Mansi - History and Cultural Relations

The Ob-Ugrian peoples are thought to have descended from the combination of two distinct groups of people: a local population and a group of Ugrian nomads who arrived from the south sometime between A.D. 500 and 1000. Their ways of life have consistently been influenced by neighboring groups: Iranian-and Turkic-speaking peoples very early, then ancestors of the Persian peoples, and finally western Siberian Tatars, Nenets, Khanty, Russians, and Komi-Zyrians. First contact with Russians was recorded in the eleventh century, when merchants and traders from Movgorod advanced into what they knew as the Iugra Mountains (Urals). After contact with Russians, the Mansi were subject to a varying but stiff fur tax which, when compounded by the graft of local officials, forced many to withdraw from contact and go into the forests.