Seistan

	The Vanished Paradise of Seistan Quoted from: George Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol 1 (1892) The derivation of the name Seistan or Sejestan from Sagastan, the country of the Sagan, or Sacae, has, says Sir H. Rawlinson, never been doubted by any writer of credit, either Arab or Persian ; although it is curious that a band of roving nomads, as were these Scythians, who descended hither from the north in the third century A.D., should have bequeathed a permanent designation to a country which they only occupied for a hundred years. (Some English writers, however, have derived it from saghes, a wood that is grown locally and is used as fuel by the Persians.) Expelled by the Sassanian monarch Varahran II (A.D. 275 -292) they have long vanished from history themselves; but in the name of the district they may claim a monumentum oare perennius. At different epochs of history territories of very differing sizes have been called Seistan, according as the dominion of their rulers has been extended or curtailed. In its stricter application, however, the name has always been peculiar to the great lacustrine basin that receives the confluent waters of the Helmund and other rivers, whose channels converge at this point upon a depression in the land's surface, with very clearly defined borders, and a length from north to south of nearly 250 miles. It is certain that in olden days this depression was filled by the waters of a great lake; and, were all the artificial canals and irrigation channels, by which the river-contents are now reduced and exhausted, to be destroyed, I imagine that it would very soon relapse into its primeval conditions. The modern Seistan may be said to comprise three main depressions, which, according to the season of the year and the extent of the spring floods, are converted alternately into lakes, swamps, or dry land. The first of these depressions consists of the twofold lagoon formed by the Harut Rud and the Farrah Rud flowing from the north, and by the Helmund and the Khash or Khushk Rud flowing from the south and east respectively. These two lakes or pools are connected by a thick reedbed called the Naizar, which, according to the amount of water that they contain, is either a marsh or a cane-brake. In flood time these two lakes, ordinarily distinct, unite their waters, and the conjoint inundation pours over the Naizar into the second great depression, known by the generic title of Hamun or Expanse, which stretches southwards like a vast shallow trough for many miles. When the British Commissioners were here in 1872, the Hamun was quite dry, and they marched to and fro across its bed. But in 1885-6, when some of the members of the later Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission were proceeding this way from Quetta to the confines of Herat, it was found to be an immense lake, extending for miles, with the Kuh-i-Khwajah, a wellknown mountain and conspicuous landmark usually regarded as its western limit, standing up like an island in the middle. In times of abnormal flood the Hamun will itself overflow; and on such occasions the water, draining southwards through the SaTshela ravine, inundates the third of the great depressions to which I alluded, and which is known as the Zirreh Marsh. This was said at the time of the Commission not to have occurred within living memory, it being a far more common experience to find all the river-beds exhausted than all the lake-beds full ; and the Zirreh as a rule presents the familiar appearance of a salt desert. In 1885, however, a British officer exploring Western Beluchistan found water two feet deep flowing down the Sarshela or Shela, and forming an extensive Hamun in the northern part of the Zirreh, which was said to be over one hundred miles in circumference. It will readily be understood from the above description how variable is the face of Seistan, and what a puzzle to writers its Protean comparative geography becomes. For not only do the lakes alternately swell, recede, and disappear - the area of displacement covering an extent, according to Rawlinson, of one hundred miles in length by fifty miles in width - but the rivers also are constantly shifting their beds, sometimes taking a sudden fancy for what has hitherto been an artificial canal, but which they soon succeed in converting into a very good imitation of a natural channel, in order to perplex some geographer of the future. It is not surprising, therefore, that while the country owes to the abundant alluvium thus promiscuously showered upon it its store of wealth and fertility, it also contains more ruined cities and habitations than are perhaps to be found within a similar space of ground anywhere in the world. Such in brief outline is the physical conformation of Seistan. I will now proceed to its history. From the earliest times there has been something in Seistan that appealed vividly to the Persian imagination. The country was called Nimroz, from a supposed connection with Nimrod, 'the mighty hunter'; it was the residence of Jamshid, and the legendary birthplace of the great Rustam, son of Zal, and fifth in descent from Jamshid. King Arthur does not play as great a part in British legend as does the heroic Rustam in the myths of Iran. For, after all, Arthur was a mortal man (and, if we are to follow Tennyson, almost a nineteenth century gentleman), while Rustam fought with demons and jinns as well as against the pagan hordes of Turan and Afrasiab. Perhaps our Saint George of the Dragon would be a nearer parallel; and just as we stamp the record of his matchless daring upon our coinage, so do the Persians emblazon the great feats of Rustam upon gateway and door and pillar. Seistan emerges into the clearer light of ascertained history in the time of Alexander the Great, when it was known as Drangiana (identical with the land of the Herodotean Sarangians). He probably passed this way on his march eastwards to India; whilst on his return therefrom, though he pursued a more southerly line himself, through Gedrosia (Mekran) to Carmania (Kerman), he despatched a light column under Craterus through Arachotia and Drangiana. Under the Sassanian monarchs Seistan was a flourishing centre of the Zoroastrian worship, and hither came the last sovereign of that dynasty, Yezdijird, flying from the victorious Arabs on his way to his fate at Aferv. It was under the succeeding regime that the province attained the climax of its material prosperity; and to this-the Arab-period are to be attributed the vast ruins of which I have previously spoken. In the ninth century a native dynasty known as the Sufari or Coppersmiths, was founded by one Yakub bin Leitb, a potter and a robber, but a soldier and a statesman who won by arms a shortlived empire that stretched from Shiraz to Kabul, but collapsed before the iron onset of Mabmud of Ghuzni in the succeeding century. El Istakhri, visiting Seistan at this epoch, described it as a country of populous cities, abundant canals, and great wealth; among its natural resources being included a rich gold mine that subsequently disappeared in an earthquake. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Seistan, like most of its neighbours, experienced the two successive visitations of those scourges of mankind, Jenghiz Khan and Timur Beg, being turned from a smiling oasis into a ruinous waste, and suffering a murderous blow from which it has never recovered. The Sefavi dynasty repeopled it under the local rule of the ancient reigning family of Kaiani, who claimed descent from Kai Kobad, the first Achaemenian king. But the march of time brought round the fated cycle of injury and desolation; and at the bands both of the Afghan invaders of 1722, and of Nadir Shah who expelled them, it completed its chronic tale of suffering. Remaining a portion of the mighty empire of the Afshar usurper till his death in 1747, it then passed to the sceptre of Ahmed Shah Abdali, the adventurous captain who, imitating his master's exploits, rode off and founded the Durani empire in Afghanistan. From this epoch dates its appearance on the stage of modern politics, and during the last thirty years upon the chess-board of Anglo-Indian diplomacy . . . *(For further information on the Helmund River, vide a paper by C. R. Markham on 'The Basin of the Helmund,' in the Proceedings of the R. G. S.* (New Series), Vol. i. P. 191.)** (The Kuh-i-Khwaiah, known also as Kuh-i-Rustam, is an isolated bluff composed of a crystalline black rock resembling basalt, and rising to a height of about 400 feet above the level of the Hamun, in which it constitutes a famous landmark for many miles. It was a stronghold of the old Kaianian dynasty who ruled Seistan, and is said to have been held for seven years by one of their number against the troops of Nadir Shah. It is also a place of popular resort among the Seistanis, for at No Ruz (March 21) a fair is held there, and the flattened summit is used as a race-course. For further information, vide 'Visit to the Kuh-i-Khwajah,' by Major B. Lovett, in the Journal of the R. G. S., Vol. xliv. p. 145 (1874). ) (When Sir C. MacGregor was exploring Beluchistan in 1877, he skirted the Zirreh Desert on the south for two days and a half without finding a solitary pool of brackish water. 'Nowhere was there the slightest sign of dampness. Everywhere it was the same-nothing but sand, and all the vegetation as dry as bones, crumbling into dust at the least touch.' At length, and with great difficulty, he did manage in one spot to extract a little fluid from the soil; and this was how, in his inimitable unvarnished way, he described it: 'If any should wish to save themselves the trouble of going to Zirreh to fetch Zirreh water, I think I could give a recipe, which would taste something like it. Take, then, the first nasty looking water you can find, mix salt with it till you make it taste as nasty as it looks, then impregnate it with gas from a London street-lamp, and add a little bilge-water. Shake vigorously, and it is ready for use.'- Wanderings in Balochistan, p. 183. ) (The great authority on the early history and inhabitants of Seistan is Sir H. Rawlinson's essay, entitled 'Notes on Seistan,' published in the Journal of the R. G. S. vol. xliii. pp. 272-294 (1873). Compare also the excellent and accurate summary of Dr. Bellew, From the Indus to the Tigris, pp. 248-262, and Inquiry into the Ethnography of Afghanistan, 1891. The chief modern inhabitants of Persian Seistan are the Seistanis, who occupy a servile position among other and dominant tribes; the Kaianis claiming descent from the Kai dynasty of Cyrus; the Kurd Galis, a branch of the Kurds of Kurdistan, who emigrated and established the Malik Kurd dynasty of Ghor, 1245-1383, A.D. ; Iranian elements known as Tajik; and Beluchis, of whom the principal tribes in Seistan are the Sarbandi, who were transported by Timur to Hamadan, but brought back by Nadir Shah, and the Shahreki.) Return to the Asia page Last updated on February 17, 2002 by Lisa and Sylvia.

The Vanished Paradise of Seistan

Quoted from:

George Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol 1 (1892)

The derivation of the name Seistan or Sejestan from Sagastan, the country of the Sagan, or Sacae, has, says Sir H. Rawlinson, never been doubted by any writer of credit, either Arab or Persian ; although it is curious that a band of roving nomads, as were these Scythians, who descended hither from the north in the third century A.D., should have bequeathed a permanent designation to a country which they only occupied for a hundred years. (Some English writers, however, have derived it from saghes, a wood that is grown locally and is used as fuel by the Persians.) Expelled by the Sassanian monarch Varahran II (A.D. 275 -292) they have long vanished from history themselves; but in the name of the district they may claim a monumentum oare perennius.

At different epochs of history territories of very differing sizes have been called Seistan, according as the dominion of their rulers has been extended or curtailed. In its stricter application, however, the name has always been peculiar to the great lacustrine basin that receives the confluent waters of the Helmund and other rivers, whose channels converge at this point upon a depression in the land's surface, with very clearly defined borders, and a length from north to south of nearly 250 miles. It is certain that in olden days this depression was filled by the waters of a great lake; and, were all the artificial canals and irrigation channels, by which the river-contents are now reduced and exhausted, to be destroyed, I imagine that it would very soon relapse into its primeval conditions.

The modern Seistan may be said to comprise three main depressions, which, according to the season of the year and the extent of the spring floods, are converted alternately into lakes, swamps, or dry land. The first of these depressions consists of the twofold lagoon formed by the Harut Rud and the Farrah Rud flowing from the north, and by the Helmund and the Khash or Khushk Rud flowing from the south and east respectively. These two lakes or pools are connected by a thick reedbed called the Naizar, which, according to the amount of water that they contain, is either a marsh or a cane-brake. In flood time these two lakes, ordinarily distinct, unite their waters, and the conjoint inundation pours over the Naizar into the second great depression, known by the generic title of Hamun or Expanse, which stretches southwards like a vast shallow trough for many miles. When the British Commissioners were here in 1872, the Hamun was quite dry, and they marched to and fro across its bed. But in 1885-6, when some of the members of the later Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission were proceeding this way from Quetta to the confines of Herat, it was found to be an immense lake, extending for miles, with the Kuh-i-Khwajah, a wellknown mountain and conspicuous landmark usually regarded as its western limit, standing up like an island in the middle. In times of abnormal flood the Hamun will itself overflow; and on such occasions the water, draining southwards through the SaTshela ravine, inundates the third of the great depressions to which I alluded, and which is known as the Zirreh Marsh. This was said at the time of the Commission not to have occurred within living memory, it being a far more common experience to find all the river-beds exhausted than all the lake-beds full ; and the Zirreh as a rule presents the familiar appearance of a salt desert. In 1885, however, a British officer exploring Western Beluchistan found water two feet deep flowing down the Sarshela or Shela, and forming an extensive Hamun in the northern part of the Zirreh, which was said to be over one hundred miles in circumference.

It will readily be understood from the above description how variable is the face of Seistan, and what a puzzle to writers its Protean comparative geography becomes. For not only do the lakes alternately swell, recede, and disappear - the area of displacement covering an extent, according to Rawlinson, of one hundred miles in length by fifty miles in width - but the rivers also are constantly shifting their beds, sometimes taking a sudden fancy for what has hitherto been an artificial canal, but which they soon succeed in converting into a very good imitation of a natural channel, in order to perplex some geographer of the future. It is not surprising, therefore, that while the country owes to the abundant alluvium thus promiscuously showered upon it its store of wealth and fertility, it also contains more ruined cities and habitations than are perhaps to be found within a similar space of ground anywhere in the world.

Such in brief outline is the physical conformation of Seistan. I will now proceed to its history. From the earliest times there has been something in Seistan that appealed vividly to the Persian imagination. The country was called Nimroz, from a supposed connection with Nimrod, 'the mighty hunter'; it was the residence of Jamshid, and the legendary birthplace of the great Rustam, son of Zal, and fifth in descent from Jamshid. King Arthur does not play as great a part in British legend as does the heroic Rustam in the myths of Iran. For, after all, Arthur was a mortal man (and, if we are to follow Tennyson, almost a nineteenth century gentleman), while Rustam fought with demons and jinns as well as against the pagan hordes of Turan and Afrasiab. Perhaps our Saint George of the Dragon would be a nearer parallel; and just as we stamp the record of his matchless daring upon our coinage, so do the Persians emblazon the great feats of Rustam upon gateway and door and pillar.

Seistan emerges into the clearer light of ascertained history in the time of Alexander the Great, when it was known as Drangiana (identical with the land of the Herodotean Sarangians). He probably passed this way on his march eastwards to India; whilst on his return therefrom, though he pursued a more southerly line himself, through Gedrosia (Mekran) to Carmania (Kerman), he despatched a light column under Craterus through Arachotia and Drangiana. Under the Sassanian monarchs Seistan was a flourishing centre of the Zoroastrian worship, and hither came the last sovereign of that dynasty, Yezdijird, flying from the victorious Arabs on his way to his fate at Aferv. It was under the succeeding regime that the province attained the climax of its material prosperity; and to this-the Arab-period are to be attributed the vast ruins of which I have previously spoken. In the ninth century a native dynasty known as the Sufari or Coppersmiths, was founded by one Yakub bin Leitb, a potter and a robber, but a soldier and a statesman who won by arms a shortlived empire that stretched from Shiraz to Kabul, but collapsed before the iron onset of Mabmud of Ghuzni in the succeeding century. El Istakhri, visiting Seistan at this epoch, described it as a country of populous cities, abundant canals, and great wealth; among its natural resources being included a rich gold mine that subsequently disappeared in an earthquake. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Seistan, like most of its neighbours, experienced the two successive visitations of those scourges of mankind, Jenghiz Khan and Timur Beg, being turned from a smiling oasis into a ruinous waste, and suffering a murderous blow from which it has never recovered. The Sefavi dynasty repeopled it under the local rule of the ancient reigning family of Kaiani, who claimed descent from Kai Kobad, the first Achaemenian king. But the march of time brought round the fated cycle of injury and desolation; and at the bands both of the Afghan invaders of 1722, and of Nadir Shah who expelled them, it completed its chronic tale of suffering. Remaining a portion of the mighty empire of the Afshar usurper till his death in 1747, it then passed to the sceptre of Ahmed Shah Abdali, the adventurous captain who, imitating his master's exploits, rode off and founded the Durani empire in Afghanistan. From this epoch dates its appearance on the stage of modern politics, and during the last thirty years upon the chess-board of Anglo-Indian diplomacy . . .

(For further information on the Helmund River, vide a paper by C. R. Markham on 'The Basin of the Helmund,' in the Proceedings of the R. G. S. (New Series), Vol. i. P. 191.)

(The Kuh-i-Khwaiah, known also as Kuh-i-Rustam, is an isolated bluff composed of a crystalline black rock resembling basalt, and rising to a height of about 400 feet above the level of the Hamun, in which it constitutes a famous landmark for many miles. It was a stronghold of the old Kaianian dynasty who ruled Seistan, and is said to have been held for seven years by one of their number against the troops of Nadir Shah. It is also a place of popular resort among the Seistanis, for at No Ruz (March 21) a fair is held there, and the flattened summit is used as a race-course. For further information, vide 'Visit to the Kuh-i-Khwajah,' by Major B. Lovett, in the Journal of the R. G. S., Vol. xliv. p. 145 (1874). )

(When Sir C. MacGregor was exploring Beluchistan in 1877, he skirted the Zirreh Desert on the south for two days and a half without finding a solitary pool of brackish water. 'Nowhere was there the slightest sign of dampness. Everywhere it was the same-nothing but sand, and all the vegetation as dry as bones, crumbling into dust at the least touch.' At length, and with great difficulty, he did manage in one spot to extract a little fluid from the soil; and this was how, in his inimitable unvarnished way, he described it: 'If any should wish to save themselves the trouble of going to Zirreh to fetch Zirreh water, I think I could give a recipe, which would taste something like it. Take, then, the first nasty looking water you can find, mix salt with it till you make it taste as nasty as it looks, then impregnate it with gas from a London street-lamp, and add a little bilge-water. Shake vigorously, and it is ready for use.'- Wanderings in Balochistan, p. 183. )

(The great authority on the early history and inhabitants of Seistan is Sir H. Rawlinson's essay, entitled 'Notes on Seistan,' published in the Journal of the R. G. S. vol. xliii. pp. 272-294 (1873). Compare also the excellent and accurate summary of Dr. Bellew, From the Indus to the Tigris, pp. 248-262, and Inquiry into the Ethnography of Afghanistan, 1891. The chief modern inhabitants of Persian Seistan are the Seistanis, who occupy a servile position among other and dominant tribes; the Kaianis claiming descent from the Kai dynasty of Cyrus; the Kurd Galis, a branch of the Kurds of Kurdistan, who emigrated and established the Malik Kurd dynasty of Ghor, 1245-1383, A.D. ; Iranian elements known as Tajik; and Beluchis, of whom the principal tribes in Seistan are the Sarbandi, who were transported by Timur to Hamadan, but brought back by Nadir Shah, and the Shahreki.)

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Last updated on February 17, 2002 by Lisa and Sylvia.