Kimiz: mare's milk that makes you drunk
Editorial contextWood explains how the Kirghiz and Uzbeks make kimiz (kumiss) from mare's milk, churned overnight and ready by sunrise. A spoonful, he was told, makes a man drunk, but their spoons are huge. He also passes on, while flagging it as hostile gossip, a claim that kimiz season brought drunken excess.
The Kirghiz, as well as the Uzbeks, keep brood mares, according to their means, and the acidulated milk of these animals yields them in spring the intoxicating liquor called kimiz. … A spoonful will produce inebriety, but their kashuk or spoon is much more capacious than the largest upon our tables.
About Kirghiz and Uzbeks
Why the Kirghiz prefer daughters
Editorial contextAmong the Kirghiz, Wood learned, a daughter was more welcome than a son: herding needs few men, and a girl brought a large bride price. He also records that a widow passed to her husband's brother, and that a stranger who married her started a blood feud.
With the Kirghiz, a daughter is more desired than a son. Their flocks and herds, though large, do not require many men to manage them … But for a daughter a large sum is obtained … often as much as £40, if she be not above fifteen years of age.
About Kirghiz nomads
Shamans turned Muslims
Editorial contextWood reports that the Kirghiz had converted from shamanism to Islam in the early 1600s, and that his Uzbek companion claimed the old beliefs lingered. Their chiefs, called Bai, had patriarchal rather than despotic authority.
They were converted from the Shamanian superstition to Mohamedanism early in the seventeenth century. The former belief, if I may credit Abdal Ghani, is not yet thoroughly eradicated ; though in our intercourse with the people, they seemed like all proselytes to erring creeds, to be filled with the most abject reverence for their new doctrines.
About Kirghiz nomads
Keep in mind
The date of conversion is Wood's statement without a source; the survival of shamanism is his guide's claim.
Sell your wife, never your dog
Editorial contextWood notes a twist in Uzbek manners: asking a man to sell his wife was no offence, but asking to buy his dog was an insult, and 'dog-seller' was about the worst name one Uzbek could call another. He goes on to praise Uzbek women as fine housekeepers.
To ask an Uzbek to sell his wife would be no affront, but to ask him to sell his dog would be an unpardonable insult, "Suggee ferosh," or dog-seller, being about the most offensive epithet that one Uzbek can apply to another.
About Uzbeks of Kunduz
Priests who dealt in slaves
Editorial contextWood says the Sunni Uzbeks of Kunduz treated persecution of Shia Muslims as proof of faith, and that their religious leaders were the biggest slave dealers, buying Shia captives and justifying it as good for the soul. Elsewhere he describes chained slave tributes on the road to Kunduz.
These mullahs, or priests, are the most notorious slave dealers in the land, and encourage the odious traffic among their disciples, by readily purchasing of them whatever victims of the Shiah creed they may entrap. The good of the soul is assigned as ample extenuation
About Uzbeks of Kunduz and their mullahs
Keep in mind
Wood writes as a hostile Protestant observer; the slave trade itself is confirmed by many sources.
Where the word 'Tartary' came from
Editorial contextWood suggests the peoples of Central Asia descend from the ancient Huns and that most of their names came from a person: Tartar, Nogai, Uzbek, Moghul. 'Tartar', he says, had been turned into 'Tartary', a catch-all word for what the Romans called Scythia, yet he never heard the Uzbeks of Kunduz use it, and he blames the habit for much confusion.
Most of their names have had a personal origin, such as Tartar, Noghai, Uzbek, and Moghul. The first, corrupted to Tartary, has now become a generic term for the Scythia of the Roman historians, though I do not remember to have heard it used by the Uzbeks of Kunduz. From this custom much ambiguity has resulted.
About Peoples of Central Asia: Kalmyks, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Turkmens
Keep in mind
The Hun ancestry and the 'personal origin' of the names are Wood's own theories from reading, not local testimony.
The three great 'Tartar invaders'
Editorial contextWood groups Genghis Khan, Tamerlane (Timur) and the Uzbek conqueror Shaybani Khan together as 'Tartar invaders', and says none of them seems to have reached the high valleys of Badakhshan. It shows how loosely 'Tartar' was used for Mongol and Turkic conquerors alike.
None of the three great Tartar invaders, Jangez Khan, Tamerlane, or Shebani Khan, seem to have penetrated so high up the valley of the Oxus, though some of the followers of Baber, when expelled from the rich plains of Soghdiana by the Uzbeks, sought shelter here
About Genghis Khan, Timur and Shaybani Khan
Kirghiz and Uzbeks: cousins by blood
Editorial contextThe Kirghiz horde Wood visited had come down to winter in Wakhan at the invitation of the Uzbeks of Kunduz, whom they claimed as blood relatives. Wood agrees they are one stock, and puts their differences in build down to climate.
They had been solicited to do so by the Uzbeks of Kunduz, with whom the Kirghiz profess to be connected by blood. The two people are evidently of the same stock, though the effects of location, or in other words, the difference between a temperate and a rigorous climate is observable in the well proportioned frame of the Uzbek and in the stunted growth of the Kirghiz.
About Kirghiz and Uzbeks
Keep in mind
The climate explanation is Wood's own theory.
The Kazakh chief who ordered prayers in a jar
Editorial contextThe Kirghiz told Wood joke stories about their Kazakh neighbours as simple folk. In one, a Kazakh chief sent to Kokand to buy Muslim prayers for his horde and was given a sealed jar of bees, to be opened by the fire in a closed tent with all the elders undressed. Wood repeats it as a comic tale, not as fact.
A jar carefully covered, containing a swarm of bees, was delivered to the dull Kazak, with instructions to his chief not to open it till all the head men of the horde were assembled. … The chief himself, literally stung to madness, swore that never again should a Mussulman's prayer issue from a Kazak kirgah.
About Kazakhs, as described by Kirghiz storytellers
Keep in mind
A folk joke told by one people about another.