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The Khitan, in Chinese Qidan (契丹 Pinyin: Qìdān), were an ethnic group who dominated much of Manchuria and classified in Chinese history as one of the Tungus ethnic groups (東胡族 dong hú zú). They established the Liao dynasty in 907. Kara-Khitai is the name given to the remnants of Khitans who escaped the conquest of the Jurchens and migrated to the Kara-Su. Their new regime was named Kara-Khitan Khanate with capital at Balasagun. Ancestors of Khitans was the Yuwen clan of the Xianbei. After their regime was conquered by the Murong clan, the remnants scattered in today Inner Mongolia and evolved into Khitan through intermarriage. They had been identified as a distinct ethnic group since paying tribute to the Northern Wei Dynasty in mid 6th century5th century — 6th century — 7th century — other centuries) Events The first academy of the east the Academy of Gundeshapur founded in Persia by the Persian Shah Khosrau I. Irish colonists and invaders, the Scots, began migrating to Caledonia (later known .
The Khitan were known as خطا in Arabic (Khata) and are mentioned by MuslimA Muslim is a believer in or follower of Islam. The word Muslim means one who submits and implies complete submission to the will of God ( Allah). Muslims believe that nature is itself Islamic, since it follows natural laws placed by God. Thus, a Muslim s chroniclers as they initially fought with Muslims and later converted to IslamCairo Egypt Islm (In Arabic: , "submission (to God)"; In Persian and Urdu: ) is a monotheistic faith and the world's second-largest religion. Followers of Islam, known as Muslims believe that God (or, in Arabic, Allh revealed His Will to Muhammad (c..
Khitan also refers to the now-extinct language once spoken by the Khitan people. There were two writing systems for the Khitan language, known as the large script and the small script; they were functionally independent. The former was derived from ChineseThe Chinese language has been written for nearly 4000 years. Since its invention, written Chinese has been composed of Chinese characters — which are logograms where one symbol usually represents a word or a meaningful part of a word. For much of Chinese, and the latter was apparently inspired by the Uighur alphabet.
The Khitan language is most probably Mongolic, however, and its agglutinizingAn agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view. It was derived from the Latin verb aggl nature is not particularly suited to purely monosyllabic logographs. The small script had logographs as well as characters which were completely phonemic. The Jurchens (ancestors of the Manchu people) derived their large script in part from Khitan.
See also: Ethnic groups in Chinese history, Kara-Khitai
