Baloch

The Baloch are a Western Iranian people of the arid plateau of Balochistan, speaking Balochi and long organized into nomadic pastoral tribes. Their linguistic homeland probably lay southeast of the Caspian; from the late Sasanian period they drifted east for centuries into Kerman, Makran and Sistan, where Arab geographers noted them as cattle-herders by the ninth century.

The Seljuk conquest of Kerman in the twelfth century pushed fresh waves eastward; tradition makes Jalal Khan the founder of the first Baloch confederacy in that age, and through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the tribes entered Sindh and the Sulaiman Mountains, the country around Sibi and Kahan where they appear in 1337, before moving on into the Punjab in the fifteenth.

Caught between the Safavids and the Mughals, the Baloch coalesced into the Khanate of Kalat from the seventeenth century, confirmed under Mir Ahmad Khan in 1666 and reaching its height under Nasir Khan I.