The Role of Old Turkic Place Names in Teaching History

Abstract

Since Kazakhstan achieved independence, it has become necessary to reconsider the national history. Historians have been charged by the government with revising the history from ancient times up to independence. The problem is that the many modern history books overwhelm readers with bare statistics such as dates and numbers, without significantly increasing their level of substantive knowledge. In this respect history should not be limited to the presentation of dry facts concerning historical events, but should also inform the reader about the ethnos’ world-view; it should be regarded as a course, diachronically observing and showing the development of ethnos mentality. The purpose of this qualitative study is to develop additional systematically selected information about mental peculiarities of Turkic people and show its historical development through analysing the functionality of place names in ancient Turkic period. The linguistic and general scientific methods (comparative, descriptive, component analysis, etymological analysis) we have applied gave us: 1) the comprehension of the ancient Turks’ mentality, world-view through the prism of place names in which they put the important information; 2) the picture of historical events linked with the given place names. The sources (Orkhon-Yenisei written monuments, historic, linguistic, ethnographic, geographic works and scientific literature on toponyms) we used are completely related to the content of the given research. This research can be useful for the group of scholars developing new historian books and contribute to the further study on the ancient Turkic place names.