Kyshtym

The Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam of 982 lists a clan that it writes K.SAYM among the peoples of the Kirghiz country.^[1] The clan settled on the slopes of the mountains with its felt huts. It hunted for furs, musk and horn of the khutu.^[1] The text calls it a clan of the Kirghiz and also a different tribe from the Kirghiz.^[1] Its speech was nearer to that of the Khallukh, and its people dressed like the Kimek.^[1]

The name

K.SAYMPersianḤudūd al-ʿĀlam
KishtimTurkic

The Persian spelling does not fix the vowels. The restitution Kishtim is the commentator’s, and it rests on three points. The first is the likeness to the Kimek and the Khallukh. It suggests a people west of the Kirghiz proper. The second is that a people called Kishtim is said to have been conquered together with the Kirghiz in the Mongol conquests. The third is that in Russian documents of the seventeenth century, the Turkicized tributaries of the Kirghiz are called Kishtim without distinction.^[2] A Russian study of 1896 took them for a Turkicized Yenisei tribe, the Chinese Dingling.^[2]

A people, or a condition

Russian-language scholarship uses kyshtym for the dependent population of the Kirghiz states. Some scholars hold that the Tashtyk tribes of the Minusinsk basin were pushed back into the forests and lived under the Kirghiz as kyshtym. The Turkic, Teles, Samoyed and Ket tribes of the Sayan and Altai were kyshtym as well.^[3] The same scholars identify the kesim of the Ḥudūd with such a dependent tribe, which had by then taken Turkic speech and some customs of the Kirghiz.^[4] If this is right, Kyshtym names a status rather than a single people.

Other scholars treat the Kyshtym as a particular people named in runiform inscriptions. They place the people on the Kemchik in Tuva and hold that the Chik and the Az were Kyshtym too.^[5] The Kül Tegin and Tonyukuk inscriptions do not name a people Kyshtym.^[6]

Seat and date of the notice

The Ḥudūd names no seat for the K.SAYM beyond the mountain slopes.^[1] Its notices on the Turkic peoples go back in part to the lost work of Jayhānī. The date of the K.SAYM notice therefore lies before 982, by an unknown amount.^[7] The Ḥudūd alone does not decide whether the K.SAYM were one people of the western Sayan or only a name for the Kirghiz dependants.

References

^ a b c d e Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 97
^ a b Minorsky 1970, p. 286
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 114,117
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 116
^ Kocobekov 2015, p. 16
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tonyukuk inscription
^ Minorsky 1955, p. 262

Sources

Literature

V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold, 2nd ed. (1970)
V. Minorsky, Addenda to the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam (1955)
Yu. S. Khudyakov; A. Yu. Borisenko, Localization of the Kyrgyz Residence Areas in Southern Siberia and Central Asia within the Periods of late Antiquity, Early and High Middle Ages (2021)
Muratbek Kocobekov, Kırgızların Sayan-Altay Bölgesi'ndeki Komşuları (2015)