Kemijkat

The Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam says that on this side of the Fūrī, a people east of the Kirghiz, there is a town, K.M.JKATH, where the Kirghiz khan lives.^[1] It adds that apart from the khan’s residence, no class of the Kirghiz has a village or town at all.^[1] The editors take the name for a corruption of Midizhi, 密的支. The Xin Tang Shu gives Midizhi as the name of the camp that Are kept at the Blue Mountain, with a palisade for a wall and joined felt tents.^[2]

They put the residence on the upper Yenisei in the Minusinsk region.^[3] A second proposal, I. L. Kyzlasov’s, takes the name as Kemijkat, the town on the Kem. It was one of the former Uyghur fortress towns on the Ulug-Khem in Tuva.^[4] A third proposal has the seat move to Kemijkat in the tenth century, probably in Tuva. It moved to the Minusinsk basin only toward the end of that century.^[5]

A survey of the Kirghiz notes that the Ḥudūd puts the khan in a town. The town remains unidentified. The Ḥudūd lets no other Kirghiz live in villages or towns. Its picture of the Kirghiz is pastoral, and it says nothing of their agriculture.^[6]

References

^ a b Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 97
^ Minorsky 1970, p. 286,21; Barthold 1927, p. 286,21; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ Minorsky 1970, p. 283
^ Golden 1992, p. 182
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 116
^ Drompp 2002, p. 485

Sources

Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)

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. V. Barthold, Kirgizy: istoričeskij očerk [Киргизы: исторический очерк] (1927)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Michael R. Drompp, The Yenisei Kyrgyz from Early Times to the Mongol Conquest (2002)
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)