A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

42 A history of Inner Asia
managed to absorb alien tribal elements that for a variety of reasons
came to live among the Kyrgyz: only the names of some tribes such as
Kalmyk, Nayman, or Kipchak point to their different origins.At the
other extreme, the nucleus of Genghis Khan’s transcontinental empire
was conceived in 1206, when the tribes’ Mongol-speaking elders elected
the incipient conqueror as their leader at the quriltay (assembly of tribal
chieftains) held near the mountain of Burkan Kaldun in the Hentei
range of Mongolia.Even in cases where at first sight the common link
is not language but historical circumstances, as in the case of the Uzbeks
and Kazakhs, a common idiom accompanied such ethnogenesis or
gradually reinforced it.The Uzbeks, steppe nomads who in 1500 swept
down from the Dasht-i Kipchak to conquer Transoxania, were a mosaic
of tribes speaking their own Kipchak form of Turkic, distinct from the
Turki form spoken in the area; this factor as much as tribal and dynastic
politics maintained the Uzbeks’ awareness of their original identity.
Finally, the political formation of the five republics of Central Asia –
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan –
carried out in 1924 on orders dictated by Moscow, was based on an ethnolinguistic
identification in which language played the decisive role.
Pastoralism, as we have said, was the basis of the Inner Asian nomads’
economy.Horses, sheep, camels, cattle, and yaks were the main form of
wealth, the emphasis shifting among these species according to the dictates
of the environment and people’s customs.Horses and sheep played
the central role.The horse rendered a service that went beyond the usual
category of mount and draught animal common among sedentary
peoples, for it was also a source of food, both meat and dairy products.
But it was as the means of the nomad’s mobility that it played the main
historical role.
Mobility was of course the very essence of nomadism, and it involved
a number of characteristic features, both concrete and psychological.
One was the Inner Asian nomad’s universal type of dwelling, a tent
which in English is called yurt (from Russian yurta, a borrowing from
Turkic, where, however, this term means home territory; specific variants
of öy, usually accompanied by color epithets such as aq = white or
boz = grey, are the Turkic terms; significantly, in Turkish – the Turkic of
Turkey – where the bulk of the population has long led a settled life, the
word, in the form of ev, has acquired the connotation of house; the
Mongol word for our “yurt” is ger).The yurt radically differs from other
nomads’ tents – Arab, Berber, those of Iran, the tepee of the American
Indian – both in shape and construction material; the shape is that of a