The Afghans, or Pashtuns, like many peoples who are deprived of an ancient literary tradition, have very vague ideas about their origin. Very often their legends have a late religious attribution or include obvious anachronistic genealogical information, e.g. they connect their origin with a Jewish chieftain called Qays. One should stress in this connection, that for various reasons and in various periods the genealogical folk stories of the Iranian peoples often refer the origin of the given people, as a rule, to a Semitic ancestor; it became even a certain locus communis. And many authors of the past have followed this tradition as well. Josephus Flavius, a Jewish author of the c. A.D., for example, reckoned among the Semitic peoples not only the Persians and Bactrians, but even the Armenians.1 In more later times V.B. Pfaf considered the Ossetes a Semitic tribe,2 and Sir Henry Rawlinson said the same about the Guranss,3 etc. One can explain this tendency by the efforts of Christian historians to derive the origin of well-known peoples from a Biblical forefather. For instance, Movses Khorenatsi (V c.), considers the Parthians (or their first king Arshak the Brave) as descendants of Father Abraham's grandson Emran (Zimran). According to him: ((3Ututudtuj puuihhpnpil tunui2fhpnpit huIhuluhq dbq qUppthuhd muuqipntwbuwjjirh gtguz[i& twtpdnqtabjiph, ht Ii hi u(it hqtuil uqqit 1wpp,huug: RwhuJ uut, jhqp dhrnuh 1-6); he also quotes as a proof the words of God addressed to Abraham and his wife: I will make nations of and kings shall come out of thee (Gen. 17, 5-6; cf. 17, 15-16). The so-called genealogical semitization is widely attested also within the tribal traditions, especially among the nomadic and seminomadic ethnic groups of Western Iran: many Kurdish, Luri and Bakhtiari tribal genealogies, e.g., claim the Semitic origin of these peoples. This phenomenon, of course, has nothing to do with historical reality and is purely legendary, being determined, evidently, by the tendencies of the artificial archaization of ethnic origins. To some extent, this tendency has probably influenced the mentioned view of the origin of the Afghans, according to which, they are descendants of thie patriarch Qays (Pathan), the chief of the Israelites of the Ghor region (in Afghanstan). When converted to Islam, Qays got a new name (Abd-arRashid) from the Prophet Muhammad.5 Contradicting this, the information of the same Afghani authors (13-18th cc.), based mainly on the History of the Afghanls by Ne'amet Ullah-khan, shows that Qays Abd-ar-Rashid (Pathanl) must have been living