Key Milestones in the Ethnogenesis of the Kyrgyz People
An important stage in the study of the ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the Kyrgyz was a special Scientific Session held in 1956 in Frunze. The joint session summarized a long period of research on this issue, initiated by the works of Academician V. V. Bartold and continued by a whole array of historians, ethnographers, linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians.
The key element of the resolution of this conference is the thesis that "The Kyrgyz people and their culture were formed... as a result of the interaction of at least two ethnic elements: Central Asian and local — Central Asian. One of the most important milestones in the ethnogenesis of the Kyrgyz people, closest in time, is associated with events in the first half of the second millennium of our era. During this era, a significant majority of the ancestors of modern Kyrgyz, speaking the already established Kyrgyz language, penetrated into the territory of Kyrgyzstan from the East... Starting from the indicated date, which still needs to be clarified further, the Kyrgyz become the numerically predominant group of the population in the territory of Kyrgyzstan, which cannot be said about earlier epochs..." (TKAEE. 1959. P. 233).
The conclusion about the formation of the people and its culture as a result of the interaction of two ethnic components - Central Asian and local Central Asian - became fundamental for all subsequent scientific works on this issue and largely predetermined their results. Thus, for the first time, a point of contact was found between two mutually exclusive concepts, and new directions for research on this complex scientific problem were defined.
The concepts of renowned historians S. M. Abramzon and K. I. Petrov on the ethnogenesis of the Kyrgyz people were formulated taking into account the recommendations of this scientific forum. While K. I. Petrov paid special attention to the problems of the formation of the Central Asian component in his works, the fundamental monograph by S. M. Abramzon devotes significant space to the problem of the origin and development of the local Central Asian component. According to K. I. Petrov's concept, the Turkic-speaking tribes of the Ob-Irtysh interfluve, the main core of which consisted of the Kimak-Kipchak tribes of the Western Altai, assimilated the Kyrgyz tribes that migrated from the Yenisei in the 10th-11th centuries, and after the Mongol conquests during the era of the Haidu state, moved to the Tian Shan. Thus, K. I. Petrov was the first to note that the tribes that later migrated to the Tian Shan were territorially and ethnically more connected to the Ob-Irtysh interfluve, i.e., to the Kimaks and Kipchaks, than to the Yenisei valley (Petrov, 1963). However, K. I. Petrov's works did not resolve the mystery of the movement of the ethnonym "Kyrgyz" from the Yenisei to the Tian Shan.
S. M. Abramzon, based on a comparative study of a wide range of ethnographic materials with data from other sources, proposed the position that the process of forming the Kyrgyz people mainly took place in the territory of the Pre-Tian Shan, Eastern Turkestan, Pamir-Alai, and adjacent areas. According to S. M. Abramzon, the main ethnic core consisted of the descendants of Turkic-speaking tribes from the era of ancient Turkic states of the 6th-10th centuries. It was around these tribes that the political consolidation of nomadic tribes that migrated here during the Mongol era from Southern Siberia and Desht-i Kipchak occurred.
Ethnocultural ties of the Kyrgyz of Tian Shan with the population of the Ob-Irtysh and Altai