Merv, the Queen of the
World;
and the Scourge of the Man-stealing Turcomans. With an
Exposition of the Khorassan Question:
By Charles Thomas Marvin, Published by W.H. Allen, 1881
CHAPTER III. THE ORIGIN OF THE Turkmen.
WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE MINOR TRIBES.
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of the Arabs, and, strange to say,
in the very place which they now occupy. A few centuries
later we meet the Kara and Alieli Turkmen
in a successful engagement with Sultan Sandjar around
Andkhoy and Maimana, in the very place where the remnants
of these once mighty tribes are actually to be found.
Again, a few centuries later, other families spread their
influence as far as Asia Minor. Towards the end of the
fifteenth century the Ada district of the Mangishlak
peninsula was entirely in the hands of the Turkmen,
a place which is now almost exclusively in the hands of
the Kazaks, and in the vicinity
of which only the small tribes of Chodor and Imreli
linger in a miserable existence. The Ersari
Turkmen, to-day living between Kerki and Chardzhou, are
said to have lived in the sixteenth century near the
Balkan, and whilst the Tekkes had then only a
secondary importance, mention is made of the tribes of
Aradji, Ali, and Khizr, of which now only small traces
are to be found."
We thus see that the Turkmen
originated in mid-Siberia, migrated to the East Caspian
region at a period probably when the Oxusran into the
Caspian, and the existing Aral-Caspian steppe was a
tolerably fertile tract of ground; and that, finally, they settled along the North
Persian frontier, where they are to be found to-day. In his statement that the
Turkmen are of Turkish origin, Vambery simply repeats
what Burnes said 50 years ago, and Klaproth a year or two
earlier in his notes to the Voyage de Murav’ev en
Turcomanie, and as his account is clearer and more minute
than theirs we may suppress the latter, Regarding the
origin of the term Turkmen
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