Kipchak

The Kipchak are the Turkic people of the northern steppe. Kashgari counts their speech with that of the Oghuz rather than with that of the Karakhanid Turks.^[1] In Arabic he writes the name Qifchaq.^[1]

The Dīvān is an early source in which the name is attached to a dialect of its own. The entries that mark a word as Kipchak are the beginning of a record. Later Arabic and Persian writers extend that record over the whole western steppe.^[1]

The editors of the texts call one of the two tamgas on a painted runiform text at Hoyto Tamir in central Mongolia a Kipchak tamga. They give no reason for the name. One reckoning dates the text to 756, more than three centuries before the Dīvān.^[2]

References

^ a b c Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
^ Sertkaya 2000, p. 339

Sources

Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
Osman Fikri Sertkaya; Sartkocaulı Harcavbay, Hoyto Tamir (Moğolistan)’dan yeni yazıtlar (ön neşir) (2000)