Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/114

 Rh replaced it; their chiefs, through intermarriage with neighbouring Musulman peoples, have changed so greatly, even in type, that usually no trace of the Tibetan is left; but the mass of the nation, though practising Musulman social customs and wearing a Musulman costume, have not lost the Tibetan spoken language, and are, in feature and other personal attributes, as thoroughly Tibetan as ever they were. Had the Baltis occupied an open country, and been constantly engaged in wars and invasions, there might have been a greater and more rapid change. Their secluded mountainous home (like that of the Hazáras) has mitigated this, and has helped to preserve them as a race: but the principle is the same as with the Moghuls.

With regard to the misleading employment of the word Turk, alluded to above, it must be explained that, among Asiatic authors, it is constantly met with as the definition of a race or people distinguished from the Tartars and the Moghuls, on the one hand, and from Tájiks, or Táziks, on the other. But in the same writings, and often on the same page, it is used to denote all nomads and inhabitants of the steppes, irrespective of race or origin, and merely to distinguish such people from those who dwelt in towns, and who cultivated the settled districts—or from the Tájiks generally. The first may be regarded as its ethnological sense: the second as sociological only, and as about synonymous with the adopted English word nomad. In this second sense it included, as we shall see, all Mongoloid and Tartar races. In dictionaries we find among its many meanings those of barbarian, robber, vagabond, wanderer, etc. It is also, in poetry, applied to the planet Mars as "a Wanderer of the sky," and to the sun as "the Turk of China," that is of the East; or “"the Turk of midday"—viz., the South; or "the Turk of the Spheres." All who lived in the steppes and ranges, outside the pale of what was regarded as civilisation, and led a pastoral or unsettled life, but who were not distinctively mountaineers, were deemed a separate class (irrespective of race) and required a separate name to denote them. To this class the name of Turk attached itself throughout Central Asia. In Europe and in India the word Turk was not used in this sense. By Europeans, and perhaps Western Asiatics also, the word Tatar, or Tartar, was usually in vogue, down to quite modern times, to indicate the nomadic nations of the interior of Asia, without reference to any racial con-