BALUCHISTAN

53

where he found them, and we can trace a Dravidian ancestry
for the Brahui (or Bar Rohi, 7. the hill men), who hold
all that impenetrable mass of hill frontier country which
extends along the Sind border from Kalat to the sea,
The date of the first Dravidian occupation of the Baluch
frontier is lost in the mists of antiquity. It was certainly
anterior to the great irruption of Aryan races from Central
Asia about 2000 years B.C. Vast successive waves of
Turanian immigration swept in from the west—from the
plains of Mesopotamia and the highlands of Persia—and
they must have included pre-Semitic races from ancient
Chaldeea. Strange monuments of evident Turanian origin
are to be found amongst the Makran Hills; curious
evidences of relationship to peoples who were buried in
the valley of the Euphrates. Some of these human tides
may have flowed through Southern Baluchistan, and
creeping along by the coast-line down the western borders
of the Indian continent may have spread into the jungles
of the Central Provinces. Others, such as the Brahuis
who still talk a language allied to that of the Dravidian
tribes of Southern India, found themselves driven southward
 into a compact mass of hills on the Sind border
with no convenient outlet to the east, and taking possession
 of this wilderness, have been able easily to hold their
own against all comers through successive ages ever
since. Thus the Dravidian and Persian ethnographical
stock of Baluchistan is the earliest for whose existence we
can in any way account, although there are indications of
a yet earlier prehistoric occupation to be found in Arrian’s
account of those Makran fish-eating savages who were
encountered by the Greeks near the mouth of the Hingol
River,
Grafted on to the early Persian, Dravidian, and
Ethiopian stock, we find representatives of a vast number
 of other races all more or less historically modern.
Chief amongst them, claiming precedence of all others,
and rejoicing in the distinction of being “assal” (true)
Baluch, are those tribes of Arabic origin who are
best represented by the great confederation of Rinds.