ABSTRACT
Humans have inhabited present-day Kazakhstan since the earliest Stone Age, generally pursuing the nomadic pastoralism for which the region’s climate and terrain are best suited. In the eighth and ninth centuries, portions of southern Kazakhstan were conquered by Arabs, who also introduced Islam. After the Mongol capture of the Karakitai state, Kazakhstan fell under the control of a succession of rulers of the Mongolian Golden Horde, the western branch of the Mongol Empire. Non-Muslim ethnic minorities departed Kazakhstan in large numbers from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s and a national program has repatriated about a million ethnic Kazakhs back to Kazakhstan. “The main 1901 chain from Orenburg to Tashkent through Kazakhstan was based on a Second-Order triangulation in support of the railroad and the irrigation project of the Syr Darya Valley.
