Mythologies of the Khakas Tribe

The Khakas are a Turkic indigenous people of Siberia, who live in the republic of Khakassia, Russia. They speak the Khakas language. The Khakhassian people are direct descendants of various ancient cultures that have inhabited southern Siberia, including the Andronovo culture, Samoyedic peoples, the Tagar culture, and the Yenisei Kyrgyz culture. The Khakas people were historically known as Kyrgyz, before being labelled as Tatar by the Imperial Russians following the conquest of Siberia. The name Tatar then became the autonym used by the Khakas to refer to themselves, in the form Tadar. Following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet authorities changed the name of the group to Khakas, a newly-formed name based on the Chinese name for the Kyrgyz people, Xiaqiasi. Some of the Yenisei Kyrgyz were relocated into the Dzungar Khanate by the Dzungars, and then the Qing moved them from Dzungaria to northeastern China in 1761, where they became known as the Fuyu Kyrgyz. Sibe Bannermen were stationed in Dzungaria while Northeastern China (Manchuria) was where some of the remaining Öelet Oirats were deported to. The Nonni basin was where Oirat Öelet deportees were settled. The Yenisei Kyrgyz were deported along with the Öelet. Chinese and Oirat replaced Oirat and Kyrgyz during Manchukuo as the dual languages of the Nonni-based Yenisei Kyrgyz.

Khakass, people who have given their name to Khakassia republic in central Russia. The general name Khakass encompasses five Turkic-speaking groups that differ widely in their ethnic origin as well as in their culture and everyday life: the Kacha, Sagay (Sagai), Beltir, Kyzyl, and Koybal. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Kacha were seminomadic pastoralists raising cattle, sheep, and horses. The Kyzyl had permanent villages and engaged in both pastoralism and farming. The Sagay, of heterogeneous ethnic composition and origin, changed from hunting and fishing to farming and stockbreeding. The Beltir (meaning “river-mouth people”), famed as trappers and as smiths, have also become farmers and stockbreeders. The Koybal, not a tribe in the ethnographic sense but a territorial group, have retained their Kacha language but assumed the Russian peasant way of life. In the late 20th century there were about 60,000 Khakass in Russia.

The Khakas ethnic group in the narrow sense is comprised of that particular Turkic-speaking population that is officially referred to as the "Khakas." This population may be more exactly termed the Khakas proper. In a historical, linguistic, and to some extent even cultural sense, the Khakas also comprise three other ethnic groups—the northern division of the Shor, the Chulym Turks, and the Manchurian Kirgiz. The latter three groups may be considered the descendants of small dislocated fragments of essentially the same parent population of which the Khakas proper represent the principal surviving part. During the initial period of czarist colonization (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the Khakas were known to the Russians as the "Yenisei Kirghiz." This appellation was obviously based on the autonym of the contemporary Khakas, or at least of a considerable part of them. Today the old ethnonym is still retained by the Manchurian Kirgiz, who continue to call themselves "Kïrgïs." The Russian colonial administration referred to the Khakas as the "Minusinsk" or "Abaka Tatars," implying a linguistic relationship with the Tatars proper, as well as with other groups regarded as varieties of the Tatars. At the same time, the Shors were referred to as the "Kuznetsk Tatars," whereas the Chulym Turks were known as the "Meletsk Tatars." This colonial terminology was also adopted by the Khakas, who started to call themselves "Tadar" (plural, Tadarlar), an ethnonym still used by older generation of the Khakas. The current official appellation, "Khakas" (plural, Khakastar), was introduced around the time of the October Revolution. Historically, this is a manufactured term, based on a false reading of an ethnonym that occurs in ancient Chinese documents and actually refers to the Kirgiz. For this reason, there is a continuing discussion among the Khakas about the necessity of finding a more genuine native name. As yet, no generally acceptable alternatives seem to be available.

Khakass is an ethnonym used to refer to a number of South Siberian Turkic groups. The term Khakass came into use during the Soviet era to refer to a number of Turkic groups, the most numerous of which were the Abakan Tatars and Minusa Tatars, named after the river valleys they inhabited. In fact, the group today known as Khakass is composed of five historically and culturally distinct groups—the Kachins, Sagays, Beltirs, Kyzyls, and Koybals. The origins of these five groups are considerably complex, and although they are all Turkic-speaking, historically they were formed from a number of Turkic, Samoyedic, and Kettic groups. The homeland of the Khakass, the right bank of the upper Yenisei River, was a central region of the medieval Yenisei Kirghiz Empire, which reached a peak in the middle of the 8th century after its conquest of the Uyghur Empire in Mongolia. The Yenisei Kirghiz state did not last long as an independent state, being conquered already in the 10th century by the Khitay, but Yenisei Kirghiz rulers remained established in Khakasia until the appearance of Russians in the area in the 17th century. By the time of the Russian annexation of the region in the 18th century, the Yenisei Kirghiz had disappeared as a political force and as an ethnic group, and the region remained populated by the five groups previously mentioned as the constituent elements of the modern-day Khakass.

The relatively favorable climatic conditions of the Minusinsk Basin and the protection provided by the surrounding mountains have attracted human populations to this region since Paleolithic times. During the last several thousand years, in particular, the Minusinsk Basin has been continuously inhabited by a succession of populations whose cultures provide the single most spectacular archaeological continuum in all of North Asia. Starting with the late Neolithic (and still controversial) Tazmin culture (approximately 2000 to 2500 B.C. ) through the subsequent Afanas'evo, Okunevo, Andronovo, and Karasuk cultures, the Minusinsk Basin seems to have been inhabited by semisedentary agriculturalists and cattle breeders with an increasingly strong steppe-nomadic orientation. This development culminated in the late Bronze-Age Tagar culture (700 to 200 B.C. ), connected with the Scythian epoch of Central Eurasian history. According to paleoanthropological data, the Tagar people and most of their local predecessors seem to have had a predominantly Europoid complex of physical features. There then followed the Tashtyk culture (200 B.C. to A.D. 200), which corresponds to the Hunnic period in Central Eurasia and represents a major intrusion of a new Mongoloid population into the Minusinsk Basin. This may be considered the beginning of the formation of the modern Khakas population, although it is obvious that all of the previous periods have also left their genetic and cultural traces on the Khakas. It is not known which language the Tashtyk people spoke, but evidence from comparative linguistics suggests that an early Turkic idiom may have been involved. In any case, a few centuries later the population of the Minusinsk Basin had become largely Turkic-speaking, as evidenced by the written documents in runic Turkic that have been found in the region. From these earliest Siberian inscriptions, as well as from other historical sources, it is known that the Minusinsk Basin belonged to the sphere of the medieval Turkic nomadic empires (sixth to eighth centuries). Power was subsequently seized by the Kyrgyz tribal union, which for several centuries (ninth to thirteenth) maintained an important Turkic-speaking state centered on the Minusinsk Basin. This state, occasionally called the medieval Khakas Empire, seems to have had a fairly large local population (by some estimates up to 1 million people), some of whom were certainly engaged in settled agriculture. The Khakas Empire finally perished during the turmoils connected with the Mongol expansion under Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, and a considerable part of the local population seems to have moved away from the Minusinsk Basin. It is generally assumed that this wave of Kyrgyz emigrants ultimately contributed to the origination of the modern Tianshan Kirghiz of Central Asia. In a very similar way, when the Russians conquered the Minusinsk Basin they forced part of the local population to move away to neighboring Dzungaria. These emigrants were probably largely absorbed by the Turkic and Mongolic inhabitants of Dzungaria, but a small group was transferred (around the middle of the eighteenth century) by the Manchu government of China to Manchuria, where this group still survives as the modern Manchurian Kirgiz. The latter may thus be considered a diaspora group of the Khakas.

The Khakas language is the language of the Khakas people living on the territory of the Republic of Khakassia along the middle streamway of the river Yenisei and its tributaries - the river Abakan and the upper Chulym. The total number of the Khakas people according to the population census of 1989 constituted 78500 people, 62900 among them being inhabitants of the Republic of Khakassia comprising 11.9 per cent of the total population. Some part of the Khakas people live outside Khakassia in the neighbouring regions of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, the Uzhur region, the Sharypovo region and in the Republic of Tuva. Following the genealogical classification of the Turkic languages suggested by ? A. Baskakov, "the Khakas language belongs to the UighurOghuz group of the Turkic languages, being a part of this group it comprises a peculiar Khakas subgroup together with the Kamasin, Kueric, Shorsk, Sarygh-Uighur languages and the northern dialects of the Altay language/'. According to the typological classification, the Khakas language is referred to agglutinating languages. Khakas tribes have been mentioned in ancient Chinese annals as a group of ethnic Turkic tribes of Ghyanghun (Kyrgyz). Some historians suppose that the Khakas tribes, having split off from the Altai main body situated somewhere in Central Asia, "in the second century BC moved towards the north out of the basin of Great Lakes across the Sayan range to the Khakas-Minusinsk basin, where they met with the Dinlins, The latter, judging by the toponymy (which is preserved on the territory of Khakassia till present time) spoke partially Uighur and partially South-Samod dialects. The ethnic name 'Khakas' was officially recognized in the USSR as the name of people belonging to several Turkic-language tribes Haas, Sagay, Koibal, Kyzyl, Beltyr), also from Turkic-influenced Samod-language tribes, Keto-language tribes and other tribes who lived in the Khakas-Minusinsk basin beginning from the 2,ul to 1st century BC. The language of the tribes which comprised the Khakas people and their native names has survived till present time in the form of dialects and sub-dialects of the modern Khakas language oras compound elements of other languages.

Khakas, also known as Xakas, is a Turkic language spoken by the Khakas, who mainly live in the southwestern Siberian Republic of Khakassia, in Russia. The Khakas number 73,000, of whom 42,000 speak the Khakas language. Most Khakas speakers are bilingual in Russian. Traditionally, the Khakas language is divided into several closely related dialects, which take their names from the different tribes: Sagay [ru], Kacha [ru], Koybal, Beltir, and Kyzyl. In fact, these names represent former administrative units rather than tribal or linguistic groups. The people speaking all these dialects simply referred to themselves as Tadar (i.e. Tatar). The people who speak the Fuyu Kyrgyz language originated in the Yenisei region of Siberia but were relocated into the Dzungar Khanate by the Dzungars, and then the Qing moved them from Dzungaria to northeastern China in 1761, and the name may be due to the survival of a common tribal name. The Yenisei Kirghiz were made to pay tribute in a treaty concluded between the Dzungars and Russians in 1635. Sibe Bannermen were stationed in Dzungaria while Northeastern China (Manchuria) was where some of the remaining Öelet Oirats were deported to. The Nonni basin was where Oirat Öelet deportees were settled. The Yenisei Kirghiz were deported along with the Öelet. Chinese and Oirat replaced Oirat and Kirghiz during Manchukuo as the dual languages of the Nonni-based Yenisei Kirghiz. The present-day Kyrgyz people originally lived in the same area that the speakers of Fuyu Kyrgyz at first dwelled within modern-day Russia. These Kyrgyz were known as the Yenisei Kyrgyz. It is now spoken in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, in and around Fuyu County, Qiqihar (300 km northwest of Harbin) by a small number of passive speakers who are classified as Kyrgyz nationality.

Khasas (Devanāgarī: खश; Khaśa) were an ancient Indo-Aryan tribe and a late Janapada kingdom from Himalayan regions of northern Indian subcontinent mentioned in the various historical Indian inscriptions and ancient Indian Hindu and Tibetan literatures. European sources described the Khasa tribe living in the Northwest Himalayas and the Roman geographer Pliny The Elder specifically described them as "Indian people". They were reported to have lived around Gandhara, Trigarta and Madra Kingdom as per the Mahabharata. People of this tribe includes Khas people of medieval Western Nepal, medieval Indian regions of Garhwal and Kumaon, the Kanets of Kangra, Himachal and Garhwal, the Khasa of Jaunsar-Bawar as well as Khakha Rajputs and Bomba clans of Kashmir and different part of northern Pakistan. The original spelling for the name in Sanskrit literature is Khaśa (Sanskrit: खश) while variants of name also used are Khasa (खस), Khaṣa (खष) and Khaśīra (खशीर).

Khakas is a Turkic language with about 60,000 speakers mainly in the Republic of Khakassia in eastern Siberia in the south of the Russian Federation. There are a number of different dialects of Khakas, named after different tribes: Sagay, Kacha, Koybal, Beltir and Kyzyl, and Khakas speakers call themselves Tadar (Tatar), and their language belongs to the Uighur-Oguz group of the eastern Hun branch of Turkic languages. In the mid-19th century a number of Finnish and Russian linguists started documenting Khakas. A literary version of the Khakas language was developed in 1924 using the Cyrillic alphabet. The Latin alphabet was used to write the language between 1929 and 1939, after which the Cyrillic alphabet was used.