From the Indus to the Tigris : a narrative of a journey through the countries of Balochistan, Afghanistan, Khorassan and Iran, in 1872, together with a synoptical grammar and vocabulary of the Brahoe language and a record of the meteorological observations and altitudes on the March from the Indus to the Tigris / by Henry Walter Bellew.

“Henry Walter Bellew was a surgeon and medical officer in the Indian Army who in 1871–72 accompanied Major General F.R. Pollock on a political mission to Sistān in southwestern Afghanistan. Undertaken on behalf of the government of British India, the mission set out from Multan (present-day Pakistan) on December 26, 1871, and arrived in Sistān in early March. From there Pollock and Bellew traveled to Mashhad and Tehran. Bellew went on to Baghdad and returned to India by steamer to Bombay (now Mumbai). From the Indus to the Tigris is Bellew’s account of the voyage. It includes detailed observations on the landscape, people, economic life, and culture of the parts of Afghanistan and Iran that he visited, and descriptions of encounters with Afghan leaders. Like many British and Anglo-Indian officials at the time, Bellew was preoccupied with the perceived Russian threat to India and the importance of Afghanistan in the rivalry between the two empires. Referring to the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–42, he regretted “the wrong we inflicted in the Afghan war—a wrong the fruits of which are yet abundant, as anybody who has served on our north-west frontier can testify.” The book contains two appendices: a grammar and vocabulary of the Brahui language (called Brahoe by Bellew) and a record of the meteorological conditions encountered on the journey”—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.

English