The Tat people or Transcaucasian Persians (also: Tat, Parsi, Daghli, Lohijon) are an Iranian people presently living within Azerbaijan and Russia (mainly Southern Dagestan). The Tats are part of the indigenous peoples of Iranian origin in the Caucasus.H. Pilkington,"Islam in Post-Soviet Russia", Psychology Press, Nov 27, 2002 . pg 27: "Among other indigenous peoples of Iranian origin were the Tats, the Talishes and the Kurds"R. Khanam,"Encyclopaedic Ethnography of Middle-East and Central Asia:P-Z, Volume 1", Global Vision Publishing Ho, 2005. pg 746:"The contemporary Tats are the descendants of an Iranian-speaking population sent out of Persia by the dynasty of the Sasanids in the fifth to sixth centuries."T. M. Masti︠u︡gina, Lev Perepelkin, Vitaliĭ Vi͡a︡cheslavovich Naumkin, "An Ethnic History of Russia: Pre-Revolutionary Times to the Present", Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. pg 80:"The Iranian Peoples (Ossetians, Tajiks, Tats, Mountain Judaists)"
Tats use the Tat language, a southwestern Iranian language somewhat different from standard Persian,Gruenberg, Alexander. (1966). "Tatskij jazyk". In: Vinogradov, V. V. (ed.), Jazyki narodov SSSR. Volume 1: Indoevropejskie jazyki, 281-301. Excerpt: "The Tat language belongs to the Southwest group of Iranian languages and is close in its grammatical structure and lexical content to the Persian and Tajik languages."Authier, Gilles (2012). Grammaire juhuri, ou judéo-tat, langue iranienne des Juifs du Caucase de l'est. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Excerpt: "Judaeo-Tat has no particular affinity with the Persian varieties, spoken until recently by Jews of Bukhara, Yazd, Isfahan, Kerman, Hamadan, Kashan, and Nahavand. Contrary to these, Judaeo-Tat is a different language that is not intelligible with Standard Persian;", as well as Azerbaijani and Russian. Tats are mainly Shia Muslims with a significant Sunni Muslim minority.
Demographics
As late as the turn of the 20th century, the Tat constituted about 11% of the population of the entire eastern half of Azerbaijan (see Baku Governorate, the section on Demography). They formed nearly one-fifth (18.9%) of the population of the Baku province and over one-quarter (25.3%) of the Kuba Province—both on the Caspian Sea. Either through misrepresentation, data manipulation, or simple assimilation, the Tat portion of the population of Azerbaijan has shrunk to insignificance, facing assimilation.
The 1886–1892 Tsarist population figures counted 124,683 Tats in the Russian Caucasus of which 118,165 were located in the Baku Governorate and 3,609 in the Dagestan Oblast.Tsutsiev, Arthur. "Appendix 3: Ethnic Composition of the Caucasus: Historical Population Statistics". Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 180. The 1897 Russian Empire census recorded 95,056 Tats, of which 89,519 were in the Baku Governorate and 2,998 in the Dagestan Oblast. The 1926 Soviet census only counted 28,705 Tats of which 28,443 were in the Azerbaijan SSR and 1,237 in the Dagestan ASSR. Arthur Tsutsiev notes that a major portion of Tats in the 1926 census were listed under the categories "Persians" and "Azerbaijani Turks".Tsutsiev, Arthur. "Appendix 3: Ethnic Composition of the Caucasus: Historical Population Statistics". Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 189 (note 34). This was particularly the case within the Azerbaijan SSR, where some 38,327 individuals were recorded as "Turks whose native language is Tat". The 1979 Soviet census counted 22,441 Tats of which 8,848 were located in the Azerbaijan SSR and 7,437 in the Dagestan ASSR.
History
The earliest mention of Persians in the Caucasus is found in the Greek historian Herodotus' account of the Achaemenid expansion of 558–330 BC, during which they annexed Transcaucasia (South Caucasus) as the X, XI, XVIII and XIX satrapies of their empire.Herodotus. History
Archaeological material uncovered in present-day Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia include Achaemenid architecture, jewelry and ceramics. Kroll, Stephan. "Medes and Persians in Transcaucasia: archaeological horizons in north-western Iran and Transcaucasia", in : Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, Michael Roaf, Robert Rollinger, eds., Continuity of Empire (?) Assyria, Media, Persia. Padova, S.a.r.g.o.n. Editrice e Libreria, 2003, pp. 281–287.
There is little information about the permanent Persian population in South Caucasus since the Achaemenid period. Likely the ancestors of modern Tats settled in South Caucasus when the Sassanid Empire from the 3rd to 7th centuries built cities and founded military garrisons to strengthen their positions in this region.V. Minorsky. A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th–11th Centuries
Khosrow I (531–579) presented the title of regent of Shirvan in eastern South Caucasus to a close relative of his, who later became a progenitor of the first Shirvanshah dynasty (about 510 – 1538).al-Baladhuri. Book of the Conquests of Lands (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan)
After the region had been conquered by Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries, the Islamization of the local population began.
In the 11th century, Oghuz tribes led by the Seljuq dynasty started to penetrate into the region. The gradual formation of the Azeribaijani people started. Apparently, in this period the Turkic exonym Tat or Tati, which designated settled farmers, was assigned to the South Caucasian dialect of the Persian language. B. Miller. Taty, ikh rasseleniye i govory (in Russian)
The Mongols conquered South Caucasus in the 1230s and the Ilkhanate state was founded in the 1250s. Mongol domination lasted until 1360–1370, but did not prevent prominent poets and scientists from emerging.
At the end of the 14th century, the South Caucasus was invaded by Tamerlane. By the end of the 15th century, the state of Shirvanshahs had obtained considerable power, its diplomatic and economic ties had become stronger. In the middle of the 16th century the state of Shirvanshahs was eliminated and the South Caucasus joined Safavid Iran almost completely.
In the late 18th century Russia actively started to contest the hegemony of Iran in the Caucasus. Following the Russo-Persian Wars of 1804-1813 and 1826-1828 and the respectively resulting treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay, Russia gained most of the South Caucasus and parts of the North Caucasus from Qajar Iran.Timothy C. Dowling Russia at War: From the Mongol Conquest to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Beyond, pp. 728-729 ABC-CLIO, 2 dec. 2014 After that there is data about quantity and settling of the Tats, collected by tsarist authorities. When the city of Baku was occupied in the beginning of the 19th century during the Russo-Persian War (1804–1813), the whole population of the city (about 8,000 people) were Tats.Yunusov A. S. Azərbaycanda Islam (in Azeri Turkic); This is an official result of the first census of the population of Baku, gained by tsarist authorities
Russia more or less openly pursued a policy to free their newly conquered land from Iran's influence. By doing this, the Russian government helped to create and spread a new Turkic identity that, in contrast to the previous one, was founded on secular principles, particularly the shared language. As a result, many Iranian-speaking residents of the future Azerbaijan Republic at the time either started hiding their Iranian ancestry or underwent progressive assimilation. The Tats and Kurds underwent these integration processes particularly quickly.
According to the 19th-century Golestan-e-Eram, written by Abbasqulu Bakikhanov, Tati was widespread in many areas of Shamakhi, Baku, Darband and Guba:Gulistan-i Iram / ʻAbbāsqulī Āqā Bakikhānūf; matn-i ʻilm – intiqādī bi-saʻy va ihtimam: ʻAbd al-Karīm ʻAlī-zādah [va dīgarān], Bākku : Idārah-ʾi intishārāt-i "ʻIlm", 1970. Original Persian: درصفحه 18 كتاب مذكور آمده است: هشت قريه در طبرسران كه جلقان و روكال و مقاطير و كماخ و زيديان و حميدي و مطاعي و بيلحدي باشد، در حوالي شهري كه انوشيروان در محل متصل به دربند تعمير كرده بود و آثار آن هنوز معلوم است، زبان تات دارند. ايضا" در صفحه 19 كتاب ياد شده آمده است: محالات واقع در ميان بلوكينشماخي و قديال كه حالا شهر قبه است، مثل حوض و لاهج و قشونلو در شيروان و برمك و شش پاره و پايين بدوق در قبه و تمام مملكت باكو سواي شش قريه ي تراكمه، همينزبان تات را دارند... قسم قربي مملكت قبه سواي قريه ي خنالق كه رباني عليحده دارد و ناحيه ي سموريه و كوره دو محال طبرسران كه دره و احمدلو ميباشند به اصطلاحاتمنطقه، زبان مخصوص دارند و اهالي ترك زبان را مغول مينامند .
According to the 1894 publication of the Caucasian Calendar, there were 124,693 Tats in the Caucasus.
In 2005 American researchers carried out investigations in several villages of Guba, Devechi, Khizi, Siyazan, Ismailli and Shemakha districts of the Republic of Azerbaijan, indicating 15,553 Tats in these villages. John M. Clifton, Gabriela Deckinga, Laura Lucht, Calvin Tiessen. Sociolinguistic Situation of the Tat and Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan, 2005 г.
Local self-designations Although the majority of the Tat population of Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan uses the Turkic exonym Tati or Tat as a self-designation, there remain some local self-designations:Миллер Б. В. Таты, их расселение и говоры. Баку, 1929. B. Miller. Taty, ikh rasseleniye i govory (in Russian)
Parsi—The term Parsi has been used until the present day by the Tats of Absheron as self-designation and zuvan Parsi as an indication of Tat language. This term relates to Pārsīk, the Middle Persian self-designation of Persians, cf. Middle Persian Pārsīk ut Pahlavīk – Persian and Parthian. During the New Persian language period the final consonant was lost and the ethnonym became Pārsī. Some groups of Persian-speaking populations in Afghanistan and the Zoroastrians of India (the Parsis) also use the term Parsi as a self-designation. Lohijon—The citizens of the Tat settlement Lahij in the Ismailli district name themselves after their village Lohuj, plural Lohijon. Lahij is the largest Tat village (about 10.000). Its isolation has prevented the local population from contacts with the outside world which has led to their own isolated self-designation. A small community of the Lohijon, descendants of the 1910–20s migrants from Lahij, live in the village of Gombori in Kakheti, in the east of Georgia. They are registered as Azerbaijanis and speak Azerbaijani as their primary language. As of 2020, there are only about 150 them left. Daghli—The Tats in Khizi district and parts of Devechi and Siyazan districts use another Turkic exonym, Daghli (mountaineers) for themselves. As a result of the spread of Azeri Turkic the term Daghli has strongly come into use and the local Tats started to use it themselves.
On December 14, 1990, the Azeri cultural and educational society for studying and development of Tati language, history, and ethnography was founded by the board of the Ministry of Justice of the Azerbaijan SSR. A primer and textbook of the Tat language together with literary and folklore pieces were published.
Culture The Persians of the South Caucasus have long interacted with the surrounding ethnic groups, exchanging elements of their cultures. Arts like carpet-making, hand-weaving, metal manufacture, embossing and incrustation are highly developed. The arts of ornamental design and miniature are also very popular.Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 25 (in Russian)
There is a rich tradition of Tat spoken folk art. Genres of national poetry like ruba’is, ghazals, bayts are highly developed. While studying the works of Persian medieval poets of South Caucasus like Khaqani and Nizami Ganjavi some distinctive features of the Tat language have been revealed. Jamāl-al-Din Khalil Šarvāni, Nozhat al-majāles, ed. Mohammad Amin Riāhi, Tehran, 2nd ed. Tehran, 1996. (in Persian)