Kyrgyz People, Kirgiz/ia, The Forty

Some of the descendants of the Forest People came to call themselves “the Forty Tribes.” The word “Kirgiz” means “40” as well as “immortal,” for the Forest People believe they are undefeatable as long as their 40 clans are united. Thus Kyrgyzstan means “Land of the Forty” as well as the “Land of Immortals.” The Yenisei Kyrgyz (coming from Siberia) arrived in the Tian Shan region around the 9/10th century AD. According to D. Sinor, “The Uighurs In Mongolia And The Kyrgyz,” p. 204:

“Some aspects of their civilization clearly set the Kyrgyz apart from the rest of the Turco-Mongol inhabitants of the steppe. Thus . . . when mourning, the Kyrgyz did not lacerate their faces . . . The description of their customs in T’ang times clearly shows that the Kyrgyz were a forest-dwelling people, very different in their lifestyle from the ‘Hsiung-nu type’ steppe-dwelling pastoral nomads. We are informed that, in their forests, the pine trees grew so tall that an arrow could not reach their peaks. Their land was marshy in the summer and covered with deep snow in the winter, so that the Kyrgyz could use skis (mu ma, or ‘wooden horse’) for the hunt . . . They were shamanists, and the shamans were called by their Turkic name, gam or kam. The early twelfth-century geographic treatise of Marvaz ̄ı describes in some detail the doings of a shaman, and he notes that the Kyrgyz burn their dead.”