The Rashīdī History 8.3.4

8.3.4

Had the Baltis occupied an open country, and been constantly engaged in wars and invasions, there might have been a greater and more rapid change. Their secluded mountainous home (like that of the Hazaras) has mitigated this, and has helped to preserve them as a race: but the principle is the same as with the Moghuls. With regard to the misleading employment of the word Turk, alluded to above, it must be explained that, among Asiatic authors, it is constantly met with as the definition of a race or people distinguished from the Tartars and the Moghuls, on the one hand, and from Tajiks, or Taziks, on the other. But in the same writings, and often on the same page, it is used to denote all nomads and inhabitants of the steppes, irrespective of race or origin, and merely to distinguish such people from those who dwelt in towns, and who cultivated the settled districts—or from the Tajiks generally. The first may be regarded as its ethnological sense: the second as sociological only, and as about synonymous with the adopted English word nomad. In this second sense it included, as we shall see, all Mongoloid and Tartar races. In dictionaries we find among its many meanings those of barbarian, robber, vagabond, wanderer, etc. It is also, in poetry, applied to the planet Mars as "a Wanderer of the sky," and to the sun as "the Turk of China," that is of the East; or "the Turk of midday"—viz., the South;