Ethnogenesis and history of the Bashkir people
Bashkirs (self-named Bashkort) are Turkic-speaking nomads who began their movement to present-day Bashkiria in the IV century from the south-western strip. The ethnogenesis of the Bashkirs is extremely complex. The southern Urals and the adjacent steppes, where the formation of the people took place, have long been an arena of active interaction between different cultures and languages. In the second half of the first millennium BC, Iranian-speaking Sarmatian pastoralists lived in the south of Bashkiria, and agricultural and hunting tribes of the Ananyin culture, the ancestors of the Finno-Ugric peoples, lived in the north.
In the first millennium A.D., the penetration of the nomadic Turks into the Southern Urals began, occupying the whole of Bashkiria by the end of the millennium. Having displaced and partially assimilated the aborigines, the Turkic tribes obviously played a decisive role in the formation of the Bashkir language, culture, and physical appearance. The Oguzo-Pecheneg tribes, the Volga-Kama Bulgars, and later the Kipchaks (XI-XIII centuries) and some Mongol tribes (XIII-XIV centuries) participated in the ethnogenesis of the Bashkirs.
In Arabic sources, Bashkirs were mentioned in the 9th-10th centuries under the name "bashgird" ("bashgurd"). Thus, according to Ibn Fadlan, during his journey (922) to Volga Bulgaria, crossing the Chagan River (a right tributary of the Yaik), the embassy entered "the country of the Bashgird people." An Arab geographer and diplomat calls them "the worst of the Turks... more than others, they encroach on life." Therefore, having entered their land, the Arabs sent an armed mounted detachment forward for safety.
In the 9th-13th centuries, Bashkirs roamed in separate clans in the Urals, in the Southern Urals and between the Volga and Yaik rivers (Ural). They were engaged in nomadic cattle breeding, as well as fishing, hunting and bee-keeping. In the X-XIII centuries. The Bashkirs began to disintegrate their tribal relations, and they began to roam in separate groups of 10-30 families. For a long time, they maintained patriarchal slavery. At the end of the 12th - beginning of the 13th centuries, feudal relations emerged. In the X-XIII centuries, the western Bashkirs were subordinate to the Volga-Kama Bulgaria. Bashkirs were idolaters, and Islam began to infiltrate them from Bulgaria in the tenth century.; Bashkir believers are Sunni Muslims. In 1229, the Mongols invaded the territory of Bashkiria and by 1236 had completely conquered the Bashkirs, who entered the Sheibani ulus with their nomads, the brother of Batu Khan. In the second half of the 15th century, after the collapse of the Golden Horde, the southern and southeastern territories of the Bashkir nomads went to the Nogai Horde, the western part to the Kazan Khanate, and the northeastern part to the Siberian Khanate. With the annexation of the Kazan Khanate to Russia (1552), the Western Bashkirs became subjects of the Russian state. Since 1557, almost all Bashkir nomads began to pay yasak to the Russian tsar. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the eastern Bashkirs also found themselves under Russian rule. In 1586, Bashkirs from the northeast and lower reaches of the Yaik began actively colonizing Russian territories.
The Bashkirs "considered themselves descendants of the Nogai people, whom they really resembled in some physical features, but the Kyrgyz called them Ostyaks and regarded the Bashkirs as tribesmen of this Siberian people mixed with Tatars. The mountain Bashkirs, who probably preserved the original type in the greatest purity for the longest time, most often had a small but very wide head; among them there were tall and strong types with regular facial features, very similar to the Magyars, which is why they were attributed to Ugric origin for quite a long time. According to the anthropological type, the population is mixed: the majority of Bashkirs are Caucasians with some degree of Mongoloid (sub-Ural racial type). The eastern Bashkirs are dominated by Mongoloid features (the South Siberian racial type) [9].
Many Bashkirs owned fairly large flocks of sheep and cattle, but preferred herds of horses, which served them both as mounts, sledges, and drays; the animals gave them meat, milk (they made koumiss from mare's milk, a medicinal and alcoholic drink), and leather, from which they made their clothes, wagons, blankets, belts, sacks, or tursaks.
It was not uncommon to meet Bashkirs who counted their wealth in hundreds, even thousands of horses. Bashkirs (as well as other nomadic peoples and tribes) were extremely dexterous horsemen; horse racing was their favorite military exercise, and it was an extremely exciting and picturesque sight. Beekeeping was also considered one of the most favorite activities of Bashkirs, so some of the ethnographers even tried to derive the name of the people - "Bashkurt" from the word meaning the profession of beekeepers.
Bashkirs actively resisted the penetration of Russians into their lands, as they immediately began to plow their pastures and meadows, build villages on the banks of streams, dig mines, narrowing the scope of pastoral nomads in their centuries-old movement after their flocks and herds. Russians Russians Russians graves, however, the Bashkirs vainly ravaged and burned down Russian villages, even digging up the Russian dead from their graves so that there would not be a single Russian person left in their land, either alive or dead. After each such uprising, the Russians came again, and in even greater numbers than before, now forcibly expelling the Bashkirs from their possessions and building new towns and villages on them.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Bashkirs already owned only a third of their former lands." The gradual reduction of pastures forced Bashkirs to take up farming: first they leased their land to Russian peasants (the so-called pripushenniki) for an annual or one-time fee, and then slowly they began to adapt themselves to the work of the farmer. Numerous local khans became the progenitors of noble and princely families and became part of the Russian nobility, while the Bashkir princely families of the Aptulovs, Turumbetevs, Devletshins, Kulyukovs, and others continued to use tarkhanism as before. Russian Russian troops formed special detachments during the Tarkhans' campaigns, and the militia, recruited from the tyagly and yasachny Bashkirs, joined them; they were always commanded by Russian heads. Shortly after accepting Russian citizenship, the Bashkirs, unwilling to bring yasak to Kazan and suffering from the raids of neighboring tribes, asked the tsar to build a city on their land that would protect them and where they would take yasak. In 1586, Governor I. Nagoy began the construction of Ufa, which became the first Russian settlement in the Bashkir lands, except for Yelabuga, built on the very border of the Bashkir settlement. In the same year, 1586, despite the opposition of the Nogai Urus, Samara was built. The voivodeship decree (1645) mentions ostrozhek Menzelinsk. In 1736, the Chelyabinsk fortress was founded on the Miass River to cover the settlements along the river. Iset (in the modern Sverdlovsk region). In 1663, the previously existing Birsk was transformed into a fortification that stood in the middle of the road from Kama to Ufa. Simultaneously with the construction of Ufa, the colonization of the region begins: Tatars, Mescheryaks, Bobyl, Teptyari, Cheremis, etc. ethnic groups settle among the Bashkirs as slaves, take land from them for rent, and the Russians first occupy the Siberian settlements (in the modern Chelyabinsk region), and then begin to infiltrate the indigenous lands of Bashkiria.
In 1919, the Bashkir ASSR was created as part of the RSFSR. Since 1992, the name of the national statehood of the Bashkir ethnic group has been the Republic of Bashkortostan.
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