In a country so extensive, there is, as may be imagined, almost every variety of climate and of soil; but by much the greater part of the land, particularly that to the east­ward, is barren, mixed in many instances with sandy deserts, while the climate is inhospitable, so that the difficulty of procuring subsistence on one spot, or at a moderate distance from their habitations, has compelled the inhabitants in all ages to adopt a wandering life. The many noble rivers which intersect the country, of course supply numerous fertile tracts along their banks; but in the greater part of this region, the districts capable of profitable cultivation are too few, too remote from each other, and too much surrounded by desolate sands, to admit of the formation of a permanent kingdom or state devoted to agriculture sufficiently extensive to protect the cultivator, and to check the predatory tribes of the desert by which it would be surrounded on all sides. The cities that have been built, and the districts that have been cultivated, in the flourishing times of any particular tribe, have always therefore rapidly declined.

The country lying between the Amu and Sirr rivers (the Oxus and Jaxartes of antiquity), and usually called Great Bucharia, or Māweralnaher, though now overrun and governed by Tūrki tribes, was not perhaps originally a part of Tartary, and must be excepted from this description. It is a region abounding with fine tracts of land, defended by inaccessible mountains and barren deserts, and watered by numerous streams. The natural condition of this country is that of a civilized and commercial state, abound­ing with large towns; a situation which it has always rapidly attained, when its governors possessed sufficient power to secure it from foreign enemies.

The Moghul and Tūrki tribes, though now confined to the limits that have been described, have, however, succes­sively changed the aspect of the civilized world. The Huns (whom their historian the learned Des Guignes regards as being of Tūrki race, though some circumstances in the hideous description given of them by the Roman historians would lead us to conclude that, with a mixture of Tūrks, they consisted chiefly of the Moghul tribes),* passing from their deserts beyond the Caspian, poured into the richest provinces of the empire of the Romans, and under the ferocious Attila, the scourge of the human race, broke the already declining force of that mighty people. Still later, in the tenth century, the rich and cultivated provinces of Samarkand and Khwārizm, at that period the seats of Oriental science and learning, were subdued by the Tūrki hordes. In the following century the Ghaznevide dynasty, whose dominion spread over great part of India and Persia, the dynasties of the Seljuks in Persia, the vassalage of the Khalifs of Baghdad to their Turkomān guards, and the final destruction of the Khalīfat itself, the successive conquest of Armenia, Asia Minor, and in the end of the whole Empire styled the Turkish, from its founders, attest the valour and enterprise of the Tūrki tribes. The Moghuls were unknown beyond the wilds of Tartary, from the age of Attila till the thirteenth century, when their leader, the celebrated Chingiz Khan, after having subdued all the neighbouring Tartar tribes, particu­larly those of Tūrki extraction, who, under the dynasty that existed down to his time, had possessed the ascendancy over the Moghuls, burst into the provinces of Turān, Māweralnaher, Khwārizm, and Khorasān, subdued part of India, reduced Azarbaijān, and a considerable portion of Persia, the Tūrki tribes of Kipchāk, and a great part of China, leaving those vast countries, which were much more extensive than the Roman Empire at the period of its widest dominion, to be governed by his posterity. His successors pursuing the tract of conquest, traversed Russia, marched over Poland, and poured their troops into Hungary, Bohemia, and Silesia; accident alone, perhaps, prevented the cities of Germany from undergoing the fate of Samarkand and Bokhāra, cities at that time the seats of greater refine­ment and politeness than any in Europe; and it has been truly observed that the disordered digestion of a barbarian on the borders of China, by withdrawing the Moghul armies from the west, may have saved us from the misfortune of witnessing at this day a Tartar dynasty in the richest coun­tries of the west of Europe. The superiority acquired by Chingiz Khan, a Moghul, over the Tūrki tribes, has never been entirely lost. His empire, after his death, having been divided among his sons, who seem to have been accom­panied to their governments by numerous families, and even by tribes, or parts of tribes, of Moghuls, who followed their princes, the chief authority in all the conquered countries continued for a series of years to be in the hands of that race; and even the chiefs of Tūrki tribes, if not Moghuls them­selves, appear to have been ambitious of connecting them­selves by intermarriages with Moghul families; so that, at the present day, the greater part of them trace up their descent to Chingiz Khan. The descendants of these Moghuls and Moghul families, however, being placed among a people who spoke a different language, gradually adopted that of their subjects, as is usual in all conquered countries where the conquerors are few and the conquered many; so that the Tūrks and their chieftains, being now freed from any dependence on the Moghuls, are once more com­pletely separated from them both by government and language, and regard them as strangers and foreigners.

Whether the Moghul and Tūrki languages differ from each other essentially, or only as very different dialects of the same tongue, is a question which I have never seen clearly decided. Of the Moghul I possess no vocabulary by which a comparison could be instituted with the Tūrki.* An examination of the lists in the Comparative Vocabulary made by order of the Empress of Russia, or of those in the Mithridates of the learned Adelung, would go far towards deciding the question, which is one of considerable curiosity. If the Tūrks, as is probable, inhabited the neighbourhood of the Caspian as early as the days of Herodotus, by whom the Turkai are mentioned,* and if they always inhabited the country from Tibet to the Black Sea, their language may reasonably be supposed to have had some influence on that of their neighbours. But if, in addition to this, we consider the frequency of their irruptions into the south of Asia for the last fourteen hundred years, under their own name, and probably for a much longer period under that of Scythians; that one-half of the population consists of Tūrki tribes, or of Tūrks settled in towns, but still speaking their native tongue; that the most numerous race next to the Slavonians, in the extensive empire of Russia, are the Tūrks;* that several Turkomān tribes also traverse the wastes of Turkey, and that the Ottoman Empire itself, as well as the Turkish language, owes its origin to the northern Tūrks, we shall probably feel some surprise that a language so extensively spoken, and which seems to promise so rich a field to the industry of the philologist, should have been so much overlooked,* and even its existence scarcely known, except in the Osmanli dialect of Turkey, the dialect, to the antiquary and philologist, of all others the least valuable, as most widely deviating from its primitive form. The Chaghatāi Tūrki furnishes a variety of finished works, both in prose and verse; but that dialect having been carried to its per­fection in the provinces between the Amu and Sirr,* where the Persian was formerly spoken, is full of words borrowed with very little change from that language and from the Arabic. In the Tūrki of Bābur, perhaps the purest specimen now extant of the language of his times, probably two-ninths of the whole extent may be traced to an Arabic or Persian root. Specimens of the language of the different wandering Tūrki tribes, compared with the language of Bābur and with that of the Moghultribes, would enable us to form tolerably decided notions of the affiliations of the Tūrki and Moghul races.

Another question, which has been a good deal agitated, and which to me appears to have been erroneously decided, is that which regards the application of the name of Tartar, or more properly Tatār, by which we denominate these nations. It is applied by Europeans as a general term comprehending a variety of different tribes in the northern division of Asia, and is quite unknown to the inhabitants themselves, as well as to the Indians; which last, very improperly, call all of these tribes, as well as all Persians, and indeed any Mussulman with a whitish face, Moghuls. The term Tartar seems to have been first used by our historians and travellers about the thirteenth century. Joannes de Plano Carpini, who travelled A. D. 1246, informs us that the country of the Moghuls, in his time, not long after the death of Chingiz Khan, was inhabited by four nations (or populi), the Yeka Mongols,* the Sū-Mongols, or Water Mongols,* who call themselves Tartars from a certain river called Tartar which runs through their territory,* the Merkat and Metrit; and adds that all these nations speak the same language. Chingiz belonged to the Yeka Mongols, and subdued the other three divisions. All of these nations lived in the middle division of Tartary. Carpini, after describing his passage eastward through the country along the Sirr or Jaxartes, and the lands of the Tūrks whom he calls Black Kythai,* adds, ‘On leaving the country of the Naymans’ (which was the last of the Tūrks), ‘we then entered the country of the Mongols, whom we call Tartars.’* This name of Tartar, however, by which we are accustomed to designate Chingiz Khan and his successors as well as their empire, these princes themselves rejected with disdain. Rubriquis, who visited the court of Sartakh, Chingiz Khan’s grandson, about the year 1254, was cautioned, therefore, to call him Moal (that is Moghul), and not Tartar; ‘for they wish to exalt their name of Moal above every name, and do not like to be called Tartars; for the Tartars were a different tribe;’* meaning, I presume, the Sū-Mongols, conquered by Chingiz; and hence the victorious family did not choose to receive the name of their subject vassals. Rubriquis informs us that Chingiz Khan, after the union of the kindred tribes of Moghuls and Tartars under his govern­ment, generally made the Tartars take the advance, and that, from this circumstance, they being the tribe who first entered the territory of their enemies, and whose name was first known, the appellation of Tartar was by foreigners applied to the whole race, to the exclusion of the superior name of Moghul. It was by the united strength of these two tribes of Moghuls that Chingiz Khan destroyed the powerful kingdom of Kara Khita, and subdued the Tūrki tribes.