It seems that quite recently we learned the word "Tartaria", I recall that Levashev seemed to be the first to talk about it.
Recently, I see a lot of criticism around, the people of Tartaria are fed up, there are many "revelations" about both the term itself and the ancient past of the Slavs. The main arguments, perhaps, are such that no one had ever heard of any Tartary before, all this is a Vatican project, maps and books are fake, and in general tartars are Tatars, and that the Russian "R" should be swallowed in the pronunciation of this word.
It's convenient to blame everything on the Vatican. Will the Vatican endure everything? Everywhere we see conspiracies and forgeries. This is normal, it is in human nature, it must be so, everything must be questioned, no one should be taken at their word. But you need to compare the facts, look for documentary evidence of your theories, and not make unfounded statements.
This is what an ordinary person can do, where to go and where to find questions for answers, if the Vatican libraries are far away, and such a person does not speak languages, and does not have the Elders of the Magi, the keepers of ancient knowledge, in his acquaintances?
What kind of Tartary is this, was it? Not?
Let's head on, let's do a simple thing that is available to everyone who has access to the Internet. Let's look at the statistics of mentions of the word tartarian and tartar according to the data of digitized books available from Google.
Of course, you can blame everything on the Vatican here, but you have to start from something.
Promotional video:
Ngram Viewer is interesting because it analyzes phrases or individual words in the digitized books in the Google collection. The collection contains over 5 million books in different languages and is constantly growing. The graph is interactive, you can get not only a list of books where the search word or phrase is mentioned, but also the page on which the word is found, view part of the text or even the entire book.
We look at the word "tartar" in the documents in English and see a clear peak around 1800 followed by extinction up to 90%. This cannot be attributed to the insufficient number of documents for analysis, because the volume of printed materials has been increasing every year in arithmetic progression.
Well, the fact that Levashev was the first is, forgive me, disappears.
In German - a similar picture.
In Italian.
In Spanish.
What are these sources? These are, I repeat, books, printed publications.
As this little study shows, the word "tartar" has been found in written sources in various languages since the 16th century.
Moreover, references to "tartar" refer exclusively to the country-territory or to the ethnic group - tartary.
A spoon of tar
There is also a big fly in the ointment with these graphs. For example, I will give a short excerpt from one message in VK
Perhaps this is only partly true. We need to approach data analysis with understanding. It's not enough to get charts - you still need to be able to read them.
Let's see, for example, the mention of the word Tartary in French documents.
It turns out that there is an obvious injection in the region of the 16th century, and then - there is a normal curve - then there are bursts and falls. Yes, but look - in the 16th century, only a few books were digitized there and they give 100% for analysis by this time, and in the twentieth million books it is 100%.
Why jump? in one book, even out of context, there is a mention of a similar word and such a single mention affects a high percentage of citation in graphics compared to hundreds and thousands of mentions in a couple of centuries. So much for the race, here's the column.
What about place names?
There is a place in Romania called Tartaria.
Interestingly, there are a few more Tartar streets, but they are all in the USA:
- Tartarian Way, Sunnyvale, CA, United States
- Tartarian Way, Union City, CA, United States
- Tartarian Court, Brentwood, CA, United States
- Tartarian Way, Ceres, CA, United States
Tartars today
On Facebook, you can find a huge number of people with the surname Tartaria and even the name Tartar. I understand that Tartaria is Tartaria, mostly Hispanophones, but there is no smoke without fire. I was especially interested in the surnames with the correct declension Tartarian - Tartarian.
What about documents in Russian?
It would seem that everything is exactly the same. But there is no "stuffing in" - there is no jump at the beginning. Quite normal to itself the schedule on the rise. And there is one more difference:
"Faith and Reason":
The mentioned tartare is the underworld of the dead.
Tartary is a mythological territory of darkness, nothing more than Hell.
Tartars, mind you, and no Tartars. Gloomy dungeon.
Tartarus, Tartary - the underworld, the abyss.
Tartary is the palaces of the underworld.
Google did not find any atlases and geographical almanacs, historical documents in Russian. But in fiction - the same meaning of the word "tartars". This passage is interesting because there are Tartar tartars. Think about it.
Here, judging by the text, "tartars" are some distant lands where the "poor man" can be "hidden". Not a specific place is indicated, perhaps, but here it is used as a term for the meaning of "a certain bad place."
These are the questions of philosophy. Unless these lines can be attributed with a stretch to the mention of a certain geographic place, although perhaps this is not the case.
Well, and the famous "fall into the gutters." Who would say what this means, plainly and how through hell you can fall and where you fall out.
Anton Pavlovich has a clear comparison with the circles of hell, which, like Tartary, can be traversed.
What conclusions can be drawn now?
Tartary in references to foreign sources, if you take them into account, is a very specific geographical concept. Tartars are a nationality.
In Russian-language sources - a place mythologized with a clear negative connotation, a real hell, an underworld. The last place, and not a place on earth, but a certain image, concept.
Sorry, but what comes to mind? What is the explanation besides the fact that among the Slavs the truth about Tartaria was removed from history and replaced by terrible stories?
At the expense of the Tatars and any other nationalities: the term "nationality" was introduced artificially and only in the 19th century. Before that, no nationalities existed, but there were, let's say, nationalities, various ethnic groups, which for one reason or another differed from their neighbors in language and customs. In this regard, the statement that Tartars are Tatars is as false as it is true. For modern differences in history simply did not exist. As not only the mythical Tatar-Mongols did not exist, but also the Russians in the current sense.
I propose to treat the above as our common history.
Author: Sil2