48. Relatives in Iran and Pakistan

by George Weber

  

1 Yemen 2 Oman 3 Arabia (Saudi Arabia) 4 Iraq 5 Iran (Persia) 6 Pakistan

5 and 6. Iran and Pakistan

Iran and Pakistan have provided a great deal of evidence of a human presence from the earliest times, but unfortunately, such evidence consists almost entirely of stone tools. Such tools provide us with a good view of the technological development through the ages but they tools do not tell us what kinds of humans made them.

The tools found all along the coastlines of Iran and Pakistan show that early people have passed through there and that the area was part of the story of early pre-human (Homo erectus) and human (Homo sapiens) migrations eastwards to India and beyond.

Like Mesopotamia, Iran and Pakistan are so rich in glamorous archaeological treasures from the neolithic to historical times, that research into the comparatively unspectacular palaeolithic stone tools and fire places, however ancient, has not been pursued and published with the vigour the subject would deserve.

If there are Iranian and Pakistani archaeologists reading these lines, maybe they will feel moved to consider digging for the deepest human past of their country. Here is an idea that occurred to the president of the Andaman Association (George Weber) when visiting the spectacular exhibition "7000 Years of Persian Art" at the Basel Antiquities Museum, Switzerland, in March 2003. The museum displayed a map of Iran and parts of Pakistan that showed the path Alexander the Great and some of his army took when returning to the west from the furthest point reached in the east, in what is now Pakistan. The march took place in late 325 BC and passed through the forbidding desert of Gedrosia (also known as Makhran) now straddling Iran and Pakistan. The map had a special impact on George since he had flown over this very area on a commercial flight from the Far East to Europe some years before - and had vivid memories of the unearthly landscape that had passed below him then for several hours: there had been no signs of human existence, just rocky landscapes and yellow-orange sands.

In J.B. Bury's A History of Greece (Macmillan St. Martin's Press, 1900, reprint 1973; page 814) the following description of Alexander's army in Gedrosia can be found the following:

"... Then he (Alexander) descended into the waste of Gedrosia. No resistance met him there, for there was no folk to resent his intrusion; only a few miserable villages in the hills, or more miserable fishing hamlets on the coast. The army moved painfully through the desert of rocks and sand, waterless and barren...

The reference to a few "miserable villages" allegedly offering no resistance is intriguing. They were merely figures that briefly stood in the conquering hero's path.

Nevertheless, in Robin Lane Fox' s Alexander the Great (originally Allen Lane, 1973; Penguin Books, 1986, our references are to the Penguin edition) we find a few more details on how Alexander's soldiery saw the locals:

"... The closer they (Alexander's army in Gedrosia, ed.) kept to the coastline, the less their comfort from the Gedrosian natives. The men of Makran were 'inhospitable and thoroughly brutish'. They allowed their nails to grow from birth to old age and they left their hair matted: their skin was scorched by the sun and they dressed in pelts of wild animals (or even of the larger fishes). They lived off the flesh of stranded whales'. They were a people still living in the Stone Age and they used their long nails instead of iron tools: the army named their neighbours the Fish-Easters, because they caught fish in nets of palm bark and ate them raw. Their houses were built from oyster shells and whale bones, like Eskimos' in some warmer environment; a few sheep ranged on the edge of the sea, where the desert gives way to pebbles and salt cliffs; these were killed and eaten raw, but their flesh tasted horribly fishy. Dead fish had infected the whole district, and in the heat, which never moderates even on an autumn evening, it rotted and stank. It was as well that the army had picked the sweet nard grass which grew in the desert valleys, for they used it as a bedding or roofing for their tents to dispel the smell of surrounding decay." (ref. pp. 393-394)

"...By now, some four hundred miles along the coast, interpreters and pilots had been recruited from the natives, and Nearchus (Alexander's admiral in charge of the fleet following the army along the coast, ed.) would converse with them through Persian interpreters of his own. Their reports, when twice translated, caused alarm. Certain islands, they claimed, lay close to the coast of Makran and were haunted by evil spirits, whom the Greeks, reared on Homer's Odyssey, identified with the Sun and an unnamed sea nymph. (ref. p. 396)

What is most intriguing here is the reference to translators having to translate twice, i.e. the natives did not speak an Iranian tongue.

Could these "natives" have been the remnants of an earlier wave of migration from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent? Could they have been Negritos? They could indeed. Palaeolithic and later stone tools have been found almost everywhere in Iran, including the coast ,but they do not tell us what people made them. On the Negritos in Iran, sources are few, vague and ambiguous. Richard N. Frye is typical in this respect in his "The Heritage of Persia" (Weidenfels and Nicholson, London, 1962, p. 10) where he writes that

"the existence of Negritos in coastal areas of south Persia, however, may testify to an aboriginal population to be connected with Negritos in Africa and the East Indies or Polynesia".

Although he seems to take the existence of early Negritos along the Iranian coast for granted, he does not mention his source or any evidence. He also never mentions the Negritos in his book again.

At the Andaman Association we are not looking for Alexander and his deeds of derring-do but for the missing Iranian and Pakistani links in the Great Human Migration - tens and hundreds of thousands of years before the famous conqueror. We would like to know what people lived there at this relatively early day in history, what they looked like, what their culture and language was, why they were there and since when and what remains of them. Answers there have been none - yet.

The director of the Iranian National Museum, Mohammad Reza Karga, spoke at the opening of the exhibition in Basel. For us, the exhibition was spectacular but as usual in such matters, skewed in the direction of art appreciation, rather than archaeology and prehistory.

Would the director and his Iranian (and indeed Pakistani) fellow archaeologists and prehistorians please take note of our cry and perhaps consider a small research project or two on the Gedrosian natives? The results could be rather interesting. 

Fig. 47-4. Alexanders the Great's route of return from the Indus to the west. Red: the march of Alexander's army through Gedrosia August to October 325 BC. Dotted black lines: (1) a fleet also followed the coastline under admiral Nearchus while (2) a second army returned home through what is now Afghanistan under general Craterus. Brown: area conquered by Alexander (unconquered areas remain white). Green: modern national borders. (from J.B. Bury's A History of Greece)

  

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Last change 28 March 2005