Khanate of Kokand
The city takes its name from the local salt mines (in Persian نمک‌کان ("namak kan") — "a salt mine"). Babur mentioned the village of Namangan in his memoirs "Baburnama". In his book "A brief History of the Khanate of Kokand" () (Kazan, 1886), the Russian ethnographer Vladimir Petrovich Nalivkin wrote that Namangan is mentioned in legal documents dating back to 1643.