PRINCE— TATAR MATERIAL IN OLD RUSSIAN. 75 



sors of Jenghis Khan. These rulers held the Russians in well or- 

 ganized tributary thralldom for nearly two centuries (from 1223 

 A.D.). 



As attention to the Oriental material in Russian has been called 

 quite recently, perhaps for the first time in English, by Mr. Magnus, 

 I have in the present paper ventured to advance some of my own 

 views as to this subject and to emphasize the points regarding which 

 I am at variance with the work of that scholar, as well as to set 

 forth some of the facts now established with tolerable certainty con- 

 cerning this early period of Slavo-Turkic intercourse. The infor- 

 mation herein gathered is not intended to be exhaustive and may 

 be supplemented on the lexicographical side from such works as" 

 Berneker's " Slavisch-Etymologisches Worterbuch " and Radlofif's 

 " Worterbuch der Tiirk-Dialekte." 



The first question confronting the student of this Tatar* influ- 

 fluence in Igor is that of the identity of the Polovtsy, who appear 

 throughout the Epic as the successful and often not unchivalrous 

 foes of the adventurous hero and his company. 



We have direct and convincing evidence in the Chronicle of 

 Nestor ( 1096) as follows : " And Ismael begat twelve sons, whence 

 come the Turks, Pecenegs^ (White Huns), Torks (remnants of the 

 Pecenegs) and Kumans, that is to say the Polovtsy who 'came out 

 of the desert.' " In other words, the Turkic tribes known to us as 

 Cumanians were identical with the Polovtsy. It is highly probable 

 that the word Kiiman is a popular etymology from qum, " sand," 

 indicating that these tribes originated in the sandy steppe ; i. e., 

 "came out of the desert," but that the original of the word was 



Our chief source of information as to the idiom of these Kumans 



* Tatar is a name generally applied to all Turkic, Mongolian and Hunnic 

 tribes; in short, to every Oriental non-Russian people in the former Russian 

 Empire. See below, note 9. Turkish of practically every variety is more or 

 less intelligible in essentials to all the Turkic tribes. Hunnic (Finno-Ugric), 

 however, differs very much in its various dialects. 



5 The Pecenegs, or White Huns, were also called Bisseni, Bysseni, 

 Yla.l^i.va.KiTa.1 in Arabic Badzak, etc. Cf. Anna Comnena, Bonn Ed. p. 404) : 

 TrpSffeuri ToTi Ka/idvois ws oixwyXuxraon " they are very close lingiiistically to the 

 Cumanians." 



