In the
Western Turkic Khaganate two
Chuy tribes, Chumukun and Chuban, occupied a privileged position of being voting members of the confederation's Onoq elite, while the
Chuyue and Chumi tribes did not. A part of the Chuyue tribe intermixed with the
Göktürks' remnants and formed a tribe called
Shatuo, which lived in southern
Dzungaria, to the west of
Lake Barkol. The Shatuo separated from the Chuyue in the middle of the 7th century. (Another component of the Chuyue, the Chigil, were still listed in censuses taken in Tsarist Russia and the early decades of the Soviet Union.) After the disintegration in 743 AD of the Western Turkic Kaganate, a part of the Chuy tribes remained in its successor, the
Uyghur Kaganate (740-840), and another part retained their independence. During the
Uyghur period, the Chuy tribes consolidated into the nucleus of the tribes known as
Kimaks in the Arab and Persian sources.
Lev Gumilyov associated one
Duolu Chuy tribe,
Chumukun 處木昆 (
Yamakkiyya > ms.
Namakiyya); while the Kipchaks, in some customs, resembled the contemporary Oghuzes, who were nomadic herders. In the beginning of the eleventh century the Kipchak Khanlyk moved west, occupying lands that had earlier belonged to the Oguz. After seizing the Oguz lands, the Kipchaks grew considerably stronger, and the Kimeks became dependents of the Kipchaks. The fall of the Kimek Kaganate in the middle of the 11th century was caused by the migration of Central Asian Mongolian-speaking nomads, displaced by the Mongolian-speaking
Khitan state of
Liao, which formed in 916 AD in Northern China. The Khitan nomads occupied the Kimek and Kipchak lands west of the Irtysh. In the eleventh to twelfth centuries a Mongol-speaking
Naiman tribe displaced the Kimeks and Kipchaks from the Mongolian Altai and Upper Irtysh as it moved west. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries Kimek tribes were nomadizing in the steppes of the modern
Astrakhan Oblast of Russia. A portion of the Kimeks that left the
Ob-
Irtysh interfluvial region joined the Kipchak confederation that survived until the Mongol invasion, and later united with the
Nogai confederation of the Kipchak descendants. The last organized tribes of the Nogai in Russian sources were dispersed with the Russian construction of
zaseka bulwarks in the
Don and Volga regions in the 17th-18th centuries, which separated the cattle breeding populations from their summer pastures. Another part of the Nogai were deported from the
Budjak steppes after Russian conquest of Western Ukraine and Moldova in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. ==Ethnolinguistic Belonging==