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TURKMEN 805
An alternative spelling is Turkoman, or Turcoman, derived from the Persian,
Turkuman.
The Turkmen language, which the Turkmen refer to variously as Tiirkmence,
Tiirkmen Dil or Tiirki, belongs to the southwestern or Oqiiz group of Turkic
languages and has close affinities to Azeri and modern Turkish (see Turkicspeaking
Peoples). Like the latter languages, Turkmen is heavily laden with
Arabic and Persian loan words. Before the present century, there was a small
body of literature written in the Turkmen language using the Arabic alphabet.
This literature until recently was cultivated exclusively by religious teachers who
had become literate as part of their religious education. Since the establishment
of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, a fairly extensive literature in Turkmen
written with Cyrillic letters has developed.
A little over a century ago, most all of the Central Asian Turkmen were
nomads living in felt tents of the Central Asian variety, which are often referred
to in English as yurts or trellis tents. The nomadic residence patterns of pastoral
peoples in the Middle East are often assumed to have a purely economic function,
that of using sparse and seasonably variable pasture for livestock production.
But nomadism can also be a means of exploiting mobility for military and political
ends, and for the Turkmen this second function was more important.
The mode of economic production of most Turkmen included both production
of sheep and goats and agriculture. In regions where production of livestock was
more important, some migration was necessary for the care of their flocks.
Nevertheless, this economy could be easily combined with a semi-nomadic
residence pattern. Such a residence pattern would consist of living part of the
year in permanent houses and part of the year in tents while making short
migrations.
In regions where agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, a completely
sedentary form of residence was possible. Despite these facts, however, until
recently all Turkmen lived the year around in tents. In spite of the discomfort
of portable dwellings as opposed to more substantial ones, the hard work of
migration itself and the expense of maintaining the beasts of burden necessary
to move their families with all of their belongings, the military advantage of
nomadism made it worthwhile. Being highly mobile and on the edge of the Kara
Kum, the Turkmen could easily raid sedentary neighbors and retreat quickly into
more arid regions where the armies of sedentary states could not follow. They
used this military advantage to maintain de facto political independence despite
occasional nominal acceptance of sedentary suzerains. Such independence meant
freedom from taxation, conscription and the manipulative government officials
common in the traditional Middle East. Government officials were especially
threatening to rural people, because they often managed to acquire ownership
of the land and thus to add a burden of land rent to that of taxation.
The political organization of the Turkmen was based on genealogies traced
in the male line, so every Turkmen was a member of a hierarchy of named
patrilineal descent groups. Most of the members of a named descent group lived