Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/89

 58 golian hordes, however, under Chingiz and his successors, put an end to all such practices, and from that time till the date when Mirza Haidar's history closes (and probably for long after also), the country reverted to a purely pastoral condition. When, therefore, we read of the cities of Taráz, Bálásaghun, Aimal, Bishbálik, Almáligh, etc., within the Moghul period, it can hardly be that Moghul cities are intended, but rather encampments—some of them, perhaps, central in situation and well inhabited—standing on or near the sites of the remains of these places.

In the more advanced of the countries conquered by the Mongolian armies—in Persia, Mávará-un-Nahr, Turkistan, etc.—no obliteration or even systematic destruction of towns (except in the course of the wars), and no reversion to a nomadic level, seems to have taken place; but the difference in the case of Moghulistan was that, in that country, the nomadic tribesmen of the steppes immediately to the eastward—the true Mongolia—pressed in, and appropriating the land for their own habitation, took root, while in the lower countries they settled as rulers only. Those of the Mongols who, after the first invasion, stayed in the conquered countries with their governing Khans or chiefs, probably intermarried, after a time, with the settled population, and were soon absorbed; while in what became known—and partly for this very reason—as 'Moghulistan,' or the 'land of the Mongols,' the invaders found a suitable home, and establishing themselves as one of the nations of the soil, became, for a time at least, the dominant one. As generations passed, they tended, no doubt, to lose their identity by intermarrying with other races already sparsely inhabiting the region, but in this instance their absorption would be a slow process, as compared with the few left among the overwhelming populations of the lower countries in the west. The aul was probably a tribal community, and the number of the Moghuls was perhaps greater than that of their neighbours, while the life of the steppes rendered a certain degree of isolation inevitable. All these circumstances would combine to retard a fusion of races, though it may not, as far as the evidence goes, have obviated it in the end.

Here, then, no cities sprang up, while those already in existence soon fell to ruin. But the Musulman writers, who constantly confuse the words for 'city' and 'country,' and