The Journey of a Kalmyk / Qalmaq Merchant through Seventeenth-Century Kazakhstan

Introduction. The article attempts to reconstruct one route of the ‘Great Kalmyk Road’ on the basis of data contained in the late seventeenth-century North and East Tartary by the Dutch researcher Nicolaas Witsen. Goals. The study conducts a source analysis of the mentioned data that prove instrumental in reconstructing the once popular path. Materials and methods. The work focuses on historical and geographical messages from the aforementioned publication and compares them to ones traced in other historical sources, such as documents of Russian embassies that would travel through steppes of present-day Kazakhstan in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as well as famous Mongolian-language (Qalmaq) sources authored by Saghang Sechen and Ratnabhadra — with due regard of opinions expressed by J. Fischer, G. Lytkin, N. Aristov and others. Special attention is paid to modern studies on the history and toponymy of Kazakhstan. Key methods of historical research — the descriptive, historical comparative ones, and other generally accepted tools and approaches — have been employed. The descriptive method secures a deeper understanding of the route’s historical significance and cultural heritage, while the historical comparative one proves most helpful in reconstructing routes of the ‘Great Kalmyk Road’ via integrations of data from various sources for more complete and reliable historical contexts. Results. N. Witsen’s report narrates about the journey of one Qalmaq (Kalmyk) merchant from Khan Ayuka’s domains through Dzungaria to China, and thus provides a description of the route he was following. The latter comprises a number of toponyms and hydronyms of present-day Kazakhstan. So, this makes N. Witsen’s report of particular interest for the research of seventeenth-century Kazakhstan’s historical geography. Conclusions. The analysis of data from the examined work identifies some of the mentioned toponyms and outlines a branch of the ‘Great Kalmyk Road’ along which the Qalmaq merchant was travelling.

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