VII. Comparison between the Highland Clans and the Afghaun Tribes. Written in 1816 by Sir Walter Scott

The genealogies of the Afghaun tribes may be paralleled with those of the Clans; the nature of their favourite sports, their love of their native land, their hospitality, their address, their simplicity of manners, exactly correspond. Their superstitions are the same, or nearly so. The Gholée Beabaun (demons of the desert) resemble the Boddach of the Highlanders, who ‘walked the heath at midnight and at noon.’ The Afghaun’s most ordinary mode of divination is by examining the marks in the blade-bone of a sheep, held up to the light; and even so, the Rev. Mr. Robert Kirk assures us, that in his time, the end of the sixteenth century, ‘the seers prognosticate many future events (only for a month’s space) from the shoulder-bone of a sheep on which a knife never came. By looking into the bone, they will tell if whoredom be committed in the owner’s house; what money the master of the sheep had; if any will die out of that house for a month; and if any cattle there will take a trake (i.e. a disease), as if planet-struck.’

The Afghaun, who, in his weary travels, had seen no vale equal to his own native valley of Speiger, may find a parallel in many an exile from the braes of Lochaber; and whoever had remonstrated with an ancient Highland chief on the superior advantages of a civilised life, regulated by the authority of equal laws, would have received an answer something similar to the indignant reply of the old Afghaun: ‘We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood, but we will never be content with a master.’ The Highland chiefs, otherwise very frequently men of sense and education, and only distinguished in Lowland society by an affectation of rank and stateliness somewhat above their means, were, in their own country, from the absolute submission paid to them by their clans, and the want of frequent intercourse with persons of the same rank with themselves, nursed in a high and daring spirit of independent sovereignty which would not brook or receive protection or control from the public law or government, and disdained to owe their possessions and the preservation of their rights to anything but their own broadswords.

Similar examples may be derived from the History of Persia by Sir John Malcolm. But our limits do not permit us further to pursue a parallel which serves strikingly to show how the same state of society and civilisation produces similar manners, laws, and customs, even at the most remote period of time, and in the most distant quarters of the world. In two respects the manners of the Caubul tribes differ materially from those of the Highlanders; first, in the influence of their Jeergas, or patriarchal senates, which diminishes the power of their chiefs, and gives a democratic turn to each separate tribe. This appears to have been a perpetual and radical difference; for at no time do the Highland chiefs appear to have taken counsel with their elders, as an authorised and independent body, although, no doubt, they availed themselves of their advice and experience upon the principle of a general who summons a council of war. The second point of distinction respects the consolidation of those detached tribes under one head, or king, who, with a degree of authority greater or less according to his talents, popularity, and other circumstances, is the acknowledged head of the associated communities. In this point, however, the Highlanders anciently resembled the Afghauns, as will appear when we give a brief sketch of their general history. But this, to be intelligible, must be preceded by some account of their social system, of which the original and primitive basis differed very little from the first time that we hear of them in history until the destruction of clanship in 1748.—Review of Culloden Papers, Quarterly Review, vol. xiv. p. 289.