Minusinsk Basin

The Minusinsk basin is the lowland of the upper Yenisei, north of the Sayan mountains. The centre of the state of the Yenisei Kirghiz is placed there.^[1] The Tang histories do not name the basin. They put the Kirghiz country three thousand li north-west of the Uyghurs, with the ruler’s Blue Mountain camp at its heart.^[2] Cremation graves of the ninth and tenth centuries mark the Kirghiz from the basin to Tuva.^[3] The northernmost graves lie near Krasnoyarsk. Until the middle of the ninth century, the southern limit ran along the western Sayan. In Tuva the graves are more numerous than anywhere else, the basin included.^[3]

Some scholars place the seat of the khan in the basin. Others place it on the Kem in Tuva, at Kemijkat.^[4] Whether the Kirghiz lived here from the time of the Xiongnu or came from elsewhere is the subject of the Kirghiz origin debate.^[5] After 840 they did not replace the Uyghurs on the Orkhon. They stayed centred on the upper Yenisei valley.^[6]

Land and economy

The Kirghiz who defeated the Uyghurs in 840 lived on the upper Yenisei, in the general area of today’s Minusinsk and Abakan.^[7] The basin is a zone of transition. Forest, meadow and mountain meet steppe and wooded steppe there, at the southern edge of the Siberian taiga. The land lies lower than the Orkhon country, although it is further north.^[8] Grain has been grown there since ancient times. The irrigation works go back at least to the first millennium BC.^[8] Remains of blast furnaces and slag heaps lie along the river valleys. Coal, iron and gold lie near Minusinsk and Abakan today.^[9] The land suited a mixed economy of grain, cattle and metal. This economy is one reason that the Kirghiz stayed here after 840, as Turkic Atlas tells under the khaganate.^[10]

References

^ Minorsky 1970, p. 282,211; Savinov 1978, p. 282,211
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ a b Savinov 1978, p. 212
^ Minorsky 1970, p. 283,182; Golden 1992, p. 283,182
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 111
^ Drompp 2005, p. 38
^ Drompp 1999, p. 391
^ a b Drompp 1999, p. 400
^ Drompp 1999, p. 401
^ Drompp 1999, p. 400–402

Sources

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)
D. G. Savinov, Etnokul'turnye svjazi enisejskich kyrgyzov i kimakov v IX–X vv. [Этнокультурные связи енисейских кыргызов и кимаков в IX–X вв.] (1978)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Michael R. Drompp, Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History (2005)
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)
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)