222 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 1 10 



contemporaneous evidence of the Arabic author Al Umari/^ who 

 wrote in the beginning of the fourteenth century : 



In antiquity this state [the Golden Horde] was the land of the Kipchaks 

 [Polovtsy] but when it was conquered by Tatars, the Kipchaks became their 

 subjects. Afterward they [the Tatars] mingled and intermarried with them 

 [the Kipchaks] and the land prevailed upon their [the Tatars'] natural and 

 racial qualities, and they all became even as like the Kipchaks as if they were 

 of the same clan; for the Mongols [Tatars] had settled in the land of the 

 Kipchaks, intermarried with them, and remained to dwell in their land. 



The IVTongoloid population of the Golden Horde also had its origin 

 during the pre-Mongolian period. Thus the presence of South Siberian 

 and European types, among the Tork subjects of Kiev, and the same 

 types in Sarkel ^^ permitted Trofimova to connect the infiltration of 

 these tribes onto the Caspian-Black Sea steppes with the epoch of 

 formation of the Pechenegs, and later the Polovetsian (Kipchakian) 

 feudal-clan unions in Kazakhstan and the eastern European steppes. 



The complete absence of the typical Central Asian racial types 

 among the populations of the Golden Horde, with the possible excep- 

 tion of IVlongoloid admixture in the case of the Sharinnyi Hill crania, 

 adds probability to this supposition. 



Trofimova concludes that the Mongolian conquest, in the course 

 of which there was formed the new political federation of the Golden 

 Horde, and which exercised an enormous political and social-eco- 

 nomic influence upon the conquered areas, apparently did not greatly 

 change their racial and ethnical composition. The isolated dolicho- 

 cephalic European elements discovered in the series of the city- 

 dwellers' crania from Sharinnyi Hill may belong to either the pre- 

 Mongolian period, or to the Khazar state with its mixed population. 



CRANIOLOGY OF THE KALMYKS 



Levin and Trofimova ^^ state that the earliest descriptions of single 

 Kalmyk crania were published in the middle of the eighteenth century 

 by Fischer, Kamper, and Blumenbakh. A complete bibliography of 



18 This is quoted from V. Tizengauzen (W. Tiesenhausen), Sbornik materialov 

 otnosiashchikhsia k istorii Zolotoi Ordy [Collection of materials for the history 

 of the Golden Horde], vol. I, p. 325. St. Petersburg, 1884. 



1^ Debets, G. F., Chelovecheskie kostiaki iz pogrebenii v Sarkele [Human 

 skeletons from the Sarkel burials]. [In ms.] 



18 Levin, M. G., and Trofimova, T. A., Kalmyk! : kraniologicheskii ocherk 

 [A craniological description of the Kalmyks]. AZH, No. i, pp. 73-81, 1937. 

 [English summary.] 



