Yenisei Kyrgyz Erotic

The Yenisei Kyrgyz were a Turkic people of southern Siberia, first noticed by Chinese chroniclers around 200 BCE and finished as an independent force in the early 1700s, when the Dzungars deported most of them and Russian forts closed over their valleys. Their name passed to the Kyrgyz of the Tian Shan; their most direct descendants are the Khakas of the upper Yenisei. Their country was the Minusinsk Basin, a wide steppe pocket walled by the Sayan mountains where the Yenisei runs north out of Tuva, and one of the best-favored corners of Siberia: good grass, arable bottomland, gold and iron in the hills, sable and musk deer in the taiga. They farmed millet and barley, kept horses and cattle, hunted the forest, and traded furs, musk and an iron that Tang informants said fell with the rain and made exceptionally sharp blades.

For most of their history they answered to someone else, first the Xiongnu, then the Türk and Uyghur khaganates, under a ruler the Chinese transcribed as the Ajo. Their moment came in 840, when a Kyrgyz army came down onto the Orkhon, burned the Uyghur capital of Ordu-Baliq and scattered the khaganate, pushing Uyghur refugees toward the Tarim oases. They held Mongolia only briefly and loosely, pulling back to the Yenisei within a few generations, but 840 is why the modern Kyrgyz Republic dates its statehood to them. They submitted to Genghis Khan's son Jochi in 1207, rebelled a decade later and were crushed, and were shifted around the Mongol empire. The Fuyu Kyrgyz of Heilongjiang, descended from families the Dzungars deported, kept a Siberian Turkic tongue into the twentieth century.

What they left behind is unusually intimate for a steppe people. They wrote, cutting epitaphs in the Yenisei form of the Old Turkic runiform script onto standing stones, more than a hundred of which survive and speak in the first person about wives, sons and herds left behind. They cremated their dead and raised fenced stone kurgans over the ashes, the chaatas that still stud the Khakas steppe. Earlier, in the Tashtyk period, they had covered the faces of the dead with painted plaster masks, some of the most arresting faces from ancient Siberia. Tang writers, who accepted the Kyrgyz elite as kin through the exiled Han general Li Ling, recorded that men tattooed their hands after distinguishing themselves in battle and women their necks at marriage, that years were counted by the twelve-animal cycle, and that shamans called kam spoke for the sky and the spirits of the land. That shamanism outlasted every empire that passed over them.