Re: What sub Culture/Ethnic Grp do you belong to?
just because you mentioned something about it, and wikipedia talks about them being associated with kamboj (as mentioned in the first post), a bit off topic though
I’ve read about this jericho/ areeha connection… but i’ve also read that a lot of local people in india back then started calling themselves arain just because they were associated with “agriculture” and main profession of the people of areeha was agriculture which they took again once Muhammad Bin Qasim Left… that was the time when so many people virtually “joined” the tribe by just adopting their name…
another major period when different people who were not basically arain joined this group/tribe was when shah jehan decided to build shalimar garden and set up the town of baghbanpura… he gave the task to local arain people also and invited iranian professional gardeners to take the lead, at that time he gave away large agricultural lands to members of arain tribe for farming, that was when many people again adopted the name of this tribe, and tried to mimic if they were one, to get some land… these two occasions answer why there are arain who are not muslim…
before areeha the history is somewhat obscure (or may be i did not find any good source), except that this was the city where first bani-israeel landed after leaving egypt and roaming around many years in the desert… so they can be local people of jericho or the new comers..
on the other hand, many claim them to be either local daravendian (sp?) related to “Rai” raaj, some relate themselves to Indo-Iranian Aryan or whatever that is called… its all messed up and not traced very well to the roots anyway, so most of them are just claims…