A dictionary of the Pathan tribes on the North-West frontier of India / compiled under the orders of the Quarter Master General in India, in the intelligence branch.

“Pathan is a British term for Pashtun (also seen as Pushtun and Pukhtun), the people who inhabited the region along the border between British India and Afghanistan. Today they constitute the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan. During much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, British India sought to control the Pathan areas in order to secure India’s northwestern border with Afghanistan. A Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India was compiled by James Wolfe Murray (1853–1919), a British officer who was at the time an assistant quartermaster general in the intelligence branch in India. The book was published in Calcutta in 1899. The dictionary provides a detailed index of the Pathan tribes and their subdivisions. It does not include details on Pathan history or genealogy. The dictionary uses a hierarchical classification that starts with the tribe on top, followed by the clan, the division of the clan, the subdivision of the division, the section of the subdivision, and other minor fractions of the section. The entries are alphabetically ordered, from the lesser entity to the greater. The locality of the tribe, clan, or division is given in brackets. Some entries are also followed by figures in parentheses, indicating the number of fighting men in that division or fraction. The dictionary concludes with a note explaining the various spiritual titles and denominations used by the Pathans, and a color map showing the tribal boundaries”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

includes bibliographical references.

English