Novye Issledovaniâ Tuvy (Jun 2019)
Uriankhai and Uriankhaians: finding the locus and ethnic groups
Abstract
The article is devoted to the problem of the names of the placename of Uriankhai and the ethnonym Uriankhai people, who played an important part in the ancient and early modern history of Central Asia. Russian researchers are well known to have referred to Tuva as Uriankhai Krai, and called Tuvans the Uriankhai. These names, found as early as in medieval sources on the history of Turkic and Mongolian peoples and widely distributed geographically from the Transbaikalia up to the Far East, have yet resisted any plausible etymological explanation. The linguistic identity of the name of the locality of Uriankhai as a historical and geographical region was also unclear, and one could only infer by guesswork that both the main ethnicity in the region and smaller ethnic groups got their name from their area of residence. The use of the name (essentially a folk endonym) Uraangkhai-Sakhalar in Yakut folklore links these problems to the issues of ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the Yakuts and with the ethnic history of the peoples of the Baikal environs. The author, in his search for toponymic parallels for the geographical name Uriankhai, focused on Urengoy - the name of the river in the headwaters of the Ob or Irtysh, noted in the travel diary of N.G. Spathari (Spafarius) in 1675, and Novy Urengoy - the name of the city in the lower reaches of the Ob. An explanation of the origin of these toponyms has been found in Samoyed languages: in Nenets, ‘varyo-ng-hoi’ means “a mountain with thawed patches, a mountain on which snow melts before everywhere else”. Such a complicated geographical appellate entrenched as a specific toponym only in some places, and, taking into account the mountainous terrain of the territory of Tuva, it was fixed as the name of the territory as a whole. The name “Uriankhaians”, which could not be the self-name of any of the peoples of Tuva, has apparently spread in connection with the migrations of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the Baikal and Transbaikalia, as well as to the Far East. Probably, the ancestors of the Yakuts brought the name Uraangkai as part of the self-name from the regions of the Baikal region adjacent to the territory of Tuva, but it is possible that the name Uraangkhai-Sakha is an acquired feature of the language of Yakut folklore, not related to the debatable problems of the Yakut ethnic history.
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