Talk:Chigils

message: Please note the Chinese name for Chigils. Compare with Chuds (Tshuudis). If they were baptized this might be an answer to a mystery why some warriors in the Batu Army in 1236 had Christian
crosses with holy markings. Some sources have thought that the dead soldiers found in now a days Penza Province, killed in the battle of Onuza against the combined Mirde (correct version of the Mordva) peoples, were from some of the Christianed Syrian Turkish tribes as found from the yet mostly unresearched 16 hectare battlefield near the Sura River water reservoir.
This important battle and the total destruction of Mirde Onuza hillfort and town is complete omitted from all old Russian Chronicles, but described in old Persian sources by Rashid al-Din.
This was recorded in Tshita in 1941. "It seems it was not that long ago, maybe near thousand years or less, when a nation called Tshudes lived there before the Turks, Russians and Tunguses.
They were a healthy and strong nation, they turned round large chunks of land nearly barehanded to get the copper and silver. They evidently got much of this ore. They built furnages and melted it. They must have been skillful, after theit time there have been such masters there (in Altai). When they know that some new peoples were coming there, thay left of their own free will. But God knows where they went. The Tunguses have not met them since, neither have the Russians ever seen them."
This is the spoken by the local ethnic peoples Hakasses, Tuvians, Jakuts, and later by the Siberian Russians, associating it with different patterns, mainly to Tshuds.
 
JN
:Sorry, JN, here are confused two completely different people. Tshuud or Chud in Slavic was a moniker for Finns: "Chud beloglazaya" = "White-eyed Strangers", it is well documented, and applied to the aborigines near tha Baltic Sea. They must have had strikingly blue or grey eyes, a strange phenomenon for the Slavs. That was a land of Esti, Karels, and other tribes that now all blended into Northern Russians. Prior to Ivan the Terrible decimation of their land and people, their language was completely different from the S.E.Slavic. S.E. in this case is N.Rus ~ Moscow dialects.  
:Chigils, on the other hand, are as much ethnic as "Protestants". It was a community of religious communities, ethnically associated with the neighboring tribes, but not an ethnic association. As a religious community, they were very coherent, and kept together even after they were scattered. They started as Manichaeans, which is refelected in the names of the communities and their leaders, and had Manichaean crosses among their sacred symbols. Metallurgy was not their forte, as Manichaeans they wellcomed anyone, but they've learned to defend themselves and their sacred religion. Neither Batu, nor they would enlist in the Batu army, they were people learned of religion, not soldiers for conquest. In the Batu time they were in exile for 400 years, keeping religion as their unifying force. Amaizingly, they survived into present, their descendents are Gagauzez who claim a descent from Chigils.
: regards, Barefact (talk) 10:21, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origins of Chigils