Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 09 Мая 2013 в 01:40, реферат
Kazakhstan has a long and fascinating history, going back thousands of years. Some remnants are still visible today such as Great Silk Road monuments, petroglyphs and sometimes even mysterious archaeological sites. The Amazons might have originated from Kazakhstan, the first steppe nomads are supposed to have emerged from here and it is very likely that Genghis Khan was buried in Eastern Kazakhstan. In recent times more and more details about Kazakh history and culture have been re-discovered, making the country also more and more interesting for domestic and international culture seekers.
Введение
1. History of Kazakhstan
Important milestones in the history of Kazakhstan
2. Kazakhstan history: After Middle-Ages
3. Kazakhstan history: The 19th century
Введение
History of Kazakhstan
Important milestones in the history of Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan has a long and fascinating history, going back thousands
of years. Some remnants are still visible today such as Great Silk Road monuments,
petroglyphs and sometimes even mysterious archaeological sites. The Amazons might have
originated from Kazakhstan, the first steppe nomads are supposed to
have emerged from here and it is very likely that Genghis Khan was buried
in Eastern Kazakhstan. In recent times more and more details about Kazakh
history and culture have been re-discovered, making the country also
more and more interesting for domestic and international culture seekers.
The territory of Kazakhstan came to be mastered by man nearly a million years ago. As early as the age of the Lower Paleolithic, ancient man settled down on these Karatau lands fit for normal life, rich with game and wild fruit. It is here that they have found ancient settlements from the Stone Age. By and by, in the centuries of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, man came to master Central and Eastern Kazakhstan and the Mangyshlak area.
As has been shown by excavations of the Neolithic settlement Botay in Northern Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan constitutes a region of horse domestication (breeding) and that of the formation of nomadic civilizations. Archeologists have revealed dwellings and numerous hand-made articles of stone and ivory which present the ancient history and archeology of Kazakhstan in the Stone age in an altogether new way.
As early as the Bronze Age, some four millennia ago, the territory of Kazakhstan was inhabited by tribes of the so-called Andron and Begazy-Dandybay culture. They were engaged in farming and cattle-breeding, and were fine warriors who handled combat chariots marvelously. To this day we can see images of chariots drawn on rocks where ancient people would arrange their tribal temples and sanctuaries with the firmament as their natural cover. On the surfaces of black cliffs burnt with the sun people would chisel out scenes of dances, images of sun-headed deities, mighty camels and bulls as impersonations of ancient gods.
Burial mounds of noble warriors scattered all throughout Kazakh steppes
are known for the magnificent size both of the mounds and burial vaults
proper. Particularly famous are such necropolis in the steppes of Sary-Arka
and Tagiskent in the Trans-Aral area. People
of that epoch were not only fine warriors, shepherds and farmers but
also skilled metallurgists. They would take bronze and manufacture axes,
knives, daggers and various decorations thereof.
It was they who initiated the development of copper
which is being practiced to this day - they are the Zhezkazgan and Sayak
copper mines of today. Ancient people lived in large settlements and
ancient towns surrounded with walls and towers.
These towns were inhabited by warriors and craftsmen, priests and farmers.
These tribes lived on the territory of Kazakhstan for about a thousand
years - from the 17th century B.C. to 9th-8th
centuries A.D.
Later on they were ousted by the Saks. Such was the name given to this tribe by ancient Persians. The Chinese called them "se" whereas Greeks chose to call them Scythians. They were essentially nomads, semi-nomads and farmers. Yet, first and foremost, they were excellent horsemen. In fact, Saks were the first ever horsemen in the world to master arrow-shooting at full speed.
In
the 5th-2nd centuries B.C., the Saks set up their
first state with its center in the Zhetysu (Semirechje) in
South-Eastern Kazakhstan. The kings of the Saks were at the same time
high priests. Saks had a written language and a mythology of their own;
they were known for their well developed art of world standard labeled
in research papers as "animal-styled art". Respective subjects
were represented by predators and herbivorous animals and the struggle
there between. Sheer masterpieces made of gold and bronze serve as worthy
exhibits in the best museums of the world. The linguistic situation
was just as complicated. As is traditionally believed, in the course
of the first millennium B.C., the population of Kazakhstan was mostly
represented by native speakers of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages.
However, of late, they are inclined to think that the tribes of the
Bronze Age, particularly those of the Saks, included tribes that spoke
proto-Turkic languages.
In
the Issyk burial mound which harbored the world-famous "Golden Man"
they have found a silver bowl whose bottom bore an inscription consisting
26 characters. They have failed to read it to this day. Some think that
the inscription is made in one of the Iranian languages, others insist
on its proto-Turkic origin. In any case, this must be the very period
that highlighted the formation of the state of mind and the language
of medieval and modern Kazakhs, their physiological
stereotypes, in fact, of many an element of their culture, everyday
life and folk rites.
The
middle of the first millennium A.D. is a fairly important stage in the
history of all Turks in general and Kazakhs in particular. The period
is marked with manifest changes in ethnic media: predominant now become
Turkic tribes which chose the Altai as their natural center. Written
sources of the 6th century register the term "Tyurk" which
is pronounced as "Tutszyue" by the Chinese and as "Turk"
by the Sogdians.
Archeological studies of Turkic monuments make it possible to somehow compare "these" Turks with certain Turkic tribal associations. In the Sayano-Altai region they have identified certain archeological cultures which might well be likened to early Kyrgyz, early Kypchaks or early Oguzes. In the course of not infrequent internecine wars, tribal discord, and struggles for power and pasture, a part of the Turkic tribes which inhabited the steppes and valleys of Kazakhstan moved southwards - to Central Asia (say, Tyurgeshes, Karluks, Kypchaks, Uzbeks, Oguz, and Turkmens-Seldzhuks), to Asia Minor, to the Caucasus (Turkmen and Seldzhuks), and to Eastern Europe (Kangars and Pechenegs, Kypchaks-and-Polovtsians, Torks-and-Oguz, black Klobuks and Karakalpakians).
Starting
from the 4th century up to the beginning of the 13th
century, the territory of Kazakhstan was the seat of West-Turkic, Tyurgesh,
Karluk Kaganates, of the state made by the Oguz, Karakhanides, Kimeks
and Kypchaks. All of them successively replaced one another right up
to the Mongol invasion. After the invasion, i.e. in the beginning of
the 13th century, uluses of the Mongol Empire of Zhuchi-Khan
and Zhagatai were formed, which later gave birth to Ak-Orda, Mongolistan
and finally to the Kazakh Khanate.
Essentially all these states were mixed economies. Tribes of cattle-breeders had farming tribes as their neighbors, and steppes and cities supplemented each other. Such cities as Taraz, Otrar, Ispijab, and Talkhir were set up right in the middle of the Great Silk Road, which served as a reliable link joining antiquity and the Middle Ages, the West and the East: Japan, Korea and China with Central Asia, Iran, the State of the Seldzhuks, Rus, Byzantium, France and Italy.
It is through the Great Silk Road that dancing arts, painting, architecture
and music made their way from one people to another. Incidentally, it
was the way along which various religions advanced: Manichaeism and
Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, with the latter becoming predominant
(starting from the 8th century) and subsequently the solitary
faith of the Kazakhs. In the late 14th-early 15th
century, on the banks of the Syrdaria River in the city of Turkestan,
they erected a religious sacred place worshipped by all Turkic-speaking
nations - the complex of Khodja
Akhmed Yasavi.
The nation that inhabited the territory of Kazakhstan would avidly absorb and assimilate all the ideas and achievements of various civilizations, making - in its turn - its own contribution to the treasury of world culture, be it economy or handicraft or music: among numerous accomplishments one may name the mobile dwelling "yurta", saddles and stirrups for horses, combat arts on horse-back, carpet ornaments and silver jewelry, sweet melodies and music reminding one of the impetuous gallop of steppe horses...
It was then that Kazakhs appealed for help to their neighbor, Russia, with which they had long been carrying on a lively trade to meet their needs for various consumer goods. In 1731 an act on Kazakhstan’s voluntary accession to Russia was signed.
Despite the colonial policy of Russian government, this was an important step, which opened before the Kazakhs the opportunity of establishing direct economic and cultural links with Russian people. Crop farming began to develop rapidly, industrial enterprises were set up.
In the first half of the 19th century the influence of Russia’s economy on the backward economy of Kazakhstan grew stronger: an increasing number of Kazakhs settled down and took up crop farming.
As the output of agriculture produce rose, Kazakhstan’s trade and economic ties expanded. In the late 19th century capitalism penetrated into agricultural sector, intensifying the process of stratification in the auls (Kazakh villages).
The First World War, which broke out in 1914, brought innumerable calamities to the people of Kazakhstan as to the entire people of Russia. Livestock, fodder and agricultural produce were requisitioned from the Kazakhs. Taxes and levies of all kinds were increased.
According to the history of Kazakhstan after the rebellion of October 1917 the Bolsheviks ignored the ethnic differences of the people and created Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Kazakhstan in present-day Kyrgyzstan. Five years later, in 1925, the Kazakh appellation is reinstated; the Kazakh Autonomous SSR was given a capital - Alma-Ata.
In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev decided to use Kazakhstan to showcase Soviet ingenuity in land management and agriculture. As a result, he appointed Leonid Brezhenev First Secretary of Kazakhstan and commissioned him to carry out what was later known as the “Virgin Lands” project.
Helped by Kazakh Dinmukhammad Kunayev and a large number of Kazakh youths, Brezhnev turned the ancestral Kazakh grazing lands into wheat and cotton fields. While this was a major plan for the Soviet Union the project played havoc with the lives of the Kazakhs. Distanced from their major sources of self sufficiency, bread and meat, they became entirely dependent on imports from the rest of the Soviet Union.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the arrival of a different group of Soviets, the technicians who worked the coal and gas deposits and who took charge of the oil industry. This new community, added to the old farming and mining communities, tipped the balance against the Kazakhs who began to become a minority in their own country.
After Brezhnev, Kunayev became First Secretary. Using ancient Kazakh institutions such as tribal hierarchy and bata, Kunayev forged a new system of exploitation within the already exploitative Soviet system. As the chief of the “tribe” he made all the decisions on hiring and firing of managers of major firms and plants.
Then using bata, or sealed lip, he prevented any information that could damage his operation from reaching the Center in Moscow. The Kunayev empire, built around a core of his kinsmen, grew very strong. It would have grown even stronger if not Mikhail Gorbachev who displaced Kunayev as First Secretary and installed a Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, in his place.
As for Kunayev, he refused to disappear quietly. Rather, he set his own forces into motion and created the so-called “Alma-Ata” riots of the late 1980s, the first to shake the foundation of the Soviet Union.