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PAN-TURANIANISM

Turkish language by the expulsion of all foreign elements, especially Persian anU Arabic, and the establishment of a civilization based entirely on old Turkish traditions. In this movement Ziya Bey, Shinassi Bey, and Namik Kemal Bey were particularly active. The researches of the Academy of Turkish Science, established after the Young Turk revolution, dealing with the original home and the pre-Mahommedan history of the Turks, were then artificially utilized greatly to widen the scope of the Turkish national movement. The goal was now the formation of a powerful and independent union of all the peoples of the world kindred to the Osmanli Turks and alleged to embrace a population of 50,000,000 (about double the actual number of those speaking Turkish dialects). For the national designation "Turk" was now to be substituted the more comprehensive "Turanian," and the Mahommedan crescent was to be abandoned for the preMahommedan Turkish wolf as a racial emblem. Turkish writers began to speak of their ideal fatherland, their Turania, the cradle of their nation, and the home of their race. The poet Ziya Gok Alp, called by a countryman "the great Apostle of Turanianism," celebrates Attila, Jenghiz and Oghuz Khan as heroic figures that stand for the proud fame of his race, and describes the fatherland of the Turks not as Turkey or Turkestan, but as the "broad eternal land of Turania." This wider movement involves a policy of Irredentism which aspires not only to stimulate by moral and intellectual propaganda a feeling of racial unity among the kindred peoples, but under favourable circumstances to free those peoples from foreign rule. Curiously enough, the circumstances since the conclusion of the war seem to be more favourable to the realization of this ideal than they were before its outbreak. It is an ideal that is not likely to disappear, for its fulfilment is the only remaining prospect for Turkey of expansion as compensation for the great territorial losses that empire has sustained in recent times.

It now becomes necessary to inquire what possibilities this somewhat vague term Pan-Turanianism implies. The earliest form of the name "Turanian" occurs perhaps about 800 B.C. in the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism, as Tura, to designate a country which was contiguous to Iran (Persia) and the inhabitants of which were in constant conflict with the Iranians. It is met with again about A.D. 1000 in the Shahname or Book of Kings, of the Persian poet Firdusi as Turan, the country beyond the Oxus (now the Amu Darya). Persian sources show that the ancient Turan (Turania) corresponded roughly to the Russian Turkestan of to-day. In the second half of the igth century "Turanian" came to be used as a loose designation of Asiatic languages that were neither Aryan nor Semitic, and to be similarly applied in a racial sense to the nomadic peoples speaking those languages, as opposed to the agricultural Aryans. The term has more recently become synonymous with "Altaic " or "Ural-Altaic." "Turanian" is here treated in this definite sense.

Having spread in prehistoric times from the Altai mountains in the centre of Asia, this ethnic family at the present day occupies a broad belt of territory extending from Thrace across Asia to the sea of Japan and reaching from about 35 N. lat. to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. It consists of five main branches, the Samoyeds, the Finno-Ugrians and the Tunguses constituting the northern, and the Mongols and the Turks the southern division. The countries inhabited by the Turanians are Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Chinese and Russian Turkestan, Asia Minor, parts of Persia and Afghanistan, the Caucasus, the Crimea, the Volga and Pechora regions of eastern Russia, Lapland, Finland, Hungary, and portions of the Balkans.

Down to the outbreak of the World War all the Turanian peoples* were subject to foreign (Russian, Chinese, Persian, Afghan) domination except the Magyars and the Osmanli Turks. Only those sections of the Turanians that have come into close contact with the Aryans of Europe have succeeded in rising from their primitive state to a comparatively advanced degree of civilization: the Finns, the Magyars and the Osmanli Turks. The Turanians in Europe number in round figures 22,000,000: 10,000,000 Magyars; 6,000,000 Samoyeds and Finns; and 6,000,ooo Turks. In Asia there are 26,000,000: 115,000 Finns, Samo-