"Makran, ‘the frontier of al-Hind’ in the early Arab conquest (futuh) literature, is identified by the geographers of the ninth to twelfth cen­turies as the territory extending ‘about fifteen days travelling from Tlz to Qusdar in the district of Turan’. The geographers commonly use the term al-Hind to denote the regions east of the Indus, while including Makran in as-Sind. The historian Tabari took Makran to be a separate region between the Persian province of Kirman on one side and al-Hind on the other: ‘ . . . the region of Makran . . . is situated beyond Kirm­an and Fars, between the kingdoms of Sind and Hind . . . and cUman. . . ; Makran borders on Kirman and Hind, (while) the sea separates it from cUman’. It is equally common, however, even in the geograph­ical literature, to find Sind conflated with al-Hind in a single term. And since the Makran coast was the westernmost portion of Sind, or a west­ ern dependency of Sind, it is then found that al-Hind (‘India’) is not just the country east of the Indus but includes Makran, starting from Tlz. Al-Biruni thus says that ‘the coast (sahil) of al-Hind begins with Tiz, the capital (qa?ba) of Makran, and from there extends in a south­ eastern direction towards the region of Debal (ad-daybal).. These various statements from the Arabic sources show that Makran was effectually regarded as a frontier zone, but yet as distinctly Indian territory. And this is conform to the view which has been current in anti­quity - when Makran was known as Gedrosia - and down to com­paratively recent times. Pliny the Elder for instance writes in the first century A.D. that ‘the river Indus . . . is the western boundary of India {ad Indum amnem qui est ab occidente finis Indiae)’, but adds: ‘in fact, most authorities do not put the western frontier at the river Indus but include four satrapies, (those of) the Gedrosi (Makran), Arachotae (Qandahar), Arii (Herat), and Parapanisidae (Kabul), with the river Kabul as the final boundary..’ In the sixth century the Nestorian Patriarch Jesujabus considered India to begin from the coast of Persia, i.e. from Fars, about the Persian Gulf. Medieval European literature introduced a tripartite division of India: ‘India Major’, which extended from Malabar to the east; ‘India Minor’, adjoining Persia and embracing Sind and Makran; and ‘India Tertia’ which was Zanzibar. Nicolo de Conti, in the fifteenth century, similarly divided India in three parts: one, from Persia to the Indus (Makran and Sind); a second, from the Indus to the Ganges; and a third, beyond the Ganges. And Marco Polo, in 1290, speaks of the eastern part of Makran - which he calls Kij-Makran after its main inland town - as ‘the last kingdom in India as you go towards the west and north-west’, a kingdom which at that time claimed an independent status, probably under a Muslim ruler."