The Kirghiz origin debate

The Xin Tang Shu says that the Xiajiasi are the old country of Jiankun. This land lay west of Yiwu, north of Yanqi, beside the White Mountains.^[1] The same notice puts the Kirghiz three thousand li north-west of the Uyghurs. In the south they lean on the mountain Tanman.^[1] The answers to the question of their first home differ. They name north-western Mongolia, the Minusinsk basin and the eastern Tian Shan.^[2]

For a long time scholars placed the Kirghiz near Lake Hyrgys Nur in north-western Mongolia, following V. V. Barthold. The search there for the sites of the Jiankun brought no result.^[2] S. V. Kiselev has them move into the Minusinsk basin after the Xiongnu conquest. The Xiongnu gave the middle Yenisei valley to the captive Han general Li Ling, and the Jiankun and the Dingling mixed there. L. R. Kyzlasov makes the medieval Kirghiz the descendants of the Jiankun and the Dingling a second people, the Old Khakas.^[2] Yu. S. Khudyakov puts the Jiankun first in Xinjiang, in the eastern Tian Shan, on the evidence of the Han sources. He rests it on Bichurin’s Russian rendering of the Chinese texts.^[3]

The Chinese accounts of the earliest Kirghiz are unclear about their place. Many historians put them in southern Siberia, in the valley of the upper Yenisei, which the Kirghiz called Kem. The Kirghiz certainly lived there by the Tang age.^[4] The region lies far enough from China to account for the vague picture the Chinese had of them. The terse Chinese notices of their origin are of little value.^[4]

Language and descent

The second question is what the Kirghiz were. The Chinese texts describe them as tall, red-haired, fair-faced and green-eyed and call black hair unlucky. Tibetan and Islamic sources say much the same.^[1]^[4] Wilhelm Schott, Louis Ligeti, L. R. Kyzlasov and Peter B. Golden argued from these descriptions and from a few words in Chinese transcription that do not look Turkic. In their view the Kirghiz were Samoyedic or palaeo-Siberian in origin and were Turkicized later.^[5] Golden drew a consequence from this. In his reading, a people of varied descent was little concerned with the Turkic tradition of the Ötüken forest. It did not set its capital on the Orkhon and offered no resistance when the Khitan came in 924.^[6]

Michael R. Drompp finds the evidence too weak to carry this view. Appearance and language are different things. A few foreign words are what linguistic borrowing leaves behind, and most Kirghiz words that the Chinese preserved are Turkic.^[5]^[4] By the middle of the ninth century the Kirghiz were Turkic. The Xin Tang Shu says that their writing and language were exactly those of the Uyghurs, and the Yenisei inscriptions are written in Old Turkic runes with a wholly Turkic vocabulary.^[1]^[5] He allows that a non-Turkic origin cannot be excluded and holds that the “original” ethnicity may never be settled.^[5]^[4] Against Golden’s consequence he notes that the Kirghiz kept Turkic titles, asked the Tang for a title with Tengri in it and wished to move into the Uyghur lands. They therefore did not break with the steppe tradition. Turkic Atlas tells why they stayed on the Yenisei under the khaganate.^[7]

References

^ a b c d Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ a b c Khudyakov 2021, p. 111
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 110–111
^ a b c d e Drompp 2002, p. 480
^ a b c d Drompp 1999, p. 399
^ Drompp 1999, p. 399–400
^ Drompp 1999, p. 400

Sources

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

Literature

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)
Michael R. Drompp, Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A.D. 840 (1999)
Michael R. Drompp, The Yenisei Kyrgyz from Early Times to the Mongol Conquest (2002)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)