The Turkish village Davudlu in Khorasan (C. E. Stewart, 1881)

The Turkish village Davudlu in Khorasan

From Radkan I marched to Dautli, distance 22 miles; the road skirted the hills, just keeping in the plain. The men of Dautli were Turks, they said, brought from Azerbijan and settled here. I never saw finer specimens of humanity. After this country was almost depopulated by Jenghiz Khan in the 13^th century, it remained very sparsely inhabited until Kurds and Turks from the western provinces of Persia were settled here by Shah Ismail and Shah Abbas the Great of the Sufevian dynasty, in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, to act as a barrier against the Turkomans, who then as now were the curse of the country.

C. E. Stewart — The Country of the Tekke Turkomans, and the Tejend and Murghab Rivers (1881)