In our past, when our people were looking for a new site to settle and establish a village community, the leading figures of the community would go out, find and agree upon a few sites. They would leave in each site an earthenware pitcher full of fresh water and embed a long pole on the ground with a piece of meat tied to the top. When it was time to migrate and settle, those wise and respected people would go and check the freshness of the water and the chunk of meat. If the water and meat were spoiled and rotten they did not settle down in that area. That is, even if they did not use scientific terms to think and talk about bad quality soil and land and how they influence the human body, they had learned about these things through experience. Sayings like, “The place wasn’t good or beneficial”, “The land didn’t accept” prove that Türkmens knew about the merit, productivity, or unproductivity of sites and lands.

In the past, when our ancestors wanted to dig a ditch, they used to put a sack full of sand on the neck of a mare, which would find and follow the most sloping route. Then, our ancestors struck stakes on that route and then dug the ditch. This method is equal to current methods of digging canals.

When their cemetery was full and they wanted to make a new one, they would not appoint just anybody as a watchman. The watchman had to be a good man, may be not a great religious authority or a religious man, but he should be a virtuous man.

Once upon a time, a village had sent a caravan for six months’ supply of food, but it had not returned within the expected period. They waited but there was no news about the caravan. The relatives of the people who were in the caravan searched everywhere for the tracks of the caravan and inquired in the surrounding villages. The unfortunate caravan seemed to have sunk into the soil. Since they did not believe they had died and so there had been no funeral rites, the people of the village continued to hope for news of the caravan. After seven or eight years, news reached to the village that a shepherd had seen human bones in the desert. Horsemen set out from the village. In fact, bandits had attacked the caravan, plundered everything, killed everybody, buried them and erased their tracks. All the bones were dug up from wherever they lay. Since there was no concept of a common grave at that time, the villagers were not sure what to do. The historical experience of the Türkmens helped them. The skeletons were all laid out near to each other. The relatives cut their ankles with daggers and let their blood drop onto the skeletons. If those particular bones had not belonged to their relatives, they blood flowed off them. But if they were the bones of their relative, the bones absorbed the blood. Thus, everybody found relatives and buried them in their village.

“You see my boy, where the expression “bone relative” comes from!” said my grandfather when he told me this sad story.

(198-200.)