Article. The history of balochistan
Aslamolekum..Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan with an area of 347056 sq. Kms, over 40% of the country's land mass. It traces its history from times immemorial. Before the birth of Christ, it had commerce and trade with ancient civilization of Babylon through Iran and into the valleys of Tigris and Euphrates. Alexander the Great also had an encounter with the Serbia tribe of Balochistan. Muhammad Bin Qasim and Mehmood Ghaznavi also invaded Balochistan resulting in the development of Muslim character. Even today most tribal people of this province resemble Arabs and the inhabitants can be quite a fascinating subject of study by anthropologists. Balochistan is a land of contrast. It has places with lofty and rugged mountains under Chiltan, Takatu, Suleiman, Sultan etc. and plains stretching to hundreds of miles. It has fertile land like that of Nasirabad, as well as, tracks' which are thirsty for centuries, and where even a bush could hardly be sighted like that of Pat section of Sibi District and Dasht-e-Makran in Makran Division. It has hottest places in the country like Sibi and Dhadar, where temperature shoots up to over 120 °F, as well as coldest towns like Quetta, Kalat, Ziarat, Kan Mehtarzai where mercury falls down much below freezing point."The mountains are the Balochi's forts; the peaks are better than any army; the lofty heights are our comrades; the pathless gorges our friends. Our drink is from the flowing springs; our bed the thorny bush; the ground we make our pillow". These lines are from a Balochi war song. The land which nurtures such independent and brave people is indeed daunting. Barren, rugged mountains that burn in the summer and freeze in the winter In between the cheerless mountains are dry and wide deserts and, of course, beautifully fertile valleys - wherever water is available. These give this rugged land great scenic beauty. Balochistan Province covers a huge area in the southwest of Pakistan. It is a sparsely populated land bordering Afghanistan and Iran. Much of it is a high barren plateau 1,000 to 1,250 meters (3.000 to 4.000 feet) above sea level, enclosed by the Toba Kakar mountain range along the Afghan border and by the Suleman range which borders the Indus river. To the south lies one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, the Makran. which nearly defeated Alexander the Great when he marched through it on his way home.Balochi is a generalized term, for the people include the Dravidian-speaking Brahui possibly the last descendants of the Indus Civilization, and the Jat or Zutt, an Indo Aryan speaking people of Indian origin. In the northwest of Balochistan, Pathans make up the majority of the population, and there is a sizeable minority of them elsewhere in the province. Most people speak Brabui, Baiochi and Pushto. Almost half the population of Balochistan lives within 80 Kms (50 miles) of the provincial capital, Quetta. Development of underground and surface water resources laying down of road over its vast stretches and taking industry to Balochistan have been the first priorities of the Government. Talking of fruit, the date industry occupies a special position - mainly in the Makran district ,which with an area of 23,460 sq. miles is the largest district in the country. More than a 100 commercial varieties of dates are produced here. Other date-producing areas are Thalwan, sub-division of Kalat and Mashkhel tehsil of Kharan district. Incidentally the Balochi language has one ~ hundred words for dates as also for camels. The Balochistan coastline extends over 750 Km from near Karachi at Hub River to the Gwadar Bay on Pak-lran border. The whole area is rich in fish. The north of the Province presents picturesque fruit farms on the slopes of snow-clad hills and blissful juniper forests. In the south there are extensive date farms and rows upon rows of branchless coconut palms in Makran District. There is scanty rainfall throughout. From 3 to 5 inches in the plains: maximum 12 inches in the hills. Variations in temperature are aThe land and people of balochistan In spite of the intrinsic hostility of its landscape and climate, archaeological discoveries have confirmed that Baluchistan was already inhabited in the Stone Age, and the important neolithic site at Mehrgarh is the earliest (7000-3000 B.C.) on the subcontinent. Until its overthrow by Alexander the Great, Baluchistan was part of the Persian Empire, whose records refer to it as "Maka". In 325 B.C. Alexander led part of his army back from his Indus campaign to Babylon across the Makran Desert at the cost of terrible suffering and high casualties. Thereafter Baluchistan lay for centuries on the shadowy borderlands of the Zoroastrian rulers of Iran and the local Buddhist and Hindu dynasties of northwestern subcontinent. Islam was brought to Baluchistan in 711 when Muhammad bin Qasim led the army which was to conquer Sind across the Makran route, but the area was always too remote for firm control to be exerted by any of the later local dynasties. It accordingly receives only very passing mention in the court histories of the time. The connections of the inland areas were variously with Iran, Afghanistan and India, those of coastal Makran rather across the Arabian Sea with Oman and the Gulf. The name "Baluchistan" only came into existence later with the arrival from Iran of the tribes called Baluch (usually pronounced "Baloch" in Pakistan). Just how and when they arrived remains a matter of hot debate, since the traditional legends of their Middle Eastern origins, supposed to have been in the Aleppo region of Syria have been further confused by cranky theories either that like the Pathans they may descend from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, or that they originated from Babylon, since "Baluch" is phonetically similar to the names of the god Baal or the Babylonian ruler Belos. Better evidence is suggested by the Baluchi language which beIongs to the same Iranian group of Indo-European as Persian and Kurdish. This suggests that the Baluch originated from the area of the Caspian Sea, making their way gradually across Iran to reach their present homeland in around A.D. 1000, when they are mentioned with the equally warlike Kuch tribes in Firdausi's great Persian epic, the Book of Kings: Heroic Baluches and Kuches we saw, Like battling rams all determined on war. Warlike the history of the Baluch has certainly always been. As the last to arrive of the major ethnic groups of Pakistan they were faced with the need to displace the peoples already settled in Baluchistan. Some they more or less successfully subjugated or assimilated, like the Meds of Makran and other now subordinate groups. From others they faced a greater challenge, notably from the Brahui tribes occupying the hills around Kalat. The origins of the Brahuis are even more puzzling than those of the Baluch, for their language is not Indo-European at all, but belongs to the same Dravidian family as Tamil and the other languages of south India spoken over a thousand miles away. One theory has it that the Brahuis are the last northern survivors of a Dravidian-speaking population which perhaps created the Indus Valley civilisation, but it seems more likely that they too arrived as the result of a long tribal migration, at some earlier date from peninsular India. As they moved eastwards, the Baluch were initially successful in overcoming the Brahuis. Under Mir Chakar, who established his capital at Sibi in 1487, a great Baluch kingdom briefly came into existence before being destroyed by civil war between Mir Chakar's Rind tribe and the rival Lasharis, whose battles are still celebrated in heroic ballads""
. Although the Baluch moved forward into Panjab and Sind, the authority of the Moghuls
stopped them establishing permanent kingdoms there, although the names of Dera Ghazi Khan in Panjab and Dera Ismail Khan in NWFP are still reminders of the Baluch chiefs who ??????
conquered the.??????????
