Toponymic knowledge infrastructures in five-state Middle Asia: linguistic transformation, manuscript cartography, and historical-geographical reconstruction

Toponymic records embedded in Arabic, Persian, and Chinese manuscript traditions provide evidence for reconstructing the historical geographies of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. This review uses a structured narrative and conceptual-synthesis methodology to compare place-name transmission across languages, scripts, manuscript genres, and political regimes. A diachronic framework separates pre-Islamic external attestations, medieval Arabic-Persian documentation, early-modern cartography, imperial and Soviet standardisation, and post-Soviet renaming rather than treating linguistic layers as synchronous. Direct evidence from the five-state core is distinguished from supporting evidence from neighbouring transmission corridors and comparative regions. Micro-cases of Koneurgenish/Gurganj, Dargan/Dargan-Ata, hydronymic compounds, and political renaming are combined with explicit cross-script harmonisation rules and spatial-chronological triangulation. Toponymy is operationalised as a sociopolitical knowledge infrastructure when names function as repeatable identifiers linking routes, jurisdictions, administrative records, gazetteers, and maps. Digital approaches extend this framework through georeferenced historical gazetteers, variant-name alignment, route modelling, and confidence-ranked reconstruction. Reliable interpretation depends on preserving source provenance, separating transliteration from phonological reconstruction, and distinguishing linguistic change from administrative replacement.