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| History of Kazakhstan |
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Kazakhstan, the largest country fully within the Eurasian Steppe, has been a historical crossroads and home to numerous different peoples, states and empires throughout history. Throughout history, peoples on the territory of modern Kazakhstan had nomadic lifestyle, which developed and influenced Kazakh culture.
Human activity in the region began with the extinct Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus one million–800,000 years ago in the Karatau Mountains and the Caspian and Balkhash areas. Neanderthals were present from 140,000 to 40,000 years ago in the Karatau Mountains and central Kazakhstan. Modern Homo sapiens appeared from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago in southern, central and eastern Kazakhstan. After the end of the last glacial period (12,500 to 5,000 years ago) human settlement spread across the country and led to the extinction of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. Hunter-gatherer communes invented bows and boats and used domesticated wolves and traps for hunting.
The Neolithic Revolution was marked by the appearance of animal husbandry and agriculture, giving rise to the Atbasar,[1] Kelteminar,[1] Botai,[1] and Ust-Narym cultures.[1] The Botai culture (3600–3100 BC) is credited with the first domestication of horses, and ceramics and polished-stone tools also appeared during this period. The fourth and third millennia witnessed the beginning of metal production, the manufacture of copper tools and the use of casting molds. In the second millennium BC ore mining developed in central Kazakhstan.
The change in climate forced the massive relocation of populations in and out of the steppe belt. The dry period that lasted from the end of the second millennium to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC caused the depopulation of the arid belts and river-valley oasis areas, the populations moving north to the forest steppe.
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After the end of the arid period at the beginning of the first millennium BC nomadic populations migrated into Kazakhstan from the west and the east, repopulating abandoned areas. They included several Indo-Iranians, often known collectively as the Saka.[2][3]
In the 13th century, Kazakhstan was conquered by the Mongol Empire and controlled by the Golden Horde. After the Golden Horde declined, the Uzbek Khanate broke away from it. In 1465, Kazakh Khanate gained its independence from Uzbeks. Portions of the country began to be annexed by the Russian Empire in the 18th century, the remainder gradually being absorbed into Russian Turkestan beginning in 1867. The modern Republic of Kazakhstan became a political entity during the 1930s Soviet subdivision of Russian Turkestan.
- ^ a b c d The Cambridge World Prehistory. University of Cambridge. June 2014. ISBN 9780521119931.
- ^ Beckwith, Christopher I. (2009). Empires of the Silk Road : a history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-0-691-13589-2. OCLC 229467524. "Modern scholars have mostly used the name Saka to refer to Iranians of the Eastern Steppe and Tarim Basin"
- ^ Dandamayev, M. A. (1994). "Media and Achaemenid Iran". In Harmatta, János (ed.). History of Civilizations of Central Asia: The Development of Sedentary and Nomadic Civilizations, 700 B. C. to A. D. 250. UNESCO. pp. 35–59. ISBN 9231028464. Retrieved 29 May 2015. "In modern scholarship the name 'Sakas' is reserved for the ancient tribes of northern and eastern Central Asia and Eastern Turkestan to distinguish them from the related Massagetae of the Aral region and the Scythians of the Pontic steppes. Those tribes spoke Iranian languages and their chief occupation was nomadic pastoralism."(p. 37)