Afghan (ethnonym)

• 1. Introduction

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  Afghan is an ethnonym that once described only the Pashtun people of Central and South Asia. Shapur I of the Sassanid Empire recorded an early form of the word, Abgan, in the 3rd century CE. For more than a thousand years afterward, travelers and chroniclers used variations of the name. They described a people living in the mountains between Persia and India, long before any country called Afghanistan existed. What did those outside observers actually see when they wrote the word down? Where did the name come from in the first place? How did a label for one ethnic group become the name attached to an entire modern nation?

• 2. Centuries of Sightings

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  Bactrian documents from the 4th century CE record the word Afghans, or Afghana, naming a specific clan. One document preserves a complaint that the men of Rob had been denied justice after "the Afghans took away the horses."

  The Brihat-samhita, a 6th-century CE Indian encyclopedia, lists a people it calls Avagana. The text groups them with the Chola, the white Huns, and the Chinese, warning that "it would be unfavourable" to face any of them.

  The Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, written in 982 CE, places the word near the village of Saul, close to modern Gardez. The same text describes a ruler in Ninhar, now Nangarhar, who had Muslim, Afghan, and Hindu wives.

  Al-Biruni's 11th-century Tarikh-ul Hind, or History of the Indus, describes rebellious Afghans living in tribal lands west of the Indus River. That region lies within present-day Pakistan.

  Al-Utbi's chronicle Tarikh-i Yamini records Afghans and Khiljis enlisting in Sabuktigin's army after the defeat of Jayapala. Afghans also served in Mahmud Ghaznavi's expedition to Tokharistan. On one occasion, Mahmud punished a group of opposing Afghans, a detail confirmed by the chronicler Abulfazl Beyhaqi. Afghans were later enrolled in the Ghurid Kingdom, which ruled from 1148 to 1215. By 1290, at the start of the Khilji dynasty, Afghans were well known across northern India.

  Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler, visited Kabul in 1333, after the era of the Khilji dynasty. He wrote that the city had become occupied by Afghans, who "possess considerable strength" and were "mostly highwaymen."

  That reputation for banditry would linger in outside accounts of the Afghans for centuries afterward.

• 3. What the Name Might Mean

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  Some scholars trace the word Afghan to the Avestan terms awajan and apajan, and to the Sanskrit ava-Han and apa-Han. Those roots carry meanings of killing, striking, throwing, resisting, or defending.

  Under the Sasanians, and possibly under the earlier Parthian Empire, the word was used for men belonging to a certain Persian sect. Other scholars connect the name instead to the Aśvakan people, who lived in what is now Afghanistan.

  Scholars writing in the 19th and 20th centuries proposed that Afghan came from Aśvakan, meaning "horsemen." The name is built from the Sanskrit and Avestan words aśva and aspa, both meaning horse. They also linked it to the Assakenoi, a name the Greek historian Arrian gave to ancient inhabitants of the Hindu Kush.

  More recent scholarship, however, has identified linguistic inconsistencies in the horsemen theory. Those inconsistencies now call the connection to Aśvakan into question.

  The uncertainty over what the ethnic name once meant would carry into later arguments over the name of the country itself.

• 4. Naming a Country

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  The suffix -stan, attached to the end of Afghanistan, is a Persian word meaning "place of." A related Pashto word, stogna, appears in several languages across Asia.

  The 16th-century Mughal ruler Babur described the territory between Khorasan, Kabulistan, and the Indus River as home to tribes of Afghans. He wrote that the road from Khorasan runs straight through Kandahar. He also described the valleys of Kabul as home to Turks, Aimaks, Arabs, and Tajiks. Other villages held Pashais, Parachis, Berekis, and Afghans, with Kaferistan to the northeast and Afghanistan to the south.

  The 16th-century historian Ferishta recorded that men from Kabul and Khilj called their homeland "Afghanistan" rather than "Kohistan." Their reasoning, he wrote, was that the mountains held "nothing there but Afghans and disturbances." Ferishta also noted that people in India called the same group Patan, though he did not know why.

  The Encyclopædia of Islam states that the country has carried the name Afghanistan only since the middle of the 18th century. That was when, in its own words, "the supremacy of the Afghan race became assured." Before that, the name simply meant "the land of the Afghans," a smaller territory than the modern state, with some districts now inside Pakistan.

  The term "Afghanistan" itself came into wider use in 1855. It was officially recognized by the British during the reign of Dost Mohammad Khan.

  Long before the British recognized that name, other writers had already been inventing ancestries for the Afghans that reached back to the Bible.

• 5. Legends and Guesses

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  The Maḫzan-e Afġān, written in 1612 by Nimat Allah al-Harawi at the Mughal court, traces the Afghans to an ancestor named Afghana. The text calls him a grandson of the biblical Saul, born to Saul's son Irmia, or Jeremiah.

  Orphaned young, Afghana was raised by David and later served as commander-in-chief under Solomon, according to the same account. Neither Afghana nor Jeremia, son of Saul, appears anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.

  About four centuries after Afghana, in the 6th century BCE, Bakhtunnasar, or Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, attacked the Kingdom of Judah. The text says his descendants were exiled, some fleeing to the mountains of Ghor in present-day Afghanistan and others to the area around Mecca.

  A 16th-century Muslim historian wrote that Khalid bin Abdullah, son of Khalid bin Walid, married his daughter to an Afghan chief. That chief had converted to Islam. Their descendants, he wrote, became heads of tribes that still carry their names.

  The same historian linked the Afghans to Copts who converted after Moses defeated an enemy in the Red Sea, later settling in the "Sulimany mountains." He notes that Khalid bin Walid himself actually belonged to the Quraysh tribe.

  After converting to Islam, the text says, Khalid invited his supposed Israelite kinsmen in Ghor to the faith. A delegation led by a man named Qais traveled to Medina and met Muhammad, who renamed him Abdur Rashid.

  Qais's three sons, Sarban, Bettan, and Ghourghusht, are considered the ancestors of various Pashtun tribes in this account. Other writers proposed entirely different, now-obsolete origins for the name.

  Samuel G. Benjamin, writing in 1887, derived Afghan from a word for "wailing," which he said Persians used contemptuously for their plaintive neighbors. H. W. Bellew, in an 1891 study, traced it instead to Alban, from the Latin albus, meaning "white" or "mountain."

  Bellew argued Armenians used the term as Alvan or Alwan for mountaineers, which Persians then reshaped into Aoghan, Avghan, and finally Afghan. A scholar named Michanovsky offered yet another route, linking the Sanskrit Avagana to an old Sumerian term, Ab-bar-Gan, meaning "high country." That term was originally used for the region of Badakhshan.

  The scholar Yu Gankovsky and others instead traced Afghan to an Uzbek word, Avagan, said to mean "original." Unlike theories built on outside observers naming the Afghans, that Uzbek derivation stands out. It suggests the name may have come from the Afghans themselves.