Tatars

Tatars (Tatar: Tatarlar/????????) is a collective name applied to the Turkic people of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The name is derived from Ta-ta or Dada, a Mongolian tribe that inhabited present Northeast Mongolia in the 5th cent A.D. First used to describe the peoples that overran parts of Asia and Europe under Mongol leadership in the 13th century A.D., it was later extended to include almost any Asian nomadic invader, whether from Mongolia or the fringes of Western Asia. Before the 1920s Russians used the name Tatar to designate a numerous peoples from the Azerbaijani Turks to tribes of the Siberia.

Authorities

The literature of the subject is very extensive, and bibliographical indexes may be found in the Geographical Dictionary of P. Semenov, appended to the articles devoted respectively to the names given above, as also in the yearly Indexes by M. Mezhov and the Oriental Bibliography of Lucian Scherman. Besides the well-known works of Castren, which are a very rich source of information on the subject, Schiefner (St Petersburg Academy of Sciences), Donner, Ahlqvist and other explorers of the Ural-Altaians, as also those of the Russian historians Soloviev, Kostomarov, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Schapov, and Ilovaiskiy, the following containing valuable information may be mentioned:

Related Topics:
St Petersburg Academy of Sciences - Soloviev - Kostomarov - Ilovaiskiy

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• the publications of the Russian Geographical Society and its branches;
• the Russian Etnographicheskiy Sbornik;
• the Izvestia of the Moscow society of the amateurs of natural science;
• the works of the Russian ethnographical congresses;
• Kostrov's researches on the Siberian Tatars in the memoirs of the Siberian branch of the geographical society; Radlov's Reise durch den Altai, Aus Sibirien', "Picturesque Russia" (Zhivopisnaya Rossiya);
• Semenov's and Potanin's " Supplements " to Ritter's Asien; Harkavi's report to the congress at Kazan;
• Hartakhai's "Hist, of Crimean Tatars," in Vyestnik Evropy, 1866 and 1867;
• "Katchinsk Tatars," in Izvestia Russ. Geogr. Soc., xx., 1884.

Various scattered articles on Tatars will be found in the Revue orientale pour les Etudes Oural-Altaiques, and in the publications of the university of Kazan. See also E. H. Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars, 1895 (chiefly a summary of Chinese accounts of the early Turkic and Tatar tribes), and Skrine and Ross, Heart of Asia (1899). (P. A. K.; C. EL.)

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