ABSTRACT
The present-day Kazak people are an integral part of Central Eurasia’s history—a history not yet fully explored and only partially recorded. The Kazaks’ Turkic language links them to the great Turkic-Mongol-speaking confederations and empires that rose and fell over many centuries in ancient Central Eurasia. They are part of a Central Asian culture that includes ancient peoples such as the Saka, Wusun, Hun, and Yuezhi, who roamed with their herds and flocks over two thousand years ago. As these peoples disappear from written sources, successors to the same lands emerge—known to us as the Toba, Turk, Uyghur, and Karluk—peoples who lived in the third to eighth centuries a.d. Until the earliest forms of written Turkish appeared in the eighth century a.d., Central Eurasian history was recorded only intermittently by neighboring literate, settled peoples to both the east and the west. As representatives of agricultural empires, these chroniclers regarded the largely nomadic Central Eurasians as uncivilized and dangerous, possessed of many animals but of no fixed abode, practicing many “primitive and quaint” rites but having no government. Alternately scorning and fearing the nomads, the accounts that have come down to us over the centuries give only partial clues to the reality of steppe life in ancient times. Reconstructing any kind of coherent picture of Central Asian peoples prior to the eighth century on the basis of such accounts remains a difficult business, open to a broad range of interpretations.
