All are important building blocks in the evolution of a sense of political community. Biography and chronology supplement genealogy by linking the power of story-telling to the skeleton of mere kinship. But it is less important that genealogy be authenticated by independent means than that it match people’s ideas of what is right and true. As historian Robert McChesney says, “Genealogy may be validated by a historical narrative, or chronology, which sets present realities in the context of a reified past. What was important was to fix and explain their location in the larger Islamic world. The contradiction bothered no one- except modern historians, with our love of fixed categories and rules. This tradition also illustrates the flexible nature of nomadic identities, since Uzbek was a descendant of another son of Jochi, Berke, and of a different ruling dynasty than Shiban’s. The origins of this name are murky, but their own tradition associated the name with Uzbek Khan of the Golden Horde (1313–1341) who converted the entire horde to Islam. Another name for them was becoming common in the fifteenth century: Uzbek or Özbeg. Accordingly, contemporary Muslim historians as well as modern scholars refer to the tribe as the Shibanids or, in some accounts, Shaybanids. Descent from Shiban gave Abulkhayr control of a separate territory to the east of those claimed by other former Golden Horde factions. The exact son was very important, since lineage was key to the leadership’s identity as well as legitimacy. The leader who began raids into Transoxiana (Abulkhayr, 1412–1468), claimed political legitimacy on the basis of his descent from Chingis Khan’s son Jochi, via Jochi’s fifth son (out of 13), Shiban. Note: Four hundred years after Chingis Khan had died, this ruler identified himself 1) genealogically, as a son and then as a Chingisid, and 2) geographically. However, both because of negligence on the part of our ancestors and of the ignorance of the people of Khwarazm, no one has written a history of the rulers of our family.This is why I have decided to do it myself” (Soucek, p. “The son of Arab Muhammad-Khan, Abulghazi Bahadur Khan, the Genghisid, the Khwarazmian, says: Historians have written, both in Turki and Persian, the history of the ancestors and descendants of Genghis Khan who had reigned in different countries. By then the Golden Horde had fractured into several rival sub-groups, and the future Uzbeks and Kazaks came from the same loose confederation of Turko-Mongol tribes that lived north and a little east of the Caspian Sea. Uzbeks and Kazaks are the dominant peoples of today’s Central Asia, but they did not arrive in the region until the very end of the 15th century.

Descendants of genghis khan