Yenisei Kirghiz - Ethnicity and Language

Ethnicity and Language

Culturally and linguistically, the Yenisei Kirghiz were Turkic. But ethnically they may be a mixture of different people. The Kirghiz were described in Tang Dynasty texts as having primarily Caucasian features with some having East Asian features. According the Tang Huiyao (961 CE) article on Jiegu (the Kirghiz), which very likely comes from the Xu Huiyao that Yang Shaofu and others completed in 852, citing Ge Jiayun, who was the Protector General of Anxi:

During the reign period of Kaiyuan of Xuanzong, Ge Jiayun, composed A Record of the Western Regions, in which he said "the people of the Jiankun state all have red hair and green eyes. The ones with dark eyes were descendants of Li Ling.

It further mentioned that the name "Xiajiasi", which the Kirghiz were then known by, was what the Uyghurs called them and had the meaning "yellow head and red face", although confusingly it was also a name Kirghiz themselves used. Since the Turks were being described as people of small stature in the Tangshu. The description of the Kirghiz as tall, blue-eyed blonds excited the early interest of scholars, who assumed that they could not have originally been Turkic in language. Ligeti cited the opinions of various scholars who had proposed to see them as Germanic, Slav or Ket, while he himself, following Castrén and Schott, favoured a Samoyed origin on the basis of an etymology for a supposed Kirghiz word qaša or qaš for "iron". However Pulleyblank argued:

As far as I can see the only basis for the assumption that the Kirghiz were not originally Turkic in language is the fact that they are described as blonds, hardly an acceptable argument in the light of present day ideas about the independence of language and race. As Ligeti himself admitted, other evidence about the Kirghiz language in Tang sources shows clearly that at that time they were Turkic speaking and there is no earlier evidence at all about their language. Even the word qaša or qaš may, I think, be Turkic. The Tongdian says: "Whenever the sky rains iron, they gather it and use it. They call it jiasha (LMC kiaa-şaa). They make knives and swords with it that are very sharp." The Tang Huiyao is the same except that it leaves out the foreign word jiasha. "Raining iron" must surely refer to meteorites. The editor who copied the passage into the Xin Tangshu unfortunately misunderstood it and changed it to, "Whenever it rains, their custom is always to get iron," which is rather nonsensical. Ligeti unfortunately used only the Xin Tangshu passage without referring to the Tongdian. His restoration of qaša or qaš seems quite acceptable but I doubt that word simply meant "iron". It seems rather to refer specifically to "meteorite" or "meteoric iron".