Turanid race

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German ethnographic or racial map (c. 1889–1901) showing the supposed extent of the Turanid race in Europe

The Turanid race was a supposed sub-race of the Caucasian race in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races which was developed originally by Europeans in support of colonialism.[1] The Turanid type was traditionally held to be most common among the populations native to Central Asia. The name is taken from the phylum of Turanian languages, which are the combination of the Uralic and Altaic families, hence also referred to as the term Ural–Altaic race.[2][page needed]

History

racial type or "minor race" as a subtype of the Caucasoid race with some Mongoloid admixture, situated at the boundary of the distribution of the Mongoloid and Caucasoid races.[3][4]

The idea of a Turanid race came to play a role of some significance in Pan-Turkism or Turanism in the late 19th to 20th century. A "Turkish race" was proposed as a Caucasoid subtype in European literature of the period.

The most influential of these sources were Histoire Générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongols, et autres Tartares Occidentaux (1756–1758) by

Leon Cahun, which stressed the role of Turks in "carrying civilization to Europe", as a part of the greater "Turanid race" that included the Uralic and Altaic speaking peoples more generally.[5] There was also an ideology of Hungarian Turanism
most lively in the second half of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century.

See also

References

Further reading

  • Leon Cahun L’histoire de l’Asie (1896).
  • Ilse Schwidetzky, Turaniden-Studien, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, F. Steiner Verlag, Mainz, (1950).