Kumyks

Lore & Background

Kumyks historically were related to the states of the Caucasian Huns, Khazars, Cuman-Kipchaks, and the Golden Horde. The beginning of the Kumyk nation is often considered to be in the Oghuric Khazar Khaganate. Over time, the Kumyks experienced two distinctive waves of Kipchak migrations. Other Kumyk states included the Endirey Principality, Utamish Sultanate, Tumen Possession, Braguny Principality, Mekhtuly Khanate, Kaytag Uzminate and others. Until the 19th century, the Kumyks were a largely feudal, decentralized entity headed by a leader called the Shamkhal. The Kumyk polity known as the Shamkhalate of Tarki was mentioned as early as the 14th century by Timurid historians. In the 16th century, Kumyk rulers tried to balance their relationships with their three neighbouring states, and the Shamkhalate established itself as a considerable regional power. Shamkhal Chopan became a subject of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century, and participated in the 1578–1590 Ottoman-Persian War. The 1560s marked the start of numerous campaigns of the Imperial Russian Army against Kumyks. In 1604–1605, Ivan Buturlin conducted a campaign against the Kumyks, which failed and resulted in a significant loss for Russia at the Battle of Karaman. In 1649 and 1650, Surkhay-Shawkhal III attacked and routed Russian troops at the Battle of Germenchik. Kumyk military success continued from 1651 to 1653, when the Kumyks, in an alliance with Safavid forces, destroyed the Russian fortress at the Sunzha River.

Reader's Guide

Kumyks comprise 14% of the population of the Republic of Dagestan, the third-largest population of Chechnya, and the fifth-largest population of North Ossetia, all of which are parts of the Russian Federation. Kumyks are the second largest Turkic-speaking ethnic group after Azerbaijanis in the Caucasus, the largest Turkic people of the North Caucasus and the third largest ethnic group of Dagestan. According to the Russian national census of 2010 there were more than 500,000 Kumyks in Russia. In terms of administrative division in their native lands, Kumyks today are mostly divided between a few administrative regions of Russia, such as Republic of Dagestan, Republic of North-Ossetia, Chechen Republic. In the 19th century, during and following the Caucasian War, numbers of Kumyks were subject to or willingly resettled to the Ottoman Empire as a result of Russian deportation campaigns. In the 1910s–1920s, during the Russian Revolution, another emigration wave to Turkey took place. Kumyks also used to move to Syria and Jordan, where a few Kumyk families still live. The Syrian village of Dar-Ful was established in 1878-1880 by Kumyk emigrants. There is no official state census of ethnic minorities in Turkey, but according to studies of 1994–1996, there were more than 20 settlements with Kumyk population.

Did You Know?

• The majority of researchers derive the name 'Kumyk' from a Turkic ethnonym Kimak, or from another name for Kipchaks — Cuman.
• According to P. Uslar, in the 19th century the names 'Kumyk' and 'Kumuk' pertained to the Turkic speaking population of the Northern Caucasian lowlands.
• In various Russian, European, Ottoman and Persian sources Kumyks were also called Dagestan Tatars (or Dagestan Turks), Circassian and Caucasus Tatars.
• There is no universal opinion regarding the origin of the Kumyks; some scholars propose that the population of the Kumyk plains of the 8th-10th centuries were directly ancestral to modern Kumyks, while others believe the

Identity, Language & the Name Kumyk

The Kumyks call themselves Qumuqlar in their own tongue, a label whose etymology has occupied scholars for generations. Most researchers trace it back to the Turkic ethnonym Kimak or to the Cuman, another name for the Kipchaks, though a nineteenth-century observer noted that in the Northern Caucasian lowlands the term simply denoted the Turkic-speaking population of the region. In Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, however, it referred specifically to this one group. Y. Fyodorov, drawing on medieval sources spanning the eighth through nineteenth centuries, argued that the sequence Gumik, Kumyk, Kumuk was originally a Dagestani toponym. Outside the Caucasus, Russian, European, Ottoman, and Persian writers used a bewildering array of labels: Dagestan Tatars, Dagestan Turks, Circassian Tatars, Caucasus Tatars. The Kumyk language itself held a position of remarkable prestige; until the 1930s it functioned as the common tongue of the entire Northern Caucasus, binding together communities far beyond the Kumyk Plateau.

A Layered Ethnogenesis

No single narrative has settled the question of where the Kumyks came from, and the debate continues to this day. One school of thought places their roots in the Oghuric Khazar Khaganate of the eighth century, pointing to Kumyk proverbs and sayings that appear to echo the Khazar era. Yet the Kumyk language belongs to the Kipchak branch of Turkic, which is largely unintelligible to Chuvash, the last surviving Oghur tongue, casting doubt on a purely Oghuric lineage. Other scholars see the core Kumyk identity crystallizing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alongside the Kipchak migrations. S. Tokarev described a layered ancestry: an ancient pre-Turkic Japhetic stratum, possibly linked to the Kamaks mentioned by Ptolemy, whose Turkification began under Khazar influence, then reinforced by Cuman arrivals after the Khazar state dissolved. V. Minorsky proposed that the coastal Kumyks descend from a basic Khazar layer strengthened by later Kipchak settlers. Soviet archival work extended the final stages of ethnogenesis into the seventeenth century, incorporating Tumens from the Tumen Khanate, Bothe Bogans, Sople, and pre-Cuman Turks of the Botheragan-Madjar plains.

Kumykia, the Tarki Shamkhalate & Modern Settlement

The lands the Kumyks have inhabited for centuries carry their own name: Kumykia, or Qumuq in the Kumyk language. This territory stretches across the Kumyk Plateau in northern Dagestan and northeastern Chechnya, reaches the shores of the Caspian Sea, follows the banks of the Terek River, and extends into pockets of North Ossetia. All of these areas were once united under a single sovereign entity, the independent Tarki Shamkhalate, a political body that gave the Kumyks a shared state framework long before modern administrative borders were drawn. Today the Kumyk population is scattered across three republics of the Russian Federation. In Dagestan they make up fourteen percent of the population and rank as the third-largest ethnic group. In Chechnya they form the third-largest community, and in North Ossetia the fifth. The 2010 Russian national census recorded more than five hundred thousand Kumyks within the country's borders. As the largest Turkic people of the North Caucasus and the second-largest Turkic-speaking group in the broader Caucasus after Azerbaijanis, the Kumyks occupy a distinctive demographic niche in a region defined by extraordinary ethnic diversity.

Displacement and the Kumyk Diaspora

Two major upheavals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scattered Kumyk communities far beyond their ancestral plateau. During and after the Caucasian War, Russian deportation campaigns forced or compelled waves of Kumyks to undertake hijra, resettling in the Ottoman Empire. A second exodus followed the Russian Revolution in the 1910s and 1920s, carrying many prominent members of the Kumyk nobility to Turkey as muhajirs. The diaspora also reached the Levant: in 1878 and 1880, Kumyk emigrants founded the Syrian village of Dar-Ful, and Kumyk families still maintain roots in Syria and Jordan. In Turkey, where ethnic censuses are prohibited by law, no official figures exist, but studies conducted between 1994 and 1996 identified more than twenty settlements with a Kumyk population. These displaced communities, separated from the Kumyk Plateau by mountains, seas, and political borders, nonetheless preserved fragments of their linguistic and cultural heritage, carrying the memory of a people who once spoke the lingua franca of the entire Northern Caucasus.