Kazakhstan, Birthplace of History
You won’t find many historians pointing to Kazakhstan as an important region in human history but closer inspection of prehistoric and historical peoples who lived in the area reveals some interesting patterns. For a long time anthropologists believed Kazakhstan might be where horses were first domesticated. Now we believe horses may have been domesticated in Ukraine or western Russia but Kazakhstan remains important to the study of horse domestication.
Located in central Asia just south of Russia and east of Turkey, Kazakhstan’s Botai Culture may have benefitted from horse domestication for about a thousand years (say from Circa 4000 BCE to 3000 BCE). But these ancient people are now believed to have lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle, building permanent villages where they kept horses in corrals.
The Botai and their contemporaries or predecessors did not simply build villages and corrals for their horses — they developed new breeds of horses, isolating favorable traits and replicating them across generations. Animal husbandry was thus very sophisticated among these ancient peoples. They used mare’s milk, ate horse meat, probably made useful artifacts from horse hide, and generally lived their lives for dozens of generations just focusing on their horses.
The Botai were also potters, although their pottery is not considered to be very sophisticated (it was unglazed, for example). Nonetheless Botai pottery shards are telling us more of the story about how they lived and what they thought was important. They favored geometric shapes — which may imply they had a limited knowledge of mathematics.
Through the millennia Kazakhstan has played an important role in shifting cultural exchanges across Asia. As the region dried up between 2000 BCE and 1000 BCE many inhabitants migrated north to the edge of the Russian steppes. Later new peoples entered the area from east and west to form a few dozen tribes that were absorbed into the Hun empires. When the Huns collapsed the Ten Tribes confederation began expanding its power across central Asia, but in time the tribes made an alliance with Byzantium.
People from the region migrated to Europe, sometimes peacefully and sometimes with war. The Turkic tribes arose in this area and expanded their power, colliding with Mongols and other great nations. Kazakh/Turkic influence extended as far west as Hungary, where Avars and other central Asians settled. The name of the Magyars is thought to be derived from an ancient Bulgar-Turkic phrase, On-Ogur, believed to mean something like “the ten tribes” or “ten arrows”.
Modern Kazakhstan did not begin to emerge until well after the Middle Ages. After the collapse of the various Mongol and Arab empires of central Asia three hordes arose in Kazakhstan. They occasionally elected joint Khans in a semi-democratic process that required support from all three hordes. Otherwise each group lived much on its own, conducted its own affairs, and even developed its own relations (or conflicts) with neighbors.
Somewhere in all these migrations and cultural upheavals the peoples of Kazakhstan abandoned their former sedentary lifestyles and became nomadic. The shift from a wet to arid climate no doubt drove this transition for whole river systems dried up or were reduced to shadows of their former selves. The Kazakhs thus learned to drive their herds across the landscape. Their nomadic lifestyle most likely served as the foundation for their intense feelings of independence.
It was this autonomous nature of the Kazakh hordes that eventually led to their assimilation by the Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries. As each group was threatened they either turned to or were absorbed into the Russian empire. Despite occasional rebellions against Russian domination the Kazakhs never again fully recovered their independence. The Soviet Union saw to that by bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The old nomadic traditions broke down, faded away, as the Soviets built hundreds of thousands of farms, new towns and cities, railways, roads, and transplanted an industrial base to the region from eastern Europe.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union Kazakhstan has been building a democracy through quick, sometimes contentious steps. The country is now home to about 100 ethnic groups, and the economic and intellectual growth is led more-or-less by descendants of Russian families; ethnic Kazakhs have in some cases tried to preserve or restore some ancient traditions (such as eating horse meat).
It remains to be seen whether Kazakhstan will continue its journey toward full democratization, although the United States has invested a lot of resources in assisting Kazakhstan develop democratic and capitalist institutions. But while reaching out to the West for friendship and assistance Kazakhstan has also played an important role in developing post-Soviet international institutions such as the Commonwealth of Independent States. Kazakhstan has maintained military ties to the United States that have played an important role in the US “war on terror” in Afghhanistan.
It’s too early to consign Kazakhstan to the pile of historically insignificant regions. They may still have a very important role to play in the developing history of central Asia and perhaps even the world at large.