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Nadir at the same time addressed two letters to the King of the Usbegs, and to the other chiefs of that part of Tartary, informing them that he had sent orders to his son to retreat within the limits of the Persian empire, and not to disturb countries which were the inheritance of the race of Genghis Khan and of high Turkoman families.
The population of Tachkend does not differ very much from that met with in other parts of Turkestan. It comprises Sarthes, Usbegs, Tadjiks, Khirgizes, Nogais, Israelites, a few Afghans and Hindoos and as may be naturally supposed a fair supply of Russians. It is perhaps at Tachkend that the Jews are gathered in the greatest numbers.
At five o'clock in the morning the train stops at the capital of the Khanate of Bokhara, eleven hundred and seven versts from Uzun Ada. The Khanates of Bokhara and Samarkand used to form Sogdiana, a Persian satrapy inhabited by the Tadjiks and afterwards by the Usbegs, who invaded the country at the close of the fifteenth century.
The Afghan Prince of Kandahar had expected aid from the chief of Bulkh, against whom Nadir detached his son, with a chosen body of twelve thousand horse. The Prince not only defeated this ruler and took his capital, but passed the Oxus, and did not hesitate to give battle to the monarch of the Usbegs, who had advanced from Bokhara with an army far outnumbering the Persians.
After this, he obtained a precarious subsistence by heading a band of robbers; from which occupation he passed, by an easy transition in such troubled times, into the employment of the Afghan Governor of Khorasan, by whom he was at first raised to rank and command, as a reward for his valor in actions with the Usbegs, and afterward degraded and punished with the bastinado on account of his insolent and turbulent conduct.
So the months went by, and very slowly the strength returned to him; but his eyes were withered and the bones stood out in his cheeks. But he resumed his throne, and sat upon it kingly, black-bearded, eagle-eyed, terribly apart in his grief and his royalty; and so seated among his Usbegs, he declared his will.
Such an attack seems to have occurred towards the autumn of A.D. 350. The invading horde is said to have consisted of Massagatae; but we can hardly be mistaken in regarding them as, in the main, of Tatar, or Turkoman blood, akin to the Usbegs and other Turanian tribes which still inhabit the sandy steppe.
A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by Sharokh, his youngest son; but after his decease the scene was again involved in darkness and blood; and before the end of a century Transoxiana and Persia were trampled by the Usbegs from the north, and the Turcomans of the black and white sheep.
Among the first-class passengers I noticed a few Usbegs of the ordinary type, with retreating foreheads and prominent cheek bones, and brown complexions, who were the lords of the country, and from whose families come the emirs and khans of Central Asia. But are there not any Europeans in this Grand Transasiatic train? It must be confessed that I can only count five or six.
We must view them as the congeners of the Huns, Bulgarians, and Comans of the ancient world; of the Kalmucks, Ouigurs, Usbegs, Eleuts, etc., of the present day.
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