Atek

Atek is a district of Soviet Turkmenistan on the northern slope of the frontier mountains with Khurasan, the Kopet Dagh, between the railway stations of Gjaurs and Dushak. Its name is Turkish, etek, "edge border" of the mountain chain, and translates the Persian name Daman-i Kuh, "foot of the mountain"; Persians always wrote it Atak. ¹

In the Middle Ages no special name for Atek seems to have been in use; as a district of the town of Abiward it belonged to Khurasan. In the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries it fell under the Khans of Khwarazm, and later under the Turkomans. Before the Russians came, the frontier with Persia was never clearly defined. ¹

Before the delimitation of the borders in 1881, a part of Atek with Abiward belonged to the principality of Kalat; the rest of that sentence is cut off in the scan. ¹