October
06
/ 2018
Today, Tatars is a collective name given to a number of Turkic-speaking groups that live in Russia and several former Soviet countries. But Tatars has had various other meanings through history. For instance, the Chinese referred to all of their northern neighbors as the barbaric ‘Ta-Ta’ or ‘Da-Da’, and during the 14th century Westerners used the same term to refer to the population of the Mongol Empire and the khanates that succeeded it. Tatars in History The name Tatar is said to have first appeared around the beginning of the 5th century AD amongst the nomadic Turkic peoples of northeastern Mongolia in the region of Lake Baikal. The Chinese term, ‘Ta-Ta’, is said to mean ‘dirty’ or ‘barbarian’. Whilst the
