Makran

Makran is a partly-desert coastal strip in the south of Balochistan, in Iran and Pakistan. It is along the coast of the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman.

Macran

The narrow coastal plain rises very rapidly into several mountain ranges. The climate is very dry with very little rainfall.

History

Makran also Mekran and Mokrān was a vast area from Strait of Hormuz to the Indus River. The name Makrān has found a popular etymology in Persian phrase māhi-ḵᵛorān “fish eaters” (mahi = fish + khor = eat), but more probable is a connection with the name Magan, or Maka of the Old Persian. Until the early Islamic period, Makrān must have been within the sphere of Elamo-Dravidian or Brahui culture and language.

On his way homewards from the Far East in 1290, Marco Polo (II, pp. 334-35) sailed along the Makrān coast, calling it KisMacoran (i.e. Tiz Makrān), considering it as independent and attributing to it a ruler of its own. In the early 14th century, Ibn Battuta (II, pp. 341-2) records that, after the death of the Il-Khanid sultan (i.e. after 1335), a certain Malek Dinār took power in Makrān. It was during these centuries that Makrān was colonized by Baluch nomads moving southeastwards from Persia, so that it is today mostly Baluch-speaking. The boundary between Persian Makrān and that part coming within the British Indian province of Baluchistan (the easternmost part forming the Native State of Las Bela) and after 1947 within Pakistan, was demarcated by an Anglo-Persian Boundary Commission in 1870-72.