the time of the Mongol ascendency, large numbers of that people settled in the country and became, from a military point of view, the dominant race, it is scarcely surprising that the western foreigners should have given the whole of the region the name of Moghulistan,[1] just as they had previously, when the Kara Khitai were supreme there, called the same territory Kara Khitai. It was the name that the Mongols themselves affected and were (at that time, at any rate) proud of, while it was also that with which their fame and their most cherished traditions were associated. Their mode of procedure, and the result they unconsciously attained, are paralleled in European history by the instance of the Franks in Gaul. During the third century, the Franks were still a loose confederacy of Germanic tribes living beyond the right bank of the Rhine. By degrees, under the Merovingians, they began to invade the country on the left bank. As the Roman power declined, their own increased till, in the fifth century, they had extended it over the whole of northern Gaul. Here they adapted themselves to the conditions of their new territory, and gradually spread over the entire surface of what is now France, Their numbers were so small that they were overlaid by the large Gallic population, yet the new-comers succeeded eventually in imposing their name on the larger nation, and originated the names of France and French, which entirely displaced those of the ancient inhabitants.
But Moghulistan was not the only name the new land of the Mongols acquired, for in many books of the fourteenth and
- ↑ The late Professor Grigorief has explained that: "from the time of Timur the name Mongol, or Mogol, was given, by Musulman historians, not to the Mongols, but to the Turkish subjects of the Jaghatis who ruled in Zungaria and the western parts of what are now called the Kirghiz steppes." (See Schuyler's Turkistan, i., p. 375.) The word "western" is probably a misprint for "eastern;" but Professor Grigorief can hardly mean that the name of Mongol, or Moghul, was applied only to those who were Turks, and consequently not Mongols, by race. My impression is that the confusion he has fallen into, will be sufficiently cleared up by observing the non-ethnic way in which Asiatic writers use the word Turk, but which the Professor seems to have take: in a strictly ethnical sense. This subject will be explained farther on in the present Section.
be a corruption of Kalpák. Kara-kalpáks—black hats—will be remembered as an appellation. I am quite convinced that the Naimáns and Karlughs were a branch of the Uighurs. Naimán means "eight," and, by itself, is an impossible appellation. They were really called "Naimán-Uighurs," or the "Eight Uighurs." When the Mongol Empire broke up, the Naimáns joined the Kazák and Uzbeg confederacies, and the chief tribe of the Middle Horde is still called Naimán.—H. H.
