country has been conquered by Assyrians, Egyptians,
Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans; and
now the features of its Eastern life are suggested
rather than portrayed by Arab sheikhs, who have
long had contact with Turks and Franks.
But the Kirghese steppe has not been thus influenced
by foreign conquerors to anything like a
similar extent, for it lay off the area of the great
battle-fields of Central Asia. Maveraunnehar, or the
country between the Oxus and Jaxartes, with the
Zarafshan valley, has been conquered again and
again from the west by Persians, Greeks, Arabs,
and Turkomans, and from the east by Chinese,
Mongols, and Turks; but these billows, tremendous
as they were, did little more than burst upon the
southern shores of the vast northern steppes, of whose
history in early ages we! know almost nothing. None
of the armies from the west pushed their way beyond
the Jaxartes, which represented to the old world of
Central Asia the boundary between civil and savage
life. W e do not read of the Chinese generals penetrating
there. Even the creed of Muhammad had
failed to lay hold of the Kazaks, when the Russians
ascended the Irtish to meet with a people who had
never seen the face of a European, whose only other
invading foe perchance had been their neighbouring,
perhaps half-brother, Mongols, and who might, therefore,
be supposed to be living with the primeval
manners, customs, and laws, handed down from their
forefathers. It should be remembered, moreover,
that a quarter of a century has not yet passed since
the Russians could with safety travel to all parts of
the steppe, in some portions of which still they number
less than one European to a hundred natives. There
must be masses of these children of the desert who
as yet have scarcely seen, much less lived in, a town;
who neither speak nor have heard any language but
their own, and who know only their own patriarchal
usages and law s ; so that, when this is borne in mind,
it will seem probable that in the Kirghese may be
witnessed an earlier stage of pastoral life than could
be seen in the countries made familiar to us by the
Scriptures. I have been the more engrossed with
this thought because I discovered still existing in the
steppe certain laws and customs that obtained not
only in the times of Moses, but in those of the greatgrandchildren
of Abraham. The question arises,,
then, Whence came these laws into the steppe ? I f
from the Koran, matters will be simplified; but even
then there will remain a further question whether they
are due to Muhammadan influence only, or whether
they may not antedate the Koran (which has many
resemblances, we know, to the Pentateuch), and come
from the Abrahamic times of which Moses wrote— in
which case we are sent back to a very remote past
that is full of both Scriptural and ethnographical
interest. Apart from these problems, moreover, there
remains the fact that the Kirghese occupy the
largest territory, and are the most numerous of all
the peoples of Russian Central Asia. It will therefore
be proper that a space should be devoted to
their consideration.*
* There are not wanting materials from which information may be
drawn. Not to mention the few Oriental writers, and European
mediseval travellers who allude to the Kirghese, there is first the-
classical work of Levshine, much of which, with information added from
other sources, appears in the tomes of Howorth, and there are the-
simple descriptions of Kirghese customs by Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson.
These were written, however (with the exception of Howorth), before
the nomads were so well known to European scholars as now, and a re