100–35 thousand years ago Neanderthals lived in Crimea.
Modern people (Homo sapiens) appeared on the peninsula about 35 thousand years ago.
Excavations in Shan-Koba, Fatma-Koba, Murzak-Koba and other caves showed that 7 thousand years BC In the Crimea lived tall people of the European type, engaged in hunting and breeding domestic animals.
About 5 thousand years BC Crimeans have already harvested cereals in their fields and ground them as needed for flour with the help of hand-held grain grinders. Earthenware burnt on fires appears.
In the second millennium, BC metals copper appeared, then bronze.
In the VIII century, BC iron tools appeared in the Crimea.
The oldest of the Crimean ethnic groups, having its own name, is Tauri.
Taurians are the autochthonous population of Crimea.
Numerous architectural monuments testify to the genetic connection of the culture of the Taurians with the culture of the inhabitants of the copper and bronze epoch of the second millennium BC and it is natural to assume that people of the Stone Age from the caves of Shan-Koba and others are the ancestors of the Taurus (Strzheletsky, “Essays on the History of Heracleian Peninsula”, 1954).
All other tribes that appeared on the Peninsula later developed primarily on other lands, including the Cimmerians who came from the Northern Black Sea region. There are only a few monuments of their material culture on the peninsula.
At first, the Taurians did not allow aliens to land on the shores of the Peninsula from the sea; they also resisted the penetration of the Scythian tribes from steppes.
In the future, the Taurians came out of isolation and became participants in the historical events of thous times. In the V century BC, Greek colonies appeared on the Black Sea coast. The kings of the Taurians concluded treaties with the Scythian kings, with the Persians and with the Greek cities.
Tauris were skilled builders. They knew how to build powerful defensive walls. Later, alien nations erected their buildings on the foundation of the Taurian settlements and fortresses. The Taurians were good shipbuilders.
Written sources confirm that as far back as the 10th century AD the inhabitants of some of the settlements were called Taurians. Famous scientist Peter Köppen (Russische Revue, Bd V, 1874, 551) believed that the Taurians remained to live in the old places of settlement having accepted the Muslim faith. It is completely natural. For example, in Ozenbash everyone can see today stone “Tavrian boxes” in which the ancestors of the Ozenbashians buried the dead.
At the end of the III century BC, the centre of the Scythian state moved to the Crimea. The peaceful assimilation of Tauris and Scythians began.Scythians were greatly influenced by the culture of the Taurians. Mixed ethnos began to be called Tauroskifs. The Tauroskifs successfully resisted the Bosporian kingdom of the Greeks and afterwards invaders from the Roman Empire, who sought to expand the coastal lands they had seized. Of course, the aliens from the west did not like our ancestors and called them barbarians and pirates.
One of the major Scythian cities was Naples (Kermenczyk) in the Salgir valley .
The domination of the Scythians (more precisely, the Tauroskifs) in the Crimea lasted long, it lasted seven centuries, until the VI century AD.
Around the 250th AD, the Crimea experienced an invasion of the German-speaking Goths. The Goths did not manage for long on the Peninsula – only about 120 years. But they liked the Crimea, and many of them went to the mountainous areas and mixed with the former population.
The first Turkic tribe, the Hun tribe, came from Taman in the year 370 and destroyed the rule of Goths. The kingdom of Bosporus and the Roman stronghold Chersonese also ceased to exist under the onslaught of the Huns.
The Huns gradually merged with the local population and formed a single nation who inhabited the Crimea in the middle ages.
The Khazars, akin to the Huns, appeared in the Eastern Crimea in year 690. The capital of the Khazar Khaganate was on the shores of the Caspian Sea. It is known that the Khazar garrison stood in Kerch, and the Khazars practically did not enter the central regions of the Peninsula.
The Pechenegs and Oguz Turks appeared in Crimea in the year 882 and increased the Turkic population of the Peninsula. At the same time, the Kipchaks (Cumans) began to penetrate from the Black Sea steppe into the Crimea.
In 1116, the Kipchaks seized the whole Crimea. They created the main gene pool of the Crimean Tatars by virtue of their multiplicity and ubiquity.
Kipchaks settled almost all seaside areas. In 1154, according to the results of his travels, the Arab geographer Al- Idrisi wrote that Yalta (Jalit) belonged to the Kypchaks. Sudak became the capital of the Kypchaks in the Crimea.
The Kypchaks lived peacefully with the population of the Peninsula that preceded them, which had previously been significantly Turkic. Historians do not know a single military conflict when the Kypchaks come to the Crimea.
The Arab historian Ibn al- Athir (1160–1233) reports that the entry into the peninsula in 1239 of a few units of the Horde took place almost without resistance from the local population. The power passed from the Kypchak beys to the appointees of the Golden Horde.
Another Arabian author of the 14th century, El- Omari, in his turn, reports that the Golden Horde and the Kypchak very soon “mixed and intermarried with them (the Kypchaks) and the earth prevailed over their natural and racial qualities (the Mongols), and they all became exactly the Kypchaks as if they were of the same kind (with them) because the Mongols settled the Kipchaks on the ground, married them and remained to live in their land (the Kypchaks)”.
It is impossible to talk about Horde people who have established themselves on the Peninsula in terms of their impact on ethnic diversity due to the small number of this group. But it was the accession of Crimea to the Golden Horde as the ulus that caused the unification of the entire population of the Peninsula as part of a powerful independent state – the Crimean Khanate.
The Khanate was created in 1441; Haji Gerai became the creator of the Khanate.
Separately, it should be said about the Genoese and the Venetians in the Crimea, because they were not the conquerors of the Peninsula, but the creators of trade settlements.
In 1206, Venetian merchants, under an agreement with Kipchaks, opened trading posts in Sudak.
In 1266 the Khan of the Golden Horde allowed the Genoese to establish a trading post and a colony in Cafe. Genoa pursued a policy aimed at conquering a trade monopoly in the Black Sea region. Venetian merchants were ousted.
The central administration of the Black Sea colonies was located in Genoa itself. Italians, Greeks, descendants of the Tauroskifs, Kipchaks, Armenians and other peoples lived in the colonies.
In the Crimean Khanate, the rule of the Italian trading posts was put an end to. But the population of the colonies, for the most part, did not leave the Peninsula and was assimilated by the numerically prevailing Kypchaks.
Thus, the people bearing today the name of the Crimean Tatars was formed of three main blocks:
1) The descendants of the oldest tribes (Cimmerians, Tauri, Scythians);
2) Dokipchak tribes, among which it is necessary to distinguish Goths and Huns.
3) Kipchaks, who settled in the Crimea in preordain time, and the population of the Greek and Italian colonies.
Aydin SHEMYA-ZADE
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the opinion of the publisher.
