Bashkir-Karakalpak Ethnocultural Interrelations and the Origin of Esteks in Aral Sea Region

Abstract

The article is devoted to the ethnocultural relations of the Bashkirs with one of the indigenous peoples of modern Uzbekistan — the Karakalpaks. The common historical roots of these ethnic groups go to the Eurasian mountain-steppe expanses, where they have been actively in contact with each other since ancient times. First of all, this is evidenced by common strata in tribal ethnonymy. Parallels are also observed in oral folk art. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries Karakalpaks took part in the Bashkir uprisings, and there were allied relations between the two peoples. From time to time, of their own accord, the Bashkirs even became allegiances of the Karakalpak khans. Gradually a rather large group of Bashkirs settled in the south of the Aral Sea. Basically, they moved here after numerous bloody uprisings. In the work a wide range of various sources was used, namely ethnographic, folklore and archival. The famous scholar A.-Z.Validi visited the descendants of those Bashkirs who lived among the Karakalpak people as a separate kind of “estek” in the 1920s. He also noted that the Karakalpaks, like the Bashkirs, in the management organization had a way of dividing the kind into separate “tubas”. Karakalpak-esteks still live today in the vicinity of Chimbai.