Early Sources on the Qazaqs and their Khans

Abstract

This paper was the basis of the 5-minute lecture I gave at the plenary session of the recent 'Mengilik El' conference to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the founding of the Qazaq khanate, held at Nazarbayev University on the 11th September 2015. The 'conference' itself was much more of a political than a scholarly event, and largely a matter of theatre than discussion or intellectual exchange. The paper was designed with a very general audience in mind, and reflects the way in which I teach this period and these sources in 'History of Kazakhstan', rather than any real research of my own. I have also added a link to a short interview I gave to the e-history.kz website the year before, repeating many of the same things in broken Russian.