The Pashtuns began as a union of largely East Iranian tribes, which became the initial ethnic stratum of the Pashtun ethnogenesis, dating from the middle of the first millennium CE, and is connected with the dissolution of the Hephthalite confederacy... Of the contribution of the Hephthalites to the ethnogenesis of the Pashtuns, we find evidence in the ethnonym of the largest of the Pashtun tribe unions, the Abdali (Durrani after 1747), associated with the ethnic name of the Hephthalites — Abdal. The Siah-posh, the Kafirs (Nuristanis) of the Hindu Kush, called all Pashtuns by a general name of Abdal still at the beginning of the 19th century.