Researchers of tsarist Russia on the study of the origin of the Sakha people

The article is devoted to analyzing the versions of the Sakha people ethnogenesis advanced by the Russian officials in the 19th century on the basis of folklore sources. They made a hypothesis of the Yenisei River as the homeland of the Sakha ancestors, and that they temporarily lived near Lake Baikal. These versions are analyzed from the point of view of contemporary study of ethnoses connected with the Sakha people. Collegiate Assessors I. Evers and S. Gornovsky based on folklore data, and wrote that the ancestral home of the ancient Yakut tribes was the west side of the Aral Sea. For unknown reasons, the ancestors of Yakuts moved gradually to the east and stopped at Tunka. According to the scholars, Genghis Khan was first to turn his attention to the Tumat tribe. After them came the Khorintsy, with the time the Sakha and the Uraankhay tribes followed, then came the Batulintsy and the Bayagantaytsy. An article by N.F. Ostolopov states that the Batulintsy tribe descended from Omogoya, came to the Buryat steppe, and was attacked. The tribe was forced to flee on rafts down the Lena, after them came a heart of oak named Elley. A few decades later came the Khorintsy, a people living beyond Baikal. N.N. Shchukin is the founder of a version of the origin of the ancestors of the Sakha from Minusinsk Tatars, now known as the Khakas. P. Klark, a Vilyuysk district police officer, said the Sakha tribe inhabited the Upper Yenisei, then the Baikal shores, and the hordes of Genghis Khan ousted them to the upper reaches of the Lena. The former head of the Minusinsk District N.A. Kostrov pointed to the possibility of the origin of the Sakha people from the Sagaytsy. N.A. Aristov identifies the Sakha with the Sagaytsy, considering the latter the descendants of the Sakha. However, the Sakha could get to the Middle Lena from the Far East, which in the 13th century hosted Turkish settlers from the Yenisei Kyrgyz. D.A. Kochnev in his "Essays on the Legal Labor of Yakuts" made a hypothesis about the Sakha's migration from the Uraankhay region and earlier from Turkestan. N.N. Kozmin explains the resettlement of the Sakhalars from the valley of the Yenisei to the Angara by the economic and trade crisis in the country of the Khakas-Kyrgyz. The author concludes that the Yenisei and the Sayan theories of the origin of the Sakha are of historiographical interest. These theories were created by Russian travelers that noticed the similarity between Minusinsk Tatars and the Uraankhay, on the one hand, and the Sakha Turks, on the other. It is necessary to add the Aral or Kyrgyz theory of the origin of the Sakha apparently arisen under the influence of the exiled Kazakhs. At the beginning of the 20th century the Kurykan theory of the origin of the Sakha appeared.

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