Derived its name from the Chinese word ta-ta, and is incorrectly written Tartar. Another Chinese name applied to them was Tu-kiu, from which is derived our word “Turk.”
The earliest home of the Tatars or Turks was in Turkestan, north of the Plateau of Pamir and in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Aryans. Long before the beginning of the Christian era their predatory bands had repeatedly invaded the territory of the Aryans and the Semites, and quite down to two centuries ago the states which they had founded were looked upon with dread by the mightiest potentates of Europe. The Chinese annals speak of their inroads into that empire more than 200 years before our era.
At the period of the migration of nations which accompanied the dismemberment and fall of the Roman Empire, the Tatars appeared frequently in Europe, always as ruthless devastators. Attila, “the scourge of God,” with his bands of Huns, the Avari, and the Bulgari, who followed in his wake, the Turcomans and the Cossacks, and finally the Osmanli Turks whose descendants now govern European and Asiatic Turkey, and whose Sultan is the political head of the Mohammedan world, all belong in this group.
It is needless to say that in these rovings they have undergone much admixture. The modern Turk has more of the blood of the Semite and the Circassian in his veins than of his Tartar ancestors; but his language has maintained a singular purity, and the Tartar hunter, the Jakout, in the delta of the Lena on the frozen ocean, finds no difficulty in understanding its ordinary expressions. The Jakout speaks indeed the purest and most ancient form of the idiom, “The Sanscrit of the Tatar,” as it has been called by Friedrich Müller.
The peculiarity of this language is that it has a law of vocalic harmony, by which the various suffixes added to the root change the vowels they contain in accordance with the vowel of the root. It has not only a pleasing sound, but superior flexibility and an unusual capacity to express fine shades of meaning. It is, however, losing ground both in Europe and Asia, as are all the agglutinative languages.
Next to the Turks, the Cossacks and Kirghis Tatars are prominent members of the stock. They are closely related, being branches of the same dialectic family. The former wander over the steppes between the Sea of Aral and the main chain of the Altai. It is not known when they occupied this region, but it was within historic times, and they drove from it a people of higher civilization, acquainted with the use of bronze and brass, and dwellers in cities.[136] The Kirghis themselves build no houses, but dwell in felt tents called “yourts.” They did not cultivate the soil, deriving their food from their flocks and herds, but of late years have begun a careless agriculture. In religion they profess Mohammedanism, but in reality they cling to their ancient Shamanistic superstitions.
4. The Finnic Group
Has lived for certainly two thousand years or more in Northern Europe. It is mentioned by Tacitus, and its traditions as well as its dialects support this antiquity. That it ever extended, as many theorists pretend, into Central or Southern Europe, may now be dismissed as an obsolete hypothesis, disproved by craniological studies and a closer scrutiny of the alleged linguistic resemblances which have been urged. The probability is that the Finns and Lapps had the same ancestors as the Samoyeds of Northern Siberia, who once lived on the upper streams of the Yenissei in the Sajanic mountains and around Lake Baikal. The Laplanders are said still to retain some reminiscence of the migration, and the verbal affinities of the Finnic and Samoyedic demonstrate an early relationship.[137]
The eastern members of the group are the Ugrians in the government of Tobolsk, some tribes on the Volga, and the Permians on the Kama river (an affluent of the Volga). The Magyars of Hungary are a branch of the Ugrians who possessed themselves of the land in the ninth century, and who still retain their language, not remote from the Finnish.
The present Finnland was first occupied by the Lapps or Laplanders, who were driven northward and westward by bands continually arriving from the east. The Finns, who call themselves “Suomi,” which is the same as the initial syllables of “Samo-yed,” are subdivided into the Esthonians and Livonians on the Baltic, south of the Gulf of Finland, the Tavastes, Karelians, and others to the north.