What more natural than that he should draft some of his captives eastward to the land of promise? There is not an important tribe of people in all that hinterland of India that has not been drafted in from somewhere. There is not a people left in India, for that matter, that can safely call themselves indigenous. From Persia and Media, from Aria and Skythia, from Greece and Arabia, from Syria and Mesopotamia they have come, and their coming can generally be traced historically, and their traditions of origin proved to be true. But there is one important people (of whom there is much more to be said) who call themselves Ben-i-Israel, who claim a descent from Kish, who have adopted a strange mixture of Mosaic law and Hindu ordinance in their moral code, who (some sections at least) keep a feast which strangely accords with the Passover, who hate the Yahudi (Jew) with a traditional hatred, and for whom no one has yet been able to suggest any other origin than the one they claim, and claim with determined force; and these people rule Afghanistan. It may be that they have justification for their traditions, even as others have; they may yet be proved to stand in the same relationship to the scattered remnants of Israel as some of the Kafir inhabitants of Northern Afghanistan can be shown to hold to the Greeks of pre-Alexandrian days. It is difficult to account for the name Afghan: it has been said that it is but the Armenian word Aghvan (Mountaineer). If this is so, it at once indicates a connection between the modern Afghan and the Syrian captives of Armenia.
But whilst "men in nations" were thus traversing the highlands of Persia from Mesopotamia to Northern Afghanistan by highways so ancient that they may be regarded almost as geographical fixtures as everlasting as the hills, we do not find much evidence of traffic with the Central Asian States north of the Oxus.
Early military excursions into the land of the Skyths were more for the purpose of dealing with the predatory habits of these warlike tribes, who afterwards peopled half of Europe as well as India, than of promoting either trade or geographical inquiry; and it was the route which led to Northern Afghanistan and Baktria through Northern Persia which was most attractive from its general accessibility and promise of profit. It was this way that Northern Kashmir and the gold-fields of Tibet were touched. The Indian gold which formed so large a part of the Persian revenues in the time of Darius undoubtedly came from Northern India and Tibet. Old as are the workings of the Wynaad gold-fields in the west, and Kolar in the east, of the peninsula, it is unlikely that either of these sources was known to Persia.