English

Proper noun

Kurgan

1. city in Siberia, Russia, administrative centre of Kurgan oblast. Originally called Tsaryovo Gorodishche (Царёво Городище - Tsarjóvo Gorodíšče n) (1662 - 1782).

Translations

See also

• kurgan

Portuguese

Proper noun

Kurgan f

1. Kurgan (an oblast of Russia)
2. Kurgan (a city, the regional capital of Kurgan, Russia)

English

A kurgan

Noun

kurgan ‎(plural kurgans)

1. A prehistoric burial mound once used by peoples in Siberia and Central Asia.
   • 2004, Benjamin Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture, Blackwell, 2005, p. 41

     The kurgans and the burials they contain are consistent with the early IE burial practices outlined above, and the late Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas proposed that the kurgan peoples were in fact early Indo-Europeans.

   • 2009, Philip L. Kohl, Chapter 6: The Maikop Singularity: The Unequal Accumulation of Wealth on the Bronze Age Eurasian Steppe?, Bryan K. Hanks, Katheryn M. Linduff (editors), Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals and Mobility, page 91,

     In 1897 N. I. Veselovskii excavated the very large, nearly 11 meter high Oshad kurgan or barrow in the town of Maikop in the Kuban region near the foothills of the northwestern Caucasus (the present-day capital of the Adygei Republic). […] This discovery stimulated the excavation of other large kurgans located in the same general region, some of which seemed royal-like in their dimensions and, when not robbed in antiquity, in their materials.

   • 2010, David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, page 329,

     Even in the middle Volga region some kurgans have central graves containing adult females, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV. […] The appearance of adult females in one out of five kurgan graves, including central graves, suggests that gender was not the only factor that determined who was buried under a kurgan.

Synonyms

• (burial mound): barrow, tumulus

Translations

See also

• Kurgan (Курган – Kurgán, a city in Russia)

Portuguese

Noun

kurgan m (plural kurgans)

1. (archaeology) kurgan (prehistoric burial mound in Central Asia)

Turkish

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kuɾˈɡɑn/

Etymology

There are two principal sources of the word Kurgan:

1. the Old Turkic korgan ("refuge, fortress") and Middle Turkic kurğan ("fortress, rampart, major shrine"). Both are considered as a sound shifting of Old Turkic korığan, from the word stem korı- ("to protect, defend") with an Old Turkic Suffix -gan forming proper names.^[1]
2. the Old Turkic word stem qur-, of which kurgan is a derivation,^[2] is rooted in the reconstructed Proto-Turkic *Kur- ("to erect (a building), to establish"). This word "kurgan" is sometimes hard to distinguish from Proto-Turkic form *Kōrɨ-kan ("fence, protection").^[2]

Noun

kurgan ‎(definite accusative kurganı, plural kurganlar)

1. castle, fortress
2. mound, tell

References

1. ↑ “kurgan” in Nişanyan Dictionary
2. 1 2 Proto-Turkic “*Kur-” in Sergei Starostin, Vladimir Dybo, Oleg Mudrak (2003), Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Citation:
   • “EWT 302, EDT 643, ЭСТЯ 6, 156-157. There is also a derivative *Kur-gan (see e.g. TMN 3, 542-543), which is sometimes hard to distinguish from *Kōrɨ-kan (see *Kōrɨ-).”