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Kom People (Afghanistan)
The Kom or Kam are a Nuristani tribe in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most used alternative names are Kamozi, Kamoz/Camoze, Caumojee/Kaumoji, and Camoje. History Until the late 19th century, the Kom were a sub-group of the Siah-Posh Kafirs ("black-robed unbelievers") and their political (factional) headquarters was at Kombrom. They gave allegiance to the Mehtar (crown prince) of Chitral. At that time, following their conquest by Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, the Kom converted to Islam. Kafiristan ("Land of Unbelievers") was renamed Nuristan ("Land of Light") and its inhabitants became collectively known as Nuristanis (sometimes loosely translated as "enlightened ones"). By the end of the 19th century, the Kom were concentrated in the lower part of the Bashgul Valley and came to control it. Hence the valley became also known as Kam,George Scott Robertson, Kamdesh in the Khowar language, and as Kamoz in Pashto. The country of the Kom is also known as Komstan. While they have never bee ...
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Nuristani People
The Nuristanis, formerly known as Kafiristanis, are an ethnic group native to the Nuristan Province of northeastern Afghanistan and Chitral District of northwestern Pakistan. Their languages comprise the Nuristani branch of Indo-Iranian languages. The Nuristanis reside mainly in the northeast of Afghanistan and northwest of Pakistan; between the Pashtun tribes of Kunar, Kalash in Pakistan's Chitral, and Tajiks of Badakhshan in the north. In the mid-1890s, after the establishment of the Durand Line when Afghanistan reached an agreement on various frontier areas to the British Empire for period of time, Emir Abdur Rahman Khan conducted a military campaign in Kafiristan and followed up his conquest with forced conversion of the Kafirs to Islam; the region thenceforth being known as ''Nuristan'', the "Land of Light". Before their conversion, the Nuristanis practiced a form of ancient Hinduism. Non-Muslim religious practices endure in Nuristan today to some degree as folk customs ...
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Pashto Language
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan alongside Dari, Constitution of Afghanistan �''Chapter 1 The State, Article 16 (Languages) and Article 20 (Anthem)''/ref> and it is the second-largest provincial language of Pakistan, spoken mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern districts of Balochistan. Likewise, it is the primary language of the Pashtun diaspora around the world. The total number of Pashto-speakers is at least 40 million, (40 million) although some estimates place it as high as 60 million. Pashto is "one of the primary markers of ethnic identity" amongst Pashtuns. Geographic distribution A national language of Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country ...
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Ethnic Groups In Afghanistan
Afghanistan is a multiethnic and mostly tribal society. The population of the country consists of numerous ethnolinguistic groups: Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimaq, Turkmen, Baloch, Pashai, Nuristani, Kurds, Gujjar, Arab, Brahui, Qizilbash, Pamiri, Kyrgyz, Sadat and others. Altogether they make up the Afghan people. The former Afghan National Anthem and the Afghan Constitution (before 2021) each mention fourteen of them, though the lists are not exactly the same. National identity The term " Afghan" is synonymous with the ethnonym " Pashtun", but in modern times the term became the national identity of the people, who live in Afghanistan. The national culture of Afghanistan is not uniform, at the same time, the various ethnic groups have no clear boundaries between each other and there is much overlap. Additionally, ethnic groups are not racially homogenous. Ethnic groups in Afghanistan have adopted traditions and celebrations from each other and a ...
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Mountstuart Elphinstone
Mountstuart Elphinstone (6 October 1779 – 20 November 1859) was a Scottish statesman and historian, associated with the government of British India. He later became the Governor of Bombay (now Mumbai) where he is credited with the opening of several educational institutions accessible to the Indian population. Besides being a noted administrator, he wrote books on India and Afghanistan. His works are one the pertinent examples of the colonial historiographical trend. Early life Born in Dumbarton, Dumbartonshire (now Dunbartonshire) on 6 October 1779, educated at the Royal High School and raised a member of the Church of England. He was the fourth son of the 11th Baron Elphinstone, by Anna, daughter of Lord Ruthven, in the peerage of Scotland. Having been appointed to the civil service of the British East India Company, of which one of his uncles was a director, he arrived at Calcutta (now Kolkata) early in 1796 where he filled several subordinate posts. In 1799, he ...
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George Scott Robertson
Sir George Scott Robertson, (22 October 1852 – 1 January 1916) was a British soldier, author, and administrator who was best known for his arduous journey to the remote and rugged region of Kafiristan in what is now northeastern Afghanistan and for his overall command of British Empire forces during the Siege of Chitral. He chronicled his Kafiristan experience in the book ''The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush''. Some have suggested that Robertson's year-long expedition and subsequent book (originally published in 1896) provided background and inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's short story ''"The Man Who Would Be King"''. However, Kipling's work was originally published in 1888, predating Robertson's travels to the region. Travels to Kafiristan Robertson was born in London and received his education at the Westminster Hospital Medical School (now Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London). In 1878 he entered the Indian Medical Service and served throughout the Second Anglo-Afghan War of ...
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Kambojas
Kamboja ( sa, कम्बोज) was a kingdom of Iron Age India that spanned parts of South and Central Asia, frequently mentioned in Sanskrit and Pali literature. Eponymous with the kingdom name, the Kambojas were an Indo-Iranian people of the Kshatriya caste inhabiting the Kamboja Mahajanapada region, forming one of the sixteen nations that made up ancient India from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE during the second urbanisation period. Earlier, during the late Vedic age, the Kambojas had emerged as an important part of the Indo Aryan Vedic people with a prominent place among the Kshatriya tribes of the Mahabharata. While historical boundaries of the Kambojas are varied, scholarly accounts altogether place the northern and western borders in present-day Tajikistan and eastern Uzbekistan, with eastern borders in present-day Jammu and Kashmir, and southern borders in present-day Iran and southern Afghanistan. Etymology The name ''Kamboja'' may derive from ''Kam ...
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Kamviri
Kamviri () is a dialect of the Kamkata-vari language spoken by 5,000 to 10,000 of the Kom people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are slight dialectal differences of the Kamviri speakers of Pakistan. The most used alternative names are ''Kati'', ''Kamozi'', ''Shekhani'' or ''Bashgali''. Phonology The inventory as described by Richard Strand. In addition, there is stress. The neutral articulatory posture, as in the reduced vowel , consists of the tip of the tongue behind the lower teeth and a raised tongue root is linked with a raised larynx, producing a characteristic pitch for unstressed vowels of about an octave above the pitch of a relaxed larynx. Consonants * Sounds are found in loanwords. * Between vowels, voice to . * can also be heard as bilabial or a labial approximant . * For most speakers, and especially in Kombřom, becomes a retroflex flap . * becomes a velar tap The voiced velar tap is a type of consonantal sound, reported to occur in some sp ...
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Kata (people)
The Katir (also spelled Kati, Kator and Kata) are a Nuristani tribe in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Etymology The Katir a 'tɘor Kata Kafir group was ''numerically'' the most dominant group of the Siah-Posh (Persian "Black Wearer/Clothed") tribes. They owned approximately forty villages in the Bashgul valley and numbered about 40,000 (1890). The upper part of the Bashgul Valley of Nuristan (Afghanistan) is known as Katirgul. It is called Lutdeh in Chitrali and ''Kantozi'' in Pashto. According to George Scott Robertson, the Katir ''Siah-Posh'' clan settled in Katirgul valley was called Kamtoz (or ''Camtoz'') in Pashto and Lutdehhchis in Chitrali ('' The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, p 71''). But American investigator ''Richard Strand's'' website suggests that the name ''Kamtoz/Kamtozi'' may apply to all Katirs of the former ''Siah-Posh'' group, including the Ramguli and Kulam Katirs' Alternative names for Kamtoz are ''Camtozi'', ''Kantozi''. Despite their fiercely independent n ...
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Nuristani Languages
The Nuristani languages, formerly known as Kafiri languages, are one of the three groups within the Indo-Iranian language family, alongside the much larger Indo-Aryan and Iranian groups. They have approximately 130,000 speakers primarily in eastern Afghanistan and a few adjacent valleys in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Chitral District, Pakistan. The region inhabited by the Nuristanis is located in the southern Hindu Kush mountains, and is drained by the Alingar River in the west, the Pech River in the center, and the Landai Sin and Kunar rivers in the east. The languages were previously often grouped with Indo-Aryan ( Dardic sub-group) or Iranian until they were finally classified as forming a third branch in Indo-Iranian. Languages * Northern: ** Kamkata-vari (Bashgali, includes the dialects Kata-vari, Kamviri, Shekhani and Mumviri) 40,000 speakers ** Wasi-wari (Prasuni) 8,000 speakers * Southern: ** Askunu (Ashkun) 40,000 speakers ** Waigali (Kalasha-ala) 12,000 speakers ...
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Nurestan
Nuristan, also spelled as Nurestan or Nooristan (Dari: ; Kamkata-vari: ), is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, located in the eastern part of the country. It is divided into seven districts and is Afghanistan's least populous province, with a population of around 167,000. Parun serves as the provincial capital. Nuristan is bordered on the south by Laghman and Kunar provinces, on the north by Badakhshan province, on the west by Panjshir province. The origins of the Nuristani people traces back to the 4th century BC. Some Nuristanis claim being descendants of the Greek occupying forces of Alexander the Great. It was formerly called Kafiristan ( ps, ) ("Land of the Infidels") until the inhabitants were forcibly converted from an animist religion; a form of ancient Hinduism infused with local variations, to Islam in 1895, and thence the region has become known as Nuristan ("land of illumination", or "land of light"). The region was located in an area surrounded by Budd ...
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Pashtun People
Pashtuns (, , ; ps, پښتانه, ), also known as Pakhtuns or Pathans, are an Iranian ethnic group who are native to the geographic region of Pashtunistan in the present-day countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were historically referred to as Afghans () or xbc, αβγανο () until the 1970s, when the term's meaning officially evolved into that of a demonym for all residents of Afghanistan, including those outside of the Pashtun ethnicity. The group's native language is Pashto, an Iranian language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Additionally, Dari Persian serves as the second language of Pashtuns in Afghanistan while those in the Indian subcontinent speak Urdu and Hindi (see Hindustani language) as their second language. Pashtuns are the 26th-largest ethnic group in the world, and the largest segmentary lineage society; there are an estimated 350–400 Pashtun tribes and clans with a variety of origin theories. The total ...
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Kho People
The Kho (, khw, ) or Chitrali people, are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group native to the Chitral and Ghizer Districts of Gilgit-Baltistan. They speak an Indo-Aryan language called Khowar. History The Kho people are likely descendants of those who migrated to their present location in Chitral from the south. In ancient times the Kho people practiced a faith akin to that observed by the Kalash today. In the 14th century, many of the Kho converted to Islam though some previous customs continue to persist. With respect to Islam, the Kho are primarily Hanafi Sunni Muslims although there exists a substantial population of Ismaili Muslims in the Upper Chitral region. Language The Kho people speak the Khowar language, which is an Indo-Aryan language of the Dardic subgroup. The ethnologists Karl Jettmar and Lennart Edelberg noted, with respect to the Khowar language, that: "Khowar, in many respects sthe most archaic of all modern Indian languages, retaining a great part of ...
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