By adding, to all this, the statement that at least one nation, the Bashkirs, although speaking Turk, are supposed to be Finnic, and, by recollecting at the same time, the great extent of Turk conquests, like some of those of Tamerlane, less permanent than those enumerated, as well as the effects of the trade in female slaves (preeminently supported by Turk nations), we may arrive at a valuation of the importance of the Turk family as a physical influence in the way of intermixture.
The influences of the Turk family have been material rather than moral.—No portion of the Turk division has ever passed for one of the preeminently intellectual sections of mankind. The steady monotheism, however, of the Koran, they have taken up so generally, that Turk and Mahometan are almost as synonymous as Arab and Mahometan. Their literature is founded on that of Persia. No great idea has ever originated from them, and none but those of the simpler and more straightforward kind been adopted. At the same time the Syriac alphabet of the Nestorian Christians was introduced amongst the Uighur Turks, earlier than in any other quarter equally remote; and fragmentary forms of ancient Turk poetry, anterior to the influences of the Persian, and Arabic, are to be found in Von Hammer.
The verbal truthfulness of the Turk has been praised by most who have had the means of observation. Lying is the vice of the weak; and no nations have so little been slaves, and so much been masters, as the Turk.
The Yakuts.—The isolated Turks, or Yakuts, still stand over for notice. Their centre is the river Lena, whereon they extend at least as far southward as the Aldan. Eastward they are found on the[27] Kolyma, and westward as far as the Yenisey. Here the Yakut tribe is that of the Dolganen, an outlying portion of the section first noticed by Von Middendorf.[28]
That the Yakut are Turk, is placed beyond reasonable doubt; although the only test has been that of language. Respecting this the two most extreme statements which I have met with are the following:—
1st. That it is intelligible at Constantinople.
2nd. That not less than one-third of the words (and some of them the names of very simple ideas) are other than Turk.[29]
The truth will probably be known when the recent researches of Von Middendorf are published. In either case, however, the language is Turk.
Fig. 5.
