Localization of the Habitation Area of the Uygurs and the Tatars in the Pre-Chingisid Period
50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Kazan 2007
In this paper I intend to deal with a problem of the early history of the Tatar people, based on Islamic sources and modern Mongolian place-names. At least one part of the Tatars had close contacts with the Uygurs, as I have written in a previous article (The first Tatars in Europe, PIAC in Budapest 2002, published in 2003). Rashid ad-Din mentioned the rivers in the habitation area of the Uygurs. Several attempts were made to identify these place-names, some of them succesfully (e.g. Adar = the Mongolian river Ider). There is at least one more doubtless identification possible, namely that of the Bügseyn gol. This means that the Uygur (and consequently a part of the Tatars) lived in the Khangay Mountains, as far to the north-east as the mouth of the Selenga. This result corresponds exactly to the result of the archaeologists and is corroborated by other evidence as well. However, it is noteworthy that in this case the name of a relatively small river survived in Mongolian. Other pre-Mongolian names belonged to larger rivers (like the Tugla — Tuul or the Ider). The names of the large rivers are easely borrowed from one language to another, not necessarely mediated by a surviving local population. In this case, the name of the Bügseyn gol indicates that the local population was absorbed by the Mongols in a region, which is south of the Darkhat basin, where it is usual to assume such an ethnogenetic development. Such an ethnogenetic development can be proved by the ethnonym of the local rein-deer breeding population and some loan-words of the Mongolian language as well.
This paper can not answer the question of exactly how Mongolic or how Turkic the Tatars were, but it intend to localize one of their early habitation areas.