Today Sistan is an impoverished region of the Afghan-Persian borderland, the condition of whose economy and populace appeared excessively forlorn to the few European travellers and officials who visited it or who worked there in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus the Indian Army officer, boundary delimitation commissioner, and consul C. E. Yate, writing of his experiences in the 1890s, stated, “What with their debts to the katkhudas who advanced the grain, the cultivators and people of Sistan generally were in a wretched state of poverty. I do not think I ever saw a more miserable-looking lot.“ Yet Sistan, until later medieval times at least, had enjoyed a much more glorious past.“Sistan,” Middle Persian Sakastan “land of the Sakas,” whence Arabic Sijistan, is of course the more recent name in history for the Drangiana of the classical Greek geographers and historians.