The Turkomans
Nadir
Shah, the last king who ruled Persia in its full extent, from Georgia to
Candahar and from the Tigris to the Oxus, was born in a tent of an Iliat, or
tent-dwelling family, of the Afshar tribe, about one mile from Mahomadabad. He
built a small fort (now in ruins) to mark the place of his birth. At present it
is only the wild tribes who plunder Persia, Bokhara, and Afghanistan that are
called Turkomans; but the name had once a much wider signification, and there
is really no ethnic difference between the civilized Kajar tribe, to which the
royal family of Persia belong, and those now called Turkomans. In the ‘History
of Nadir Shah’ called Jehangosha, written by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astrabadi, he is
always spoken of a Turkoman of the tribe of Afshar. Nadir Shah himself, in a
letter to his son, speaks of having treated the Emperor of Delhi with courtesy
when he captured that city, because they were both of illustrious Turkoman
descent.
We
also know that the Turkomans of the white sheep and the Turkomans of the black
sheep ― so called from the figures of these animals that they carried on their
standards, and who had their respective capitals, the one at Diarbekir in
Kurdistan, and the other at Van in Armenia ― were of the same race as the
nomads of the Kara Kum desert. The Turkomans speak a variety of Turki differing
very little from the Turki spoken all over Northern Persia, and the Turks of
Persia understand it, though there are some differences. The Persians call the
Turki spoken by the Turkomans, Jagatai.
The
Turkomans inhabit the country between the Caspian Sea and the river Oxus. This
country bears no general name, and a great part of it is taken up by the sands
of the Kara Kum or Black Sand Desert. It is bounded on the north by the kingdom
of Kharezm, or Khiva, and on the south by Persia and Afghanistan. There are a
few Turkomans in Afghan territory, and a few also across the Oxus in Bokhara.
The country inhabited by the Turkomans is watered by two considerable rivers
besides the Amu or Oxus, which bounds it. One of these, the Murghab, takes its
rise far away in the Safid Kuh or White Mountains, in Afghanistan, and, after a
long course, loses itself in the sands of the Kara Kum Desert. Before doing so,
however, it fertilizes a long, narrow strip of country on its banks. This tract
of country, from the point where the Murghab leaves Afghan territory to the
point where it is lost in the desert, has always been celebrated in Eastern
history as a most fertile land.
C. E. Stewart — The Country of the Tekke Turkomans,
and the Tejend and Murghab Rivers (1881)
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