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These lived at Lake Baikal and in its vicinity at the time of Gengis Khan, and with no great opposition subjugated the Cossacks in 1644. These three Mongolian branches have all accepted Buddhism, though retaining their Shamanistic juggleries. They are very phlegmatic, good-humoured people. The appearance in their midst of Gengis Khan, who was destined to raise himself from a humble origin to be a mighty conqueror, was therefore the more extraordinary.

Far removed from the rest of the Mongolian brotherhood are the Hazara, who lead a nomadic life between Herat and Cabul, and spoke Mongolian as late as the time of the Sultan Baber.9 Their physiognomy is also so distinctly Mongolian in type, that travellers have never differed as to their ethnographical position. The Hazara are divided into western and eastern tribes, of which the former are Sunnites and the latter Shiites. The western Hazara are sometimes called Aimauq, but this word is equivalent to horde, and, as it has been applied to other Mongolian tribes also, we recommend its future disuse in ethnology.

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The Tungus and Mongols are few in number, and many of their tribes are dying out. The case is quite different with the Turks, the third branch of the Northern Asiatic group. According to the old oriental traditions, one of Japhet's eight sons was named Turk. He dwelt on the Ili and Issikol, and from one of his descendants sprang the twins Tatar and Mongol. We must regard legends such as these as attempts at ethnological classification, and they show how nearly related the Central Asiatics held themselves to be. The Turks of the West have so much Aryan and Semitic blood in them that the last vestiges of their original physical characters have been lost, and their language alone indicates their previous descent, Turcomans, Uzbeks, Nogaians, and Kirghiz, on the other hand, approximate to the Mongols; from whom the Buruts and Kiptshaks differ only in the colour of the face. So says Vambéry; but he adds that the grammar of the Mongolian language is by no means identical with that of the Turkish, although it has adopted three-fourths of the vocabulary.1

9 Fr. Spiegel, Erânische Alterthümer, vol. i. p. 344. 10 Castrèn, Vorlesungen, p. 42.

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11 Geschichte Bochara's, vol. i. p. 130.

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It is now usual to distinguish the following nationalities of the Turks Uighurs, Uzbeks, Osmanlis, Yakuts, Turcomans, Nogaians, Basians, Kumuks, Karakalpaks, and Kirghiz. In the story of the journey of the Grecian ambassador Zemarchus, A.D. 569, mention is made of a Turkish Khân, called by the Byzantines Dissabulos, and by the Chinese Ti-theu-pu-li, who had set up his court at Talas, an important commercial town of the middle ages, in the present Burut territory.12 This old Turkish kingdom was destroyed by the Uighurs, or, as they are called by the Chinese, Kaotsche, a moderately civilized people who have retained traces of Zoroastrian doctrines, but who were later converted to Buddhism 13 and finally to Islam. In the fifth century they already wrote and had a literature of their own; they inhabited the two slopes of the Thianshan, part of which they still occupy. Their present western neighbours are the Uzbeks, a Turkish tribe, named after Uzbek, a chief of the Golden Horde (1312-1342); these have some Mongolian blood. This tribe at its first appearance in history inhabited the northern end of the Caspian Sea, from whence it spread under the descendants of Timur to the Sir Daria; 14 after the sixteenth century it conquered Turkestan, and it is still the predominant tribe in the Khanates of Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokand, as well as in Kashgaria. The Seldschuks, who in A.D. 1030 yet inhabited the present Turcoman desert, came from the same regions, breaking in on the west, and afterwards, as Osmanlis, appearing as conquerors in three quarters of the world.

With some exaggeration it has been said that an Osmanli from Constantinople can make himself intelligible to a Yakut on the Lena. But it is certain that the branches of the Turkish language separated by this enormous distance are strangely alike. The hardiness of the Yakuts has already been mentioned. The American traveller Kennan, not only describes them as industrious people, but adds that of all the aborigines of Siberia they are the only ones whose numbers do not diminish but increase. Their

12 Menandri, Excerpta de legat. Corpus script. Hist. Byzant., ed. Niebuhr, pars i. pp. 295–302 and pp. 380-384.

13 Stanislas Julien, Journal asiatique, p. 58.

14 Vambéry, Geschichte Bochara's, vol. ii. pp. 35, 36.

language,15 when Erman was in Siberia, had also become the universal means of communication for travellers and merchants, for Russians, Tungus, and Buriats, from Irkutsk to Ockotsk, and from the Frozen Ocean to the Chinese frontier.

The fifth branch above enumerated consists of the Turcomans in the steppes and deserts to the east of the Caspian, and south of Lake Aral; they were dreaded as kidnappers, who, on their excellent horses, were in the habit of surprising the villages of Khorassan in earlier times, and infested the shores of Mazenderan in their pirate boats, until the Russians suppressed this scandalous trade. They supplied the slave markets in Khiva, Bokhara, and Kokand, thus causing a constant intercrossing of Turkish and Erânian blood. This has probably taken place since the oldest times, for when the Turkish tribes conquered Kashgaria, Fergana, and Khorassan, they found ancient Persian town populations, the Tadshiks of modern ethnology, who by earlier travellers were also called Sarts; though Robert Shaw had deprecated such a confusion of terms. The Sarts of Kashgaria have indeed all the physical characteristics of Erânian descent, but they speak Turkish. Prior to Shaw, and quite independently, the German traveller, H. von Schlagintweit had recognized marks of Aryan descent in the town populations of Kashgaria. 16 Cases such as these, in which the language and the physical characters of a tribe assign it to different positions, stand to ethnology in much the same relation that pseudomorphic phenomena occupied towards mineralogy. If a crystal is dissolved by percolating water and carried away out of the matrix, another mineral penetrating into the cavity may fill it up and appear as a fictitious crystal. Analogously it happens that nations have adopted the language of an alien race, or, conversely, the language holds its ground in a country while the race is gradually altered by an admixture of blood.

The invading hosts which Central Asia from time to time sent into the West, here and there left behind them fragmentary populations, which the elevated valleys and tablelands of the Caucasus sheltered from extermination. Among these remnants of the

15 Reise um die Erde, vol. iii. p. 51.

16 H. von Schlagintweit, Indien und Hochasien, vol. ii. p. 40, and R. Shaw.

Turkish Branches.

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Turkish group are the Nogaians on the left bank of the Kuban and the island of Krim; the Basians on the east and west of Mount Elburz, in whose misfortunes Freshfield (the first person who ascended Mount Elburz) has endeavoured to enlist our sympathies; and, lastly, the Kumuks in the lower portion and on. the right bank of the Terek, and on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Another Turkish tribe, the Karakalpaks, or Black-caps, has descended from their former home on the Volga to the lower portion of the Sir Daria. Lastly, the Kirghiz, that is to say, the three hordes between the Ural and Lake Balkash, including the Buruts, are of all Turks most nearly allied to the Mongols in their physical characters, and by their family names, such as Kyptshak, Argyn, Naiman, give evidence of Mongolian descent, or at least of intermixture with Mongols. 17 According to an interpretation given by Radloff, their name arose from the circumstance that one of their hordes was called Kyrk, the forty, and another Jiis (Dschiis) the hundred. 18 They call themselves Kasaks, or riders.

It is difficult to assign to the Turko-Mongolian nations their true rank in the history of civilization. It is certain that many of these tribes have remained nomadic even to the present day, and will probably disappear without having ever become stationary. The fairly advanced civilization of the Uzbeks in Kashgaria and Turkestan, and of the European Osmanlis, might be due to their admixture with Aryan and semi-Semitic races. But the early civilization of the old Uighurs and the social capabilities of the Yakuts, prove that the pure-bred Turkish tribes were also fully capable of the higher forms of social life. The invention of leather tents and the manufacture of felt, the breeding of horses as milch animals, the taming of the sheep with fat tails, and perhaps of the Bactrian camel, are achievements which are probably derived from Central Asia and a remote antiquity. Still it is hard to say to which branch of the Northern Asiatics these improvements in domestic life are to be ascribed.

The fourth division with which we have next to deal, consists of the nations of the multiform Finnish group, which is again divided

17 W. Radloff, Türkische Volksliteratur in Südsibirien, vol. iii. p. 14.
18 Zeitschrift für Erdkunde, vol. vi. p. 505. 1871.

into four branches, namely, the Ugrian, Bulgarian, Permian, and the true Finnish. Their original homes were in part more to the east and south than at present, in the Ural and Altai mountains, from which circumstance the race is often collectively termed the Ural-Altaic. 19 Under the head of Ugrians, Castrèn included the Ostiaks on the right bank of the Ob, the Voguls on the eastern slopes of the northern Urals, and the Magyars. A hundred years ago Saijnovics, a travelling companion of Hell, proved that the latter belonged to the Finnish family, 20 and a comparative grammar has thrown further light on the position of their language.21 The Bulgarians on the Danube can no longer be placed in the Bulgarian branch, for according to language and physical characters, they belong to the Sclavonic family, and have also completely absorbed into themselves the remnants of the former Bulgarians of the middle ages. For while the Bulgarians of the Volga maintained their government until the thirteenth century, and their nationality until their permanent subjugation by the Czars of Moscow, the Bulgarians of the Danube forfeited their language in the tenth and their independence at the beginning of the eleventh century.22 The inhabitants of the insulated Tsherimis, Mordvin, and Tshuvash districts on the Volga, who are quite surrounded by Russians, are Bulgarians. The name of the Tsherimis signifies in the Mordva language the Easterns. The Mordvins again call themselves Mokshans in the east, and Ersans in the west. Ruybroek called them Moxel, Merdas, and Merduas; and Herberstein called them Mordva. A more or less veiled paganism is found among them,23 and their archaic peculiarities attract the attention of ethnologists. The Permian branch received its name from the Permians, who lived on the waters of the Kama, in Bjarmaland, as it was called in old Scandinavian.

19 Comp. the travelling maps of Ujfalvy, Migrations des peuples touraniens, pp. 120 and 130.

20 Saijnovics wrote a book in 1770, entitled Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse.

21 Michael Weske, Untersuchungen zur vergleichenden Grammatik des finnischen Sprachstammes. Leipzic, 1872.

22 Robert Roesler, Romänische Studien, p. 239.

23 Von Haxthausen, Studien über Russland, vol. ii. p. 16.

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