Abstract
The article is devoted to identifying and correcting the toponymic error «Aqtobe Laeti». Based on historical-cartographic and toponymic analysis, it substantiates the correct name of the medieval city of the Kazakh State as «Aqtobe Jaiykty / Yaiykty». The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the erroneous toponymic attribution of the medieval settlement of Aqtöbe near the modern city of Atyrau, which for a long time has been known in scholarly, museum and local-history literature as “Aqtöbe Laeti”. On the basis of an interdisciplinary analysis of historical cartography, historical geography, toponymy, onomastics, cartographic palaeography, European studies, Turkology and source studies, the author demonstrates that the form “Laeti” emerged as a result of an incorrect reading of a Latinized inscription on fourteenth-century European maps and the subsequent uncritical transfer of this error into archaeological and historical-geographical circulation. The article examines portolan charts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, including materials by Angelino Dulcert, Francesco Pizigano and Abraham Cresques, as well as later facsimile reproductions that may have contributed to the distortion of the original oikonym. Particular attention is paid to the palaeographic causes of the error, the visual similarity of individual Latin graphemes, the lack of work with original maps and the inertia of citation in twentieth and twenty-first-century scholarly literature. The author substantiates that the correct name of the settlement should be rendered as “Aqtöbe Zhaiyqty / Yaiyqty”, that is, a city associated with the hydronym Zhaiyq. The correction of this error is significant not only for the archaeology and historical geography of the region of Western Kazakhstan, administratively comprising four regions, but also for the cartographic reconstruction of the urbanization of the Ulugh Ulus, the study of the spatial identity of the Kazakh State, museum practice, cultural heritage, regional branding, digital cartographic systems and future artificial-intelligence databases.