Muhammedjan Tynyshbayev was born in 1879 to a Muslim Kazakh, Naiman, Sadyr tribe family in what is today the region of Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Because of his position, Tynyshbay was able to send the young Tynyshbayev to Verniy (present day Almaty) to attend the all-male Gymnasium on a stipend provided by the Governor-General.

He enrolled at the Imperial Institute of Railway Transport in St. Petersburg, where the Tsarist government funded him with a stipend and living allowance.

In the final decades of the Russian Empire, Tynyshpaev surveyed and planned railway lines, while also writing as a correspondent for several radical publications: Syn Otechestva, Rech’, Radikal, Russkii Turkestan, and most famously, as one of the founding contributors of Qazaq, which acted as the official party organ for the Alash Orda.

Tynyshpaev was considerably less radical than the members of the Bolshevik movement, and advocated for working with the Tsarist government in cooperation with local populations.

In 1921, thanks in part to his friendship with the highly placed Turar Ryskulov, Tynyshpaev was appointed the head of the Department of Water Resources of the People’s Commissariat of Turkestan, and moved to Tashkent.

Her brother also perished in the cholera outbreak, so that Tynyshpaev, following his family's wishes and Kazakh tradition, married his newly widowed sister-in-law, Aziza Shalymbekova.

That year Tynyshpaev married Aziz Shalymbekovoy, but their marriage did not last long, and she and her little daughter Enlik moved to Moscow.

Tynyshpaev worked at the time as a professor of mathematics and physics at a pedagogical institute in Tashkent, training a new cadre of teachers among the indigenous population – in the case of this school, the students were primarily Kazakh.

A large portion of his scholarly output consisted of articles focusing on city ruins, cemeteries, mounds, and other sites which had attracted his attention while working the railroad.

It was under their auspices that Tynyshpaev published several major articles, including his two most influential works: These two works relied heavily on two general sources of data: (one) Russian language scholarship of the nineteenth century, primarily the publications of Muhammed Qanafiya Walikhanov, Aleksei Levshin, and V. V. Barthold, and (two) informants of oral history, though there has been some scholarship concerning the actual personalities involved in this second process.

Apart from new ethnographic material and archaeologically descriptive pieces of ruins near railway lines, Tynyshpaev’s direct impact on the body of Kazakh historiography was minimal.