The expedition into Afghanistan; notes and sketches descriptive of the country, contained in a personal narrative during the campaign of 1839 and 1840. Up to the surrender of Dost Mahomed Khan / By James Atkinson.

  • Atkinson, James, 1780-1852.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The expedition into Afghanistan; notes and sketches descriptive of the country, contained in a personal narrative during the campaign of 1839 and 1840. Up to the surrender of Dost Mahomed Khan / By James Atkinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/460 (page 10)
    country beyond their present seats, and the ad- joining mountains; and that they are in fact, as far as history goes, an original people : that they had, in other words, an Adam and Eve of their own! Tacitus pronounced the Germans Indx- gened, or natives of the soil. But upon this Gibbon remarks :—We may allow with safety, and perhaps with truth, that ancient Germany was not originally peopled by any foreign colo- nies already formed into a political society; but that the name and nation received their existence from the gradual union of some wandering sa- vages of the Hercynian woods. To assert those savages to have been the spontaneous production of the earth which they inhabited, would be a rash inference [like that of Professor Dorn], condemned by religion, and unwarranted by reason.’’* The expedition of Alexander the Great had also given to Caubul and its provinces a deep interest among men of antiquarian inquiry, and Kafiristan was long supposed to be peopled by the descendants of a colony of Greeks, though the Greeks were perhaps never so far north as that portion of Asia. Their fair complexions, and sitting upon chairs, unlike the tribes and nations that surround them, seemed to indicate a European race, and curiosity was awakened to ascertain the truth or otherwise of that hypothesis by a more close examination. But this classical * Chap. ix.