shah Shooja to support whose claims we undertook the disastrous Afghan expedi- tion against the " usurper " Post Mohammed.

A bibliographical enumeration of pages is the better way of conveying an idea of M. Ferrier's treatment. Altogether these pages are 491 in number; of which twenty-four are devoted to the two thousand years intervening between Alexander the Great and the first appearance on the public stage about 1719 of Mir Mahmood, the subsequent invader of Persia. This invasion, its destruction by Nadir, his own conquest of the Affghans, and the events that followed till the election of Ahmed Shah occupy less than fifty pages. His reign and dynasty, called that of the Suddozyes, occupy seventy more, reckoning to the first expulsion of Shah Shooja. We have thus more than two-thirds of the work, or three hundred and fifty out of four hundred and ninety- one pages devoted to the anarchy in Afghanistan and the British diplomacy previous to our undertaking the expedition to restore Shah Shooja, followed by the occupation and its disasters, with the story of the Afghans up to 18O; a couple of chapters of some forty pages describing Afghan customs, &c., being inserted in the midst of the narrative by Captain Jesse from another manuscript of M. Ferrier.

When it is considered how much has been written on the Af- ghan war, from blue-books and Kaye's elaborate compilation of the whole, to military histories of particular campaigns, or per- sonal adventures ; and that the pith of this original matter has been disseminated throughout the country by quarterlies, month- lies, and newspapers, we cannot think that further exhibition was wanted. There is no doubt truth in what Captain Jesse says as to the foreign point of view ; but to render this of account in a eritico-historical question of the past, requires a more trained and cultivated mind than M. Ferrier seems to us to possess. Neither do we see any great necessity for reproducing such recon- dite or authoritative matter, as articles from the Journal des Debats, or extracts from something published by the American Mr. Sumner : nor can we altogether credit M. Ferrier's own re- port, that the Post was defeated in the field not by fighting but bribery. The great advantage of the historian arises from his practical acquaintance with the Afghans, which produces a sort of modification of the native judgment. This, indeed, is the main feature of the book ; and imparts tit reality with a species of freshness, wherever men or their actions are in question. These are most prominent in the period that intervenes between the earlier part of the last and the beginning of the present century. The notices here are characteristic, because the facts are drawn from native historians, tradition, or personal communication. Many of them are not new ; but they have a more dramatin air, than when told by previous writers. And terrible the best of these men and actions are. There is greater vigour in the Afghan character than in that of the In- dians, or Persians, or perhaps even the Turks—they are a sort of Normans without their prudence and capacity for government. tO13, kson, who was de htdbeen formed againstliiiii oartvgrandsfeale, but failing, near all„e conspirators were cut to pieces on the spot save the pwnal :that *air ginast.t itheWinattatihjuded by Afigita4:4434,1444 ahtillettOt''rulesPil,Th*flphiyenne0 rah smeller amongst call otlbeir, 'chiefii" are dene ,deeda-,ThA,A84)g they are considnce4 na YiKkg,-,41.4e-We. oft 4 42.,b1poct ; errier .tells uwan excellentmonareli. , A military vmsnira AM !al . .ATeRA P1111 114FLM. Fertier See the closing doings •141ahtnitined ; and th .bhiera, S',:trti*r elsewhere ; country men,—ith fled to his tribe, -lçin the valleys enclosed be- tween thei mountains of the Iiiiicht-iaa.p,rougli country, full of did', culties, inwhink the Afghtm cavalry wo,hajtoi,liad but very little chance ofstitteesskatl tahey ventured to pursue him, ,Amoor employed cunning Lt hitc attempts, to. seize the qulprit ; he feigued forgAveness and a wish to par71 don ArselehlZhan, declaring daily at his dur14r5 and also in private, tluit he.admitted he had been occasionally unjust towards bins, and that lie de- sired nothing Mire than to be able to repair .the injuriesle, had done him. He made these sentiments well known in- puhhc; cud when he knew they had reached the ears of Arseleh Khan, he sent one of the great nobles of Ins court to him, accompanied by a large sate of servants carrying a Koran, on a page of which he had inscribed an oath that he would pardon , his fitult,, and affited hisseal to this doedinent. ArseleltiChan, placing confidence 'in the'sanetity of the book whiekliad received on ita pages this solemn.promise. from the King, invited the envoy and his suite te lodge in his own house treated him with great splendour andbeonaideration, and after a few day; returned with the embassy to Kabul; the' Khan's throat was cut the day that he entered the city. Timoor Shalr,,. a little- reassured by the death of this chief, now ordered a massacre of the people of Peshawar who had joined in the revolt, and fixed the extent of it to one. in three of its inhabitants : this command was, unfortunately, but too-well obeyed, 'and Peshawar was very nearly depopulated by these executions; which were preceded and fol-

lowed by a genera/ emigration. •

"From this period Timoor Shah became suspieious,.moroae, and restless, and his clemency, which had till , then rendered his reign remarkable, en- tirely ceased, and it terminated j, an at of, uuparalleled cruelty. His last days passed away in alternate paroxysms of remorse and fear; he could not quiet his' conscience and absolve it from the guilt of the wholesale slaughter of which we have just spoken, nor the murder of Arseleh Khan, brought about by perjury, and also having carried off by force the wife of an Afghan of Kandahar, to give her to a certain Mohamed Khan, one of hia favourites, who bad conceived a passion for her. Timoor Shah survived only ten months after the attack on his life; and his death, in 1793, was occasioned by an inflammation of the intestines, accompanied by violent fits of vomiting. Several of his contemporaries, whom we havehad occasion to consult on the subject of his death, assure us that he was poisoned by one of the women of his harem, the sister of a Popolzy-e chief, who was hostile to him.

"In spite of the several acts which have just been mentioned, the reign of Timoor Shah is cited in Afghanistan for the justice, equity, and paternal feeling with which he treated his subjects."

The conduct of Timoor though treacherous and bloody, might be but too easily paralleled. There is no ques- tion about the fate which overtook the father of Bost Ma- hommed, a minister' to whom a particular branch of the Sud- dozyes was indebted for the throne, and the government of the country. The Shah had previously been induced to disgrace him and put out his eyes. "Shah Mahmood, made desperate by this last disaster, ordered Fethi Khan, who had now been deprived of his eyesight eight months, to be brought into his presence, and commanded him to write to his brothers, and desire them to return to their duty. But the unfortunate vizier calmly re- plied, that in losing his sight he had lost also all his influence over his fellow men, and that he no lon this occupied himself with the affairs of th world. The King, enraged at this answer, order him to be put to death, and his enemies, the nobles of the court, were charged with the execution of the sentence ; Kamran Mime, himself the most cruel of the Suddozyes, struck the first blow, and at this signal the rest drew their daggers, rushed upon him, and strove who should make him feel the greatest torture and suffer- ing. They flayed him alive, disjointed his members, which they drew from his body one by one, and at length decapitated him, which put an end to his agonies. If is corpse, thus mutilated, was abandoned to the public exe- cutioner, who cut it in pieces, threw them into a sack, and earned them to Ghuznee, where they were interred. "Not a sigh or complaint escaped Fetid Khan amidst these horrible tor- tures: he was sustained by the courage of a hero, and the calm of a pure conscience."

In the anarchy that followed or rather was increased by this atrocity, Prince hamran lost Herat, of which he was governor ; but was enabled by treachery and Oriental fickleness to re- enter the city, though he failed in capturing the fortress.

The citadel in which 3Ioustapha Khan resided was surrounded at sun- rise by ten thousand armed men, who aroused him by a well-sustained fire of artillery and volleys of musketry. The iserdar, surprised by this sudden attack, lost a few men in the first instance, but after a few hours he com- pletely organized the defence, which during a month was most vigorously conducted, and he only made up his mind to surrender when the towers, shaken to their foundations by the explosion of mines, were on the point of falling, and large breaches opened a wide passage for the besieging army. In this extremity, he sent the Serdar Dost Mohamed Khan, Popolzye, one of his party, to Kanaran, to offer his submission ; at the same tune he in- voked the clemency of the conqueror, and sent him a Koran opened at the verse which recommends Mahomedans to bear no hatred, and forgive each other their faults; but thd prince, certainly very far from a good Mussul- man, and, as I have already remarked, a rare example of ferocity, fell upon the messenger and cudgelled him with a dervish's stick which he happened to have in his hand.

" Idoustapha Khan, appreciating clearly from this incident the kind of fate that awaited him, defended himself With desperation for ten days more —it was a lion encaged At last the assault was given • the place fell ; M prisoner was taken proner, and suffered the most dreadful of deaths. His body was burned with hot irons, his flesh torn with red-hot pincers by shreds ; covered with wounds and nearly flayed, he was bound to a large tree at the entrance to the citadel, and on this spot the people con- gregated to spit in his face, and covered him with every kind of excrement. At last they ripped open his belly, and he expired after enduring seven days of the most fearful agony. The tree to which he was bound was stand- ing in 1845. Kammn'Itfirza punished his [own] father, Shah Mahmood, for having assietedllte netilkein Legit rvolt hyrtibpiiling hid oftia wine' during one whole 'moat, whidh wee tit' bile 41eYrible■intlictioti; kis rto-his'hon Djehanguir Mirza, he gave him his liberty, but with it, as a small reocani- pews, for having assisted itrdelihredingak father, twoithottsand eats with

the bastinado on the aolekttf feet' forgetting that he had been guilty of

the same crime himselt this family, the,eon, grandson sad grand- father were all equally worthy of each other, anti strove to distiiiguish them- selves by the most odious crimes. Such is the Afghan. character : the people of Afghanistan honour that whichis vile with Inf."

Aegular atrocities like these certainly render credible the lesser charges against the Sepoys I