After moving into Western Asia in the Middle Ages together with other Turkic speakers and Mongol nomads, the Karapapakhs settled along the Debed river in eastern Georgia (along the present-day Georgian-Armenian border).

[2] The Karapapakhs are sometimes referred to as Terekeme[3] or Tarakama (from Arabic: تراكمة, romanized: Tarākameh, the broken plural for Turkmen—a term traditionally used for any Turkic nomadic people).

[5] Following the Russian victory in the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828 and the resulting Treaty of Turkmenchay, the Karapapakhs migrated from the area along the Debed[a] river in eastern Georgia (along the present-day Georgian-Armenian border), to the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran.

[6] Iranian crown prince Abbas Mirza handed over the Solduz (present-day Naqadeh) district as a fief to 800 Karapapakh families and these new settlers, in return, had to have 400 horsemen ready for disposal for the government.

[7] In 19th-century Iran, as part of the Iranian irregular army, the Karapapakh tribe was one of the twenty-two units (dastehs) of provincial militia from the province of Azerbaijan.

[8] Several years after the Russian conquest of Kars, the Tsarist government conducted a population counting of the newly acquired province.

[7] According to the 1926 Soviet census, the number of Karapapakhs had drastically declined to only 6,315, which reflected the loss of Kars Oblast to the newly established Republic of Turkey following World War I.

[12][13] According to Olson et al., which was published in 1994 and specifically deals with the ethnography of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Karapapakhs are described as a small ethnic group and a Turkmen tribe, who primarily live in and around Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek SSR at the time of the book's publication.

[6] Bearing similarities to the process of assimilation in the Soviet Union and Turkey, the Karapapakhs no longer speak their Turkic language and have completely switched to Turkish or Azerbaijani.

[6][c] Brent Brendemoen notes in Turkic-Iranian Contact Areas: Historical and Linguistic Aspects that the migration of the Karapapakhs (and Terekeme, amongst others) in modern times from Turkey's east has been responsible for bringing Arabic loanwords with Persian vocalism to isolated areas as far west as Kangal in Sivas.