The Khakas name debate

The Khakas name debate is the argument over Xiajiasi, the name the Tang histories give to the people of the upper Yenisei, and over Khakas, the Russian word made from it. One side holds that Xiajiasi names a medieval state of the ancestors of the Khakas, and that Kirghiz was only the name of its ruling layer. The other holds that Xiajiasi is a Chinese spelling of Kirghiz and that Khakas became a name of the people only in 1917 and 1918. The two sides met in the journal Ėtnografičeskoe obozrenie in 1992.^[1]

The name in the Tang texts

黠戛斯ChineseXin Tangshu 217
堅昆ChineseXin Tangshu 217
結骨ChineseXin Tangshu 217
Хягас, хагасRussian

The Xin Tang Shu calls Xiajiasi the old country of Jiankun, also named Juwu and Jiegu.^[2] It says that the speech of the northern peoples later turned the name into Xiajiasi. It says that this is the Uyghurs’ name for them, as if one said “yellow-red faces”, and that it was altered once more.^[2] The Russian sinologist Bichurin rendered the characters Hjagas or Hagas. The word was then tied to no living people.^[3] A history of the Yenisei Kirghiz of 2002 lists Xiajiasi, sometimes miswritten Jiajiasi or shortened to Xiajia, with Juwu, Jiegu and Hegesi among the Chinese forms of the name of the Kirghiz. It cites Edwin G. Pulleyblank for all of them but Juwu.^[4]

From Xiajiasi to Khakas

Before 1917 the people of the Minusinsk basin were called Abakan or Minusinsk Tatars. Clan names served as their self-designations.^[5] In 1917 and 1918 the Khakas ethnographer S. D. Moinagashev held national congresses. They founded a union of the non-Russian peoples of two districts under the name Khakas.^[6] Barthold held that the Minusinsk intelligentsia in effect concocted the name after the Revolution from the Russian form of the Chinese word. In his account they believed that the Chinese had used it for the people of the region.^[7] In everyday speech, V. Ya. Butanaev writes, the Khakas call themselves tadar. In seventy years of Soviet rule the word Khakas has not become their self-name.^[6]

The position of the Kyzlasovs

I. L. Kyzlasov holds that the Chinese sources used Khakas for the medieval south Siberian state, its land and its people. The chronicles of other peoples called the state Kirghiz.^[1] Kirghiz, he argues, was the name of the ruling clan, or a name extended to all subjects, and not a name of the people. He reconstructs an older form qayas or qaqas behind the modern qas.^[1]

L. R. Kyzlasov is reported to understand Xiajiasi as the Chinese form of Khakas and not of Kirghiz. On his account Khakas named the whole mixed state of the Jiankun and the Dingling. The Kirghiz proper were its Turkic ruling element, and the word comes from a Samoyed word for man.^[8]

The Kyzlasovs apply the same view in their study of the runiform texts of the Sayan–Altai, published in 1990.^[9] They speak there of Old Khakas graves and of Old Khakas Yenisei texts. They call the Yenisei script the writing of the Khakas of the Middle Ages.^[10]

The replies

S. E. Yakhontov finds no word Khakas in the Chinese sources.^[3] Jiankun, Jiegu and Xiajiasi are three Chinese spellings of the one name Kirghiz, as the Chinese historians themselves say. A comparison that ignores the sounds the characters had when written has no value.^[3] A long vowel in the Turkic languages comes from the loss of a g or ŋ and not of a k. Therefore the modern Khakas khaas cannot go back to Kyzlasov’s form.^[11] Kyzlasov answered that sinologists disagree on the old sound of the characters. He added that Yakhontov reads those of Xiajiasi as yat kat sie for about 600.^[12]

S. G. Klyashtorny names three points.^[13] Chinese, Old Turkic, Muslim, Byzantine and later Russian sources give one name for the people and the country, Kirghiz. Edwin G. Pulleyblank takes the identity of the transcriptions with Kirghiz as obvious.^[13] The self-name tadar is far older than the Tsarist administration. In 1399 the Kirghiz Ugechi Kashka gave his realm and its people the official name Tatar.^[14] The third self-name, khoorai, lives on in Khakas folklore and continues the line from the Kirghiz to the Khakas.^[14]

Butanaev adds that the Kachin group of the Khakas call themselves khaas, a name from the Kacha river near Krasnoyarsk. The name reaches the Minusinsk basin only after 1720 to 1740.^[15] In his view the Khakas ethnos, formed after the union with Russia, does not correspond to the Khakas of the Chinese chronicles, who were the Kirghiz. Its roots lie in them, however, through the khoorai of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries.^[16]

Butanaev’s line of reply was continued after the exchange. Mikhail A. Chertikov holds that most Khakas descend from Yenisei Kirghiz who came back from Dzungaria, to which they had moved in 1703 and 1706.^[17] He calls the Fuyu Kirghiz of north-eastern China the surviving ethnic group of the Yenisei Kirghiz and an isolated group of the Khakas.^[18] Both claims concern the centuries after the khaganate.

Claims behind the positions

Both positions make a claim about the origin of the Khakas. The Kyzlasovs speak of an Old Khakas state. L. R. Kyzlasov is quoted as saying that “from deep antiquity we have always been Turkic-speaking”.^[15] Butanaev ties the Khakas to the Kirghiz and the khoorai. He reports a festival, Ada-Khoorai, held by the Khakas association Tun on 3 August 1991 in memory of the ancestors.^[19] A survey of Turkic history grants that Kyzlasov is right to see the making of the Kirghiz in several stages, with the pressure of the Xiongnu behind it. It judges his identification of the names debatable.^[20]

Of the four authors of the exchange, three hold Xiajiasi to be a spelling of Kirghiz.^[21] The Xin Tang Shu gives Jiankun, Jiegu and Xiajiasi as names of one country.^[2] The word Khakas is the Russian form of the third. The sides agree that it became the official name of the people in 1917 and 1918.^[1] They differ on whether it had an older life among the Yenisei Kirghiz of the khaganate. Their war with the Uyghurs is told in the Uyghur–Kirghiz War.

References

^ a b c d Klyashtorny 1992, p. 59
^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ a b c Yakhontov 1992, p. 61
^ Drompp 2002, p. 480
^ Golden 1992, p. 413
^ a b Butanaev 1992, p. 64
^ Golden 1992, p. 178, 413
^ Golden 1992, p. 177–178, 413
^ Kızlasov 1990, p. 85
^ Kızlasov 1990, p. 125, 129
^ Yakhontov 1992, p. 63
^ Kyzlasov 1992, p. 69
^ a b Klyashtorny 1992, p. 59–60
^ a b Klyashtorny 1992, p. 60
^ a b Butanaev 1992, p. 65
^ Butanaev 1992, p. 66–67
^ Çertikov 2013, p. 35, 39
^ Çertikov 2013, p. 35, 41
^ Butanaev 1992, p. 67
^ Golden 1992, p. 178
^ Klyashtorny 1992, p. 59–61

Sources

Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

S. G. Klyashtorny, O stat'e I. L. Kyzlasova [О статье И. Л. Кызласова «О самоназвании хакасов»] (1992)
S. E. Yakhontov, Slovo chakas v istoričeskoj literature [Слово хакас в исторической литературе] (1992)
V. Ja. Butanaev, Vopros o samonazvanii chakasov [Вопрос о самоназвании хакасов] (1992)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
I. L. Kyzlasov, Ob ėtnonimach chakas i tatar i slove choorai (otvet opponentam) [Об этнонимах хакас и татар и слове хоорай (ответ оппонентам)] (1992)
Michael R. Drompp, The Yenisei Kyrgyz from Early Times to the Mongol Conquest (2002)
Leonid R. Kızlasov; İgor L. Kızlasov, Sayan-Altay Türklerinin Yeni Runik Yazısı (1990)
Mihail Anatolyeviç Çertikov, Yenisey Kırgızlarının Etnik Grubu Olarak Fu-Yu Kırgızları (2013)