Historical existence of tamga signs of the Sayan-Altai Turkic peoples

This article considers the question of the history of tamga signs of the Sayan-Altai Turks which is understudied in the historiography. It is known that for a long time and up to the present day tamgas as property signs exerted noticeable influence on social and economic relations between Khakas, Altaian, Tuvinian and other Turkic Mongolian peoples of Eurasia. Despite the presence of a number of scientific articles on tamgas of the Khakas, Altaians and Tuvinians, there are no special complex and summarizing works, and the symbolical meanings, significance and semantic interpretation of tamgas are studied insufficiently. The aim of the research is to identify the nature and meaning of the most ancient, widespread and specific tamgas of the Sayan-Altai Turks. The author believes the study of this topic has a great practical value in identifying the general and particular features in the traditional culture of the Khakas, Altaians, Tuvinians, and in the complex of questions connected with them. The history of existence of Sayan-Altai tamgas. Has been traced The first mention of tamgas in this territory appeared due to the scientific expeditions that aimed to investigate and record the Old Turkic runic writing. The analysis of tamga signs showed that the most ancient and widespread tamgas of the Sayan-Altai Turkic peoples were a cross, a swastika, tridents, a bow and an arrow, a mutton horn, the solar signs "sun" and "ay" (moon), etc. There were also tamgas with mythological meanings of "chylan tanma" (snake), "khus tanma" (bird). They mainly represented zoomorphic images. Besides, there also existed an anthropomorphic tamga "kizhi tanma" (human being). The most popular tamgas were those connected with things of the nomad: "kymchy/khamchy" (lash), with the cattle: "maa", "araalyg maa", with household items: "kyskash' (tongs), "khachy" (scissors), "tespi" (trough), "alaga" (hammer) and other household things: "horseshoe" or "arch". Considerable changes and gradual losses of the generic tamgas of the Sayan-Altai peoples took place at the end of the 19th century. The Khakas people had so-called "aal" tamgas. Later, with the spreading of family names, they had family tamgas and, under the influence of the Russian colonization, nominal ones. At the same time the Tuvinians had "sumon" tamgas instead of generic ones. Nevertheless, the generic tamgas of the Altaians and the Tuvinians were preserved for a long time - up to the 1930s. Based on the above, it can be concluded that the Tuvinian and the Khakas peoples had different forms of generic tamgas. Semantic images of generic tamgas represent the ideas of the ethnic history of the tribal groups, the outlook and the level of traditional culture of the peoples, the processes and the phenomena of the world around, etc.

Keywords

Authors

References