Ethnogenesis in The Tribal Zone The Sha

Peter B.
Golden
ETHNOGENESIS IN THE TRIBAL ZONE: THE SHAPING OF THE

TÜRKS1
A limes or frontier zone of natural or man-made barriers extended across Eurasia
separating the world of the tribes,2 the “Barbarian Others,” from that of urban-agrarian society.
In the often jaundiced perspective of observers in the “civilized’ world, life in the “barbarian,”
tribal zone, was violent, predatory and uncouth. Its populations were seen as quintessentially
warrior societies. As Sima Qian (145? - 89 BC?) noted with regard to the Xiongnu, “in periods
of crisis they take up arms and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions. This seems to be
their inborn nature... warfare was their business.”3 To Chinese observers, the nomadic peoples to
their north dwelled in a world that was the antithesis of what they considered a properly ordered
life. They were rootless, appearing to follow their herds in an endless pursuit of water and
pasturage.4 They wore foul-smelling hides, ate vile, often uncooked food and drank blood.5
They married their step-mothers.6 All along the “Civilized – Barbarian Divide,” the tribes were
seen as hungry, bellicose, covetous creatures whose constant warfare with one another was only
occasionally interrupted by their irruptions into civilized society that sought safety behind stout
walls. The “Barbarians” were attracted by the glitter of the civilized world7 and their boundless
greed, ferocity and simple-mindedness were axiomatic in the ethnographic works of their
contemporaries.8 Hence, any understanding of the process of ethnogenesis in the tribal zone, a
1
Parts of this article were previously published as “Some Thoughts on the Origins of the Turks and the Shaping of
the Turkic Peoples” in V. H. Mair (ed.), Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2006), pp. 136-157 and are reproduced here with the kind permission of the University of Hawai’i
Press.
2
The notion of “tribe” and “clan” has been contested by D. Sneath, The Headless State. Aristocratic Orders,Kinship
Society and Misrepresentation of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York, 2007) and elsewhere in some of the Social
Science literature. Regardless of the problems that modern Social Scientists may have with precise definitions of
these terms, “tribe” and its various “sub-branches” and “clans” are noted by the indigenous peoples of Eurasia in
their own documents and in the documents of their contemporaries. These terms had meaning for them, even if they
may seem somewhat imprecise to modern observers.
3
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, Han Dynasty, rev. trans. B. Watson (New York-Hong-Kong,1993 ), II,
pp. 129, 143. On the warrior as the “driving force of tribal life,” see H. Wolfram, The Roman Empire and its
Germanic Peoples, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1997), p. 8.
4
Liu Mau-tsai, Die chinesischen Nachrichten zur Geschichte der Ost-Türken (T’u-küe) (henceforth: Liu, CN,
Wiesbaden, 1958), I, p. 8.
5
See Ying-shih Yü, Trade and Expansion in Han China (Berkeley, 1967), p.40, taken from the Yiantielun:
Discourses on Iron and Salt composed by Huan Kuan, first century BC.
6
On the levirate among the nomads, see A.M. Xazanov, Social’naja istorija skifov (Moskva, 1975), pp. 79-82.
7
W. Pohl, Die Völkerwanderung. Eroberung und Integration (Stuttgart-Berlin-Köln, 2002), p.14.
8
See D. Sinor, “The Greed of the Northern Barbarian” in L.V. Clark and P. A. Draghi (eds.), Aspects of Altaic
P.B. Golden, “Ethnogenesis” 2
process only imperfectly refracted through the lens of largely hostile observers in the settled,
non-tribal world, must keep these prejudices in mind. Chinese, Roman-Byzantine and
Irano-Arabo-Muslim perceptions of the tribes they encountered on their frontiers are remarkably
similar.9 They regularly excoriated “Barbarian” social customs, greed and bellicosity, which they
viewed as innate. None, however, suggested that the harsh warrior ethos of “Barbarian” society
was in no small measure, a response to the threats, encroachments and attempts at political
manipulation coming from the settled world. Moreover, the nomads were equally distrustful of
their imperial sedentary neighbors.10
Contemporary observers not only had their prejudices, but also had an imperfect
vocabulary for describing or decoding tribal societies. The complex political ties that held
“Barbarian” society together were usually explained in biological terms (e.g. gens, natio in Latin
sources). Recent research on the Germanic tribal world has shown that, although distinct ethnic
units may have been at the core of the gentes (“tribes, folk”) and nationes/ἔθνη (“peoples”) that
the Roman and Byzantine world encountered, these were often conglomerations of diverse
peoples that had joined a charismatic leading clan or tribe, the “nuclei of tradition,” and adopted
its ideology and name as a political identification. Thus, belonging to a “people” could be more
political than biological11 – although political loyalty in “imagined communities” of tribal
society was invariably expressed as bonds of kinship, i.e. in biological terms. Genealogies could,
when necessity demanded, be created or manipulated.12 There was much fluidity in tribal
Civilization II. Proceedings of the XVIII PIAC, Bloomington, June 29-July 5 1975, Indiana University Uralic and
Altaic Series vol. 134 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1978), pp. 171-182 and the sources cited in P.B. Golden, “War and
Warfare in the Pre-Činggisid Western Steppes” in N. Di Cosmo (ed.), Warfare in Inner Asian History (500-1800)
(Leiden, 2002), pp.123-126.
9
From the European perspective, cf. P.S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak (Princeton, 1999), p. 101: remarks that
“[c]lassical authors almost invariably portrayed [barbarians] in stereotypical ways, as unusually large, exceptionally
strong and fierce, wild in nature, and childlike in many respects.”
10
C. Stepanov, Bŭlgarite i stepnata imperija prez rannoto srednovekovie. Problemŭt za drugite (Sofija, 2005),
pp.48ff., 63-64. The nomads held and occasionally gave official voice to equally “unkind” views of their sedentary
neighbors.
11
H. Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. T. Dunlap (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1988), pp.5-6 and his The Roman
Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, trans. T. Dunlap (Berkeley, (1990), p.8; Pohl, Die Völkerwanderung, pp.16-17
and his “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies” Archaeologia Polona 29 (1991), pp. 39-49. See also
below for this and other viewpoints on “ethnicity” in the Middle Ages.
12
A.M. Xazanov, Kočevniki i vnešnij mir (3rd, rev. ed., Almaty, 2000), pp.242ff. = A.M. Khazanov, Nomads and
the Outside World (Cambridge, 1983, 2nd ed. Madison, Wisconsin, 1994), pp.138ff; J. Janhunen, Manchuria. An
Ethnic History (Helsinki, 1996), p. 228.
loyalties and hence in ethnic and political designations. Ethnicity, then, was (and still is) a highly
politicized process. It could also be shaped by one’s neighbors, alterity (the “we” and “they”
juxtaposition13), and even by transient circumstances producing “situational ethnicity.”14 In
frontier zones, where there could be blurring of individual identities, this was particularly true.15
We should also note that our sources are far from certain in their ethno-linguistic
attributions. As Denis Sinor has noted, when we set aside the often long-encrusted ethnic
identifications, of the fifty-nine peoples of Inner Asia noted in the Chinese sources, these
accounts provide some information on the languages of only eighteen. Of these only three can be
identified with surety and “educated guesses” can be offered on another three.16 Ethnonyms,
personal names, titles and toponyms provide some clues, but must be handled with care as
anthroponyms and titles were often borrowed, especially from neighbors that were perceived to
be more prestigious. Substratal elements in toponyms and in general vocabulary reflecting earlier
languages spoken by now absorbed or displaced peoples must also be taken into consideration.
Any discussion of Türk origins, the people whose ethnonym has come to designate an
entire ethno-linguistic grouping, must take these factors into account. First of all, we must place
the original grouping that bore the ethnonym Türk within a wider Eurasian context of state
formation in the frontier or tribal zone. The ethnonym Türk first appears with certainty in the
Chinese sources dealing with events of the mid-sixth century in the form 突厥 Tujue in Modern
Mandarin Chinese and reconstructed in Early Middle Chinese (EMC, ca. 601) as *duǝtkuat, and
13
See Stepanov, Bŭlgarite i stepnata imperija
14
P. Geary, “Ethnic identity as a situational construct in the early Middle Ages” Mitteilungen der
Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, 113 (1983), pp.15-26 and discussion of recent views of ethnicity in A.
Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity. Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages in Studies in the Early
Middle Ages, 4 (Turnhout, Belgium, 2002) and F. Curta, The Making of the Slavs. History and Archaeology of the
Lower Danube Region c. 500-700 (Cambridge, 2001), pp.18ff.
15
Examples of this can be seen in the northern Chinese frontier zone in which Han and Xianbei mixed, producing
bilingual and bicultural individuals among the local political-military elites. In some regions, “hybrid” elites were
the natural outcome of a shared culture and intermarriage, in others there was resistance to this process. These
developments were contemporary with the rise of the Türk state, see A.F. Wright, The Sui Dynasty (New York,
1978), pp.94-95; D.A. Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900 (London-New York, 2002), pp.115-116.
16
D. Sinor, “Reflections on the History and Historiography of the Nomad Empires of Central Eurasia” Acta
Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 58/1 (2005), p.5, see also his “Az őstörténet és etnogenezis
problémáiról” Acta Historica CXXI (Szeged, 2005), pp.4-5.
in Late Middle Chinese (LMC, seventh-eighth centuries) as *tɦutkyat.17 This may have rendered
*Türküt (with –Vt, a plural form usually more closely associated with Mongolic), *Turkit (a
Soġdian plural form18), *Türkü,19 or *Turkwar ~ *Durkwar and ultimately Türk-wač/Türk-βač
“Ruler of the Türks,”20 as Christopher Beckwith has recently suggested. The exact form of the
ethnonym masked by the Chinese character remains contested. The ethnonym is also found in
Tibetan as Drugu,21 Khotanese Saka as ttūrka, ttrūka22 and Soġdian trʼwkt (see below, some
Soġdian documents of the early eighth century, continued to term them Xwn “Hun”23).
These Türks were not the first Turkic-speaking people attested in our sources. We may
set aside theories, now fashionable in some quarters, which attempt to link or identify various
Iranian peoples of Antiquity with the Turkic-speaking world. Even further afield, peoples and
civilizations encompassing much of Europe and even the New World have been declared Turkic.
These theories have found little in the way of substantiation.24 More interesting, but perhaps
17
On the Early Middle Chinese reconstruction, see E. G. Pulleyblank, Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in
Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin (Vancouver, 1991), pp. 168 (jué), 311 (tū). Sergej
Starostin in his “Tower of Babel” website (http://starling.rinet.ru) reconstructs these forms as Middle Postclassic,
Late Postclassic and Middle Chin. thwəәt kwəәt, thot kwəәt.
18
J. Harmatta, “Irano-Turcica” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, XXXV (1972), pp. 263-273.
See also discussion in E. Tryjarski, “Etnonim Türk ‘Turek; turecki’ i związane z nim kłopoty” in his In Confinibus
Turcarum. Szkice turkologiczne (Warszawa, 1995), pp. 91ff.
19
Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish (henceforth, ED, Oxford,
1972), pp.542-3, and his Studies in Turkic and Mongolic Linguistics (London, 1962, 2nd ed., London-New York,
2002), pp.84-88 opts for Türkü as the original form, although “[b]y the eleventh century, and perhaps even earlier”
Türkü “had admittedly become Türk.” A.N. Kononov, Grammatika jazyka tjurkskix runičeskix pamjatnikov VII-IX
vv. (Leningrad, 1980), pp. 46-47, while noting variant interpretations such as *türük, *türkü, *türĕk, concludes that
türk is the proper reading. See also M. Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (Leiden, 2004), pp.38-39, who also views
türk as the correct form.
20
C. I. Beckwith “The Chinese Names of the Tibetans, Tabghatch, and Turks” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 14
(2005), pp. 13-20 and his “The Frankish Name of the Turks” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 15 (2006/2007),
pp.6-12.
21
On the Tibetan translation of an Uyğur document, dated to the latter part of the eighth century that notes them and
many other Inner Asian tribes, see the most recent edition and translation by F. Venturi, “An Old Tibetan Document
on the Uighurs: A New Translation and Interpretation” Journal of Asian History 42/1 (2008), pp. 1-35. See also C.
Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (Princeton, 1987), pp.63-64n.56, who remarks that Drugu came to be
used as a “generic” for Turkic peoples and that the Eastern Turks were called ‘Bug cor (see also Venturi, p. 20).
22
H.W. Bailey, The Culture of the Sakas in Ancient Iranian Khotan (Delmar, New York, 1982), pp. 58,81,84 and
more extensively in his Indo-Scythian Studies Being Khotanese Texts, VII (Cambridge, 1985), pp.101-104.
23
See. B.A. Livšic, Sogdijskaja épigrafika Srednej Azii i Semireč’ja (Sankt Peterburg, 2008), p. 128, line 12.
24
Cf. M.Z. Zakiev, Proisxoždenie tjurkov i tatar (Moskva, 2003), pp. 125ff. He also makes claims (pp.80-124) for
Turkic connections with Amerindian languages, Sumerian and Etruscan. See also Abdulhaluk Çay and İlhami
equally a stretch are the attempts made by Denis Sinor, among others, to link Türk with the
Ἰύρκαι of Herodotos (IV. 22),25 reproduced by Pomponius Mela as Turcae in his Cosmographia
(De Chorographia or De situ orbis, ca. 43 AD) and Pliny (23-79 AD) as Tyrcae (<*Τύρκαι) in
his Natural History (VI, 16),26 a people located in the eastern Pontic –Volga steppes. Pliny,
without elaboration, identifies the peoples among whom the “Tyrcae” are placed as Sarmatian.27
Durmuş, ‘Old Nomads of the Steppe: Scythian Age in Eurasia’ in. C. Güzel et al. (eds.), The Turks (Ankara, 2002),
6 vols., I, pp. 147-94. Cf. E. Memiş, Eskiçağda Türkler (Konya, 2002) pp.39ff. 55ff.; The Sumerian theme was
occasionally put forward by 19th and early 20th century European scholars and most recently has attracted attention
among Turkish scholars, cf. O.N. Tuna, Sümer ve Türk Dillerinin Tarihî İlgisi ile Türk Dilinin Yaşı Meselesi
(Ankara, 1990), who, while not insisting on a genetic relationship, is convinced of some connection between Turkic
and Sumerian. He concludes (p. 49) that Turkic peoples were in the eastern regions of modern Turkey by at least
3500 BC. See the listing of suggested Sumerian-Turkic parallels in Tuna, pp. 4ff. and summarized in A. Ercilasun,
Başlangıçtan Yirminci yüzyıla Türk Dili Tarihi (Ankara, 2004), pp. 35-37, 43-46 (for Saka-Turkic ties); F. Bayat,
Türk Dili Tarihi (Ankara, 2003), p. 84. The Sumerians do not appear to have been native to Mesopotamia. Sumerian
traditions relate that they entered their Mesopotamian habitat from the south-east, i.e. the Persian Gulf region, see
I.M. D’jakonov, Jazyki drevnej Perednej Azii (Moskva, 1967), pp.35-36, who considers the theories of their eastern
origins (from Iran and Central Asia) “insufficiently convincing.” Attempts have also been made to connect them
with South Asia. It is generally held that Sumerian is a linguistic “isolate,” see J. Hayes, “Sumerian Phonology” in
A.S. Kaye (ed.), Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Winona Lake, Indiana, 1997), II, p.1002. The same may be said of
Etruscan and Hurrian, see M. Ruhlen, A Guide to the World’s Languages. Vol. 1, Classification (Stanford, 1991),
p.377. For the Etruscans as Turkic-speakers, see A. Ayda, Etrüskler (Tursakalar) Türk idiler (Ankara, 1992). On
these hypotheses see also R. Bariev, Volžskie Bulgary. Istorija i kul’tura (St. Peterburg, 2005), pp.22-23, 27 (on
claims that the Alans were Turkic) which discusses theories of a huge Turkic civilization extending from Central
Asia to France. The Uzbek scholar M. Érmatov, Étnogenez i formirovanie uzbekskogo naroda (Taškent, 1968),
pp.14-15, suggests that some of the Central Asian Scytho-Saka tribes were Turkic in speech. Post-independence
Uzbek scholarship stresses the presence of both Iranian and Turkic elements in the region in antiquity, see
discussion in A. Asqarov, Özbek xalqining etnogenezi va etnik tarixi (Tâškent, 2007), pp.5ff. The Qaračay-Balqar
scholar, Ismail Miziyev (Ismail Mızı-ulu] attempted to demonstrate that the Scythians were Turks, see his Istorija
karačaevo-balkarskogo naroda s drevnejšix vremën do prisoedinenija k Rossii, in As-Alan (Moskva, 1998), No. 1,
pp.24ff. and his Šagi k istočnikam étničeskoj istorii central’nogo Kavkaza (Nal’čik, 1986) available to me only in an
Azeri translation Merkezi Gafgaz’ın Etnik Tarihinin Köklerine Doğru, çev. S. Eliyarlı and M. Abdulla (Istanbul,
1993), the opening chapters of which are devoted to this question. It is not unlikely that some of the peoples who
appear in the Greek sources as “Scythians” and as “Saka” in Old Persian may have been speakers of other,
non-Iranian languages who were included in the polyglot confederations typical of the Eurasian steppe world. These
may have included Turkic-speakers who had come westward. This must remain speculation. The general consensus
is that the Scytho-Saka languages were East Iranian, see J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to
Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford, 2006), p. 34. Similarly, there is little doubt that
the Alans who supplanted Scytho-Sarmatian peoples in the western Eurasian steppe zone were Iranian. The
ethnonym Alan derives from “Aryan” (< Old Iran. *aryāna, gen. pl. *aryānām “Aryan”), see A. Alemany, Sources
on the Alans. A Critical Compilation (Leiden, 2000), pp1-5 for a full discussion. On the complex, heavily politicized
arguments today regarding the Alans and their modern descendants, see V. A. Šnirel’man, Byt’ Alanami.
Intellektualy i politika na Severnom Kavkaze v XX veke (Moskva, 2006).
25
Denis Sinor, “Early Turks in Western Central Eurasia, Accompanied by Some Thoughts on Migrations” in B.
Kellner-Heinkele and Peter Zieme (eds.), Studia Ottomanica. Festgabe für György Hazai zum 65. Geburtstag
(Wiesbaden, 1997), pp. 165-179. Sinor casually dismisses the form Ἰύρκαι of Herodotos as a “misreading” (p.167).
26
P. Aalto, T. Pekkanen, Latin Sources on North-eastern Eurasia (Wiesbaden, 1975, 1980), II, p.232.
27
They are noted in a listing of peoples from the Maeotis (Sea of Azov) to the Don and are presented as one of the
“sections” of the Sarmatians, see Pliny, Natural History, edited with English translation by H. Rackham (Loeb
Classical Library), II, books iii-vii (Cambridge, Mass. –London 1942, reprint: 1989), pp.350/351. See also R. Batty,
Rome and the Nomads. The Pontic-Danubian Realm in Antiquity (Oxford-New York, 2007), p.374. Beckwith, “The
Frankish Name of the King of the Turks” AEMAe 15 (2006/2007), p. 10,n.30, follows Sinor.
Whether Pomponius Mela and Pliny are simply lifting information from the Herodotian tradition
(with some garbling) or reporting still present peoples is unclear. The near neighbors of the
Ἰύρκαι/Tyrcae are the Θυσσαγέται/ Thyssagetae, according to Herodotus (III, 21). This
information is repeated by Pliny. Many scholars (with some dissenters) view the Thyssagetae as
Finnic and locate them on the Middle Kama.
Suggestions have also been made that the Ἰύρκαι may represent Ugric groups, i.e. a
garbling of Ugra, Yugra,28 this, too, is by no means established, as the origins and etymology of
Ugor are unclear. Some would derive Ugra, Yugra from Turkic Oğur29 (see below) via East
Slavic (the prothetic j- in East Slavic Югра [Jugra] can point in that direction, but Jugra would
be a later development from Slavic *Ugor, Ugra). The Arabo-Persian form Yûra (< Yugra)
confirms that such a form was already known and attested in tenth century Muslim geography.30
A complication in this is that Ἰύρκαι (*Ἰύκραι) = Jugra would have required Slavic mediation at
a very early date. However in Old Slavic the earlier form seems to have been *Ǫgra, cf. Ǫgre
“Hungarians,” customarily derived from *Ongur < Onoğur (Turk. “Ten Oğurs”). With
subsequent denazalization in East Slavic/Rus’ (by the early tenth century) it became sing. Ugrin
Ugrin’c’, pl. Ugre.31 However, the traditional *Ongur “Hungarian” < Onoğur derivation has
been called into question as well. Árpád Berta has suggested that ungar et al. derive from Khazar
Turkic ongar (oŋ “right,” oŋar- “to make something better, to put (it) right,” oŋaru “towards the
28
See texts and discussion in A.I. Dovatur, D.P. Kallistov, I. A. Šišova, Narody našej strany v “Istorii Gerodota”
(Moskva, 1982), pp. 108-109, 244-247nn.227,228.
29
L. Benkő et al., A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára (Budapest, 1967-1976), III, p.1025. Gy. Németh, A
honfoglaló magyarság kialakulása (Budapest, 1930, 2nd rev. ed. 1991, henceforth HMK), pp. 142-143.
30
H. Göckenjan and I. Zimonyi, Orientalische Berichte über die Völker Osteuropas und Zentralasiens im Mitelalter.
Die Ǧayhānī-Tradition, Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, Bd. 54 (Wiesbaen, 2001), p. 261 and n. 88.
31
A.P. Vlasto, A Linguistic History of Russia to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), p.15. Modern
Russian venger “Hungarian” comes from Polish Węgier, see M. Fasmer (Vasmer), Étimologičeskij slovar’ russkogo
jazyka, trans. O.N. Trubačëv (Moskva, 1986), I, p.290. Polish has retained nasal vowels. A. Róna-Tas, Hungarians
and Europe in the Early Middle Ages, trans. N. Bodoczky (Budapest, 1999), pp.284-285, 434-435, points to some of
the complexities of this formulation. Eleventh century East Slavic Jugra (and the Yûra < *Yuġra of the Islamic
sources) would seem to point to knowledge by the Slavs of the kinship of the Kama Magyars with those already
settled in Pannonia. This is possible but nowhere attested. Róna-Tas concludes that “not all Ugri forms go back to
the form *ongre.” Old Church Slavonic has both Ougrin and Ǫgrin, see G. D’jačenko, Polnyj cerkovno-slavjanskij
slovar’ (Moskva, 1993), pp. 749, 855.
right32) “right wing” i.e. the pre-Conquest Magyar union formed the “right wing” (= western
wing”) of the Khazar military forces.33 The pre-Conquest Magyar union was closely allied with
the Khazars for a time in the ninth century. Any connections between Ἰύρκαι and Yugra or
Tyrcae (<*Τύρκαι) and Türk remain problematic and require much more than a possible phonetic
resemblance.
If the “Tyrcae” are, indeed, the Türks, a major migration from the western Eurasian
steppes to Inner Asia would be required for them to appear in the Chinese borderlands in the
sixth century. Of this we have no record either in the Chinese historical tradition or in the Türk
tradition. Moreover, while Indo-Europeans (Indo-Iranians and Tokharians) clearly moved
eastward into Inner Asia, the movement of Inner Asian Altaic speakers (among whom the Turkic
peoples are ranked), according to the historical record, has been from east to west.
The source of the early westward movements of Turkic speakers was the turmoil
associated with the rise and fall of nomadic polities in Inner Asia on the periphery of China.
Turkic-speaking peoples, in some numbers are noted in the Western Eurasian steppes from at
least the mid-fifth century (see below) and very possibly somewhat earlier. These peoples came
from the East; their probable ancient habitat was in South Siberia-Mongolia. Here, the dynamic
patricide, Modun (r. 209-174 BC), the expansionist chanyu (supreme ruler)34 of the Xiongnu,
brought under his rule the Hunyu (EMC γwəәn-jua), Qushe or Qushi (EMC *k’ut-ziajk35),
32
Clauson, ED, pp. 166-167,189, 190.
33
Á. Berta, “Die chasarische Benennung der Ungarn” in Ch. Fragner, K. Schwarz (eds.), Festgabe an Josef Matuz.
Osmanistik-Turkologie-Diplomatik (Berlin, 1992), pp. 7-11.
34
Chanyu, previously usually rendered as Shanyu = EMC (Early Middle Chinese) *dȥian wua’. On this form, see E.
Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp. 48, 381. Attempts have been made to read into this and other reconstructions various titles
(jabğu/yabğu, tarkhan) that are later associated with Inner Asian polities, see V.S. Taskin, Materialy po istorii
drevnix kočevyx narodov gruppy dunxu (Moskva, 1984), pp. 305-306. On the rise of the Xiongnu state see N.N.
Kradin, Imperija Xunnu (2nd rev. ed. Moscow, 2001) and N. Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies (Cambridge,
2002).
35
Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their Neighbors” in Keightley (ed.) Origins, pp. 449, 455: the Hunye have not
been identified. Pulleyblank remarks that Qushe/Qushi, in his reconstruction (*kut-ziajk) “suggests Skuǰaka,
Scythians.” He finds such a possible connection “intriguing,” but notes that they “are not mentioned again” and
hence this “tells us little.” See also his “Chinese and Indo-Europeans” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1-2
Dingling (EMC tɛjŋ-lɛjŋ), Gekun (EMC kerjk-kwǝn, also Jiankun, EMC ken-kwǝn =
*Qırğıŕ/Qırğız), Xinli (EMC Sin-li, also later called the Xue, EMC siat = Sir ?), Loulan,36
Wusun37 and Hujie peoples. Of these, the Dingling, Gekun and Xinli are reckoned to be Turkic.
38 The Loulan39 in Xinjiang and the Wusun are Indo-Europeans.
(1966), p. 17.
36
D. Hitch, The Special Status of Turfan in Sino-Platonic Papers 186 (March, 2009). pp. 5, 14 (on the use of a
Northwest Prakrit in administration there.
37
EMC ʔɔ swəәn, Pulleyblank, Lexicon pp. 325, 297 wu “crow, black” sun “grandson.” The Chinese characters used
to transcribe this ethnonym fit in with the ancestor tale recorded in the Hanshu, in which the Wusun royal prince,
whose family had fled an attack of the Da Yuezhi and taken refuge with the Xiongnu, was left by his guardian in the
steppe while the latter searched for food. The guardian returned to find the prince being suckled by a wolf while
ravens brought him meat, see A.F.O. Hulsewé, China in Central Asia. The Early Stage: 125 B.C. – A.D. 23 (Leiden,
1979), pp.214-215; E. Pulleyblank, “The Wu-sun and Sakas and the Yüeh-chih Migrations” Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 33/1 (1970), p. 156, with D. Sinor following him, “The Legendary Origins of the
Türks” Folklorica: Festschrift for Felix J. Oinas, ed. E.V. Zygas, P. Voorheis (Bloomington, Indiana, 1982), p.239,
view the “crow” element as a literary embellishment by the Chinese authors, punning on the characters used to
render this foreign name. See also Ju. A. Zuev, Rannie tjurki: očerki istorii i ideologii (Almaty, 2002), p. 23, who
reconstructs this form, ca. end of first millennium BC-beginning of first millennium AD, as *aĥ-sməәn < *asman
Iran. “sky, heaven.” Zuev, p. 25, notes that in 647, the Western Türk qağan sent a gold-plated crow, to the Tang
court. On a number of symbolic interpretations of the Wusun ethnogonic myth, see Ju. A. Zuev, A.Š. Kadyrbaev,
“Drevnie narody Central’noj Azii v époxu ‘Velikix pereselenij’ (IIIv. do n.é. – V v.). Po materialam kitajskix
dinastijnyx istorij” in D.D. Vasil’ev et al. (eds.), Bjulleten’ 9 (Rossijskaja Akademija Nauk. Obščestvo
vostokovedov, Moskva, 2002), pp. 208-212. Originally located in the Gansu region between Dunhuang and the
Qilian mountain range, the Wusun were progressively moved westward, see L. A. Borovkova, Carstva “zapadnogo
kraja” (Moskva, 2001), p. 107, who places them in the Gansu corridor, near the Yuezhi and west of the Xiongnu. B.
Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi (Ankara, 1981), I, p. 490, citing the Hanshu, locates their early homeland to
the east of Qilian mountains and west of Dunhuang, to the southeast of the Tianshan. Alemany, Sources on the
Alans, p.397, puts them alongside the Yuezhi “between Dunhuang and Qilian mountains,” whence they were driven
westward by the Xiongnu. On attempts to connect the Wusun with the Alano-As, see Alemany, Sources on the
Alans, p. 399. To their northwest was Kangju (a region west of the Ili River extending to the Syr Darya, see K.
Czeglédy, “From East to West: The Age of Nomadic Migrations in Eurasia” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 3
(1983), pp. 45ff.) and to their west was Dayuan (Ferghana), see C.B. Wakeman, “Hsi Jung (the Western
Barbarians): an Annotated Translation of the five chapters of the T’ung Tien on the Peoples and Countries of
Pre-Islamic Central Asia” unpublished Doctoral Disssertation, University of California-Los Angeles, 1990), pp.
513-530, for discussion of the Wusun data, see also below. On Dayuan, see Wakeman, pp. 539ff. A.G. Maljavkin,
Tanskie xroniki o gosudarstvax Central’noj Azii (Novosibirsk, 1989), p. 184n.293, places them, in the second-first
centuries BC in modern Kyrgyzstan and southeastern Kazaxstan with their principal camp/capital on the southern
shore of Issıq Köl. See Maljavkin, p. 186n.304, for Dayuan = Ferghana. See notices in Sima Qian/Watson, II, pp.
156, 233-234, 237-243, largely based on the report of the second century BC diplomat-intelligence agent, Zhang
Qian as is also true of the account in the Hanshu in A.F.P. Hulsewé, China in Central Asia. The Early Stage: 125
B.C. – A.D. 23 (Leiden, 1979), pp. 142-162, 214-215 (report of Zhang Qian); Pulleyblank, “The Wu-sun and Sakas”
BSOAS 33/1 (1970), pp.155-157. A summary of Chinese material on the Wusun is also found in Ögel, Büyük Hun
İmparatorluğu Tarihi, I, pp. 489-499; A. Taşagıl, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Eski Türk Boyları (Ankara, 2004), pp.
17-27, who, among others, considers them Turkic and E.I. Kyčanov, Kočevye gosudarstva ot gunnov do man’čžurov
(Moskva, 1997), pp.46-50. The latter notes (p.46) that Yan Shigu (581-645), a commentator on the Hanshu, remarks
that the Wusun resemble the Soġdians and had blue eyes and reddish beards. This is a topos in Chinese ethnographic
literature for Europoids. The Hanshu reports that the kunmo and his people moved west, with the permission of the
Xiongnu, to take revenge against the “Great” (Da) Yuezhi, who, in the meantime, had driven out the Se (Saka). The
Wusun then established themselves in the Ili valley. Borovkova, Carstva, pp. 107-113, 245-252, places the Yuezhi
defeat of the “small” Wusun polity in 182 BC. This was followed, in turn, by the conquest of both the Yuezhi and
Wusun by the Xiongnu in 177. In 167 the Xiongnu drove out the Yuezhi from the Gansu corridor. They went to the
Ili region where they were attacked by the Wusun, in 163, who were acting, at least in principle, as agents of the
Xiongnu ethno-linguistic affiliations remain obscure. They have been identified as Turkic
(in, perhaps, some “Pre-Proto-Bulğaric,” i.e. pre-Oğuric form), Iranian or Palaeo-Siberian (in
particular Kettic, a theory proposed by Ligeti more than half a century ago).40
Xiongnu. The Yuezhi were driven further westward while the Wusun took possession of the Ili valley ca. 161-160.
The Han tried to draw them into conflict with the Xiongnu, but the Wusun maneuvered skillfully between the two.
Borovkova also argues that the Yuezhi and Wusun were ethno-linguistically closely related Europoid peoples, see
also her Kušanskoe carstvo po drevnim kitajskim istočnikam (Moskva, 2005), pp. 42ff. The Yuezhi and Wusun
appear to have contained Tokharian and Iranian elements, see B. A. Litvinskij (ed.), Vostočnyj Turkestan v drevnosti
i rannem srednevekov’e. Étnos, jazyki, religii (Moskva, 1992), p.17; J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans
(London, 1989), pp.59-60. The Wusun legend, as we shall see, bears more than a passing resemblence to the
Ašina-Türk ethnogenetic legend, hence the lengthy excursus here.
38
Sima Qian/Watson, II, pp. 138,140. On the EMC forms see Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their
Neighbors” in Keightley (ed.) Origins, pp. 448-449, 454-456. The Dingling, later called Tiele, had been
concentrated in Northern Mongolia and the Irtyš region, extending to Lake Baikal and the Middle Yenisei, they were
the northern neighbors of the Xiongnu and Xianbei (see Krjukov, Drevnie kitajcy, pp.62-66, attempts to associate
them with various ancient archaeological cultures remain problematic), Gekun (Qırğıŕ/Qırğız) were a possibly
Palaeo-Siberian people under Turkic leadership who were in the process of Turkicization. Qırğız ethnogenesis is
particularly complex. See discussion in Golden, Introduction, pp. 144-145,176-179, 404-406; Janhunen, Manchuria,
p. 186. A sampling of writings on the Qırğız can be found in O. Karaev, K. Žusupov, Kyrgyzy: Istočniki, istorija,
étnografija (Biškek, 1996); Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 186. See the lengthy discussion in B. Ögel, Büyük Hun
İmparatorluğu Tarihi (Ankara, 1981), I, pp. 201ff. of Modun (Mete)’s career. Also noted in other Han-era sources
are the Hujie or Wujie (EMC xɔ-gɨat, ʔɔ-gɨat = *Hagaŕ = Oğur/Oğuz?), see Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their
Neighbors” in Keightley (ed.), The Origins, pp.454-456. T. Senga, “Az onogurok a kínai forrássokban” Uralica 5
(1980), p. 105, does not accept the identification of the Hujie with the Oğurs. On the Xinli = Sir, see E. G.
Pulleyblank, “Why Tocharians?” Journal of Indo-European Studies 23/3-4 (1995), p. 417.
39
Loulan (EMC. *glu-glân, later *lǝu-lân) = Krorän, Krorayina of Indian Kharoṣṭhî documents around the Lopnur
region, see J.P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies (London, 2000), p. 81
40
See L. Ligeti, “Mots de civilisation de Haute Asie en transcription chinoise” Acta Orientalia Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 1/1 (1950), pp.141-188; E. Pulleyblank, “The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part II”
Asia Major, 9 (1962), pp. 206-265, esp. Appendix “The Hsiung-nu Language,” pp. 239-265. The Russian
translation of this study, “Jazyk sjunnu” in A.N. Kononov, S.G. Kljaštornyj (eds.), Zarubežnaja Tjurkologija, vyp. 1
(Moskva, 1986), pp. 29-71 contains (pp. 65-67) some newer readings of Xiongnu forms in light of Pulleyblank’s
later work on the reconstruction of Early and Middle Chinese. See also his “The Hsiung-nu” in H.R. Roemer (ed.),
Philologiae et Historiae Turcicae Fundamenta (= Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, III, Berlin, 2000), pp. 62-65;
Janhunen, Manchuria, pp.185-189, views them as “dominated by speakers of Pre-Proto-Bulgharic.” Bailey, The
Culture of the Sakas in Ancient Iranian Khotan, pp. 91-92 and more extensively in his Khotanese Texts, VII
pp.25-41viewed them as Iranian as does J. Harmatta, “The Origin of the Huns” Acta Classica Universitatis
Scientiarum Debreceniensis, XXXIII (1997), pp. 159-173. A. Vovin, “Did the Xiong-nu Speak a Yeneseian
Language ?” Central Asiatic Journal, 44/1 (2000), pp. 87-104. I. Horváth, “Uygur Scholar’s Significant Discovery:
Ancient Turkic Source Says Xiongnu are Turks” Eurasian Studies Yearbook, 79 (2007), pp. 63-67, on the basis of
Šiŋqo Šeli Tutung’s translation (tenth century) from Chinese into Uyğur Turkic of the seventh century Chinese
biography of Xuanzang which renders Xiongnu as türk yočul bodun, concludes that türk must render Xiongnu. This
usage is found elsewhere in Uyğur where it has nothing to do with the Xiongnu. Türk may have been used as a
generic term for “nomad” here, see P. B. Golden, Ethnicity and State Formation in Pre-Činggisid Turkic Eurasia,
The Central Eurasian Studies Lectures, 1, Department of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University
(Bloomington, Indiana, 2001), pp.13-14. See also S.G. Kljaštornyj in M. X. Abuseitova, Zh. B. Abylxozžn, S. G.
Kljaštornyi et al., Istorija Kazaxstana i Central’noj Azii (Almaty, 2001), p. 49, who suggests that the Xiongnu were
not Altaic, but Turkic-speakers may have been the predominant linguistic grouping in their tribal confederation. See
also L. Rásonyi, Tarihte Türklük (Ankara, 1971), p. 65 (Turkic); G. Faizrakhmanov, Drevnie tjurki v Sibiri i
Central’noj Azii (Kazan’, 2000), pp. 39-40 begins their history in the third millennium BC.
The relationship of the Xiongnu (EMC *xuawŋ nɔ41 = *Ḫun-nu, Ḫon-nu?) to peoples
subsequently appearing in Northern India, the borderlands of Iran, the central - western Eurasian
steppes and Eastern and Central Europe bearing the ethnonym “Hun” or variants of it in a variety
of Iranian (Soġdian ḫwn), Indic (Huṇa) and Graeco-Roman (Hunni etc., Οὖννοι) sources has also
been contentious. The most recent considerations of the material argue for a Xiongnu-Hun
connection.42 What we can say with some certainty is that Han China, and its steppe allies,
defeated groupings of the Xiongnu in the first century BC and first and second centuries AD.
Each of these defeats precipitated a series of migrations of Xiongnu groupings and some of their
subject peoples westward,43 a pattern in Turkic history that would be repeated in the course of
the Middle Ages.
The ethno-linguistic affiliations of the language of the European Huns, who are often
claimed as Turks, remain as problematic as those of the Xiongnu from whom elements of them
most probably derived.44 The Graeco-Roman authors did not know what to make of them. They
differed in appearance and habits from the “barbarians” they had previously encountered. The
ethnographic picture was further muddied by the addition of local tribes (Iranian, Germanic,
perhaps Slavic and others) to the Hunnic union.
Although some of the tribal names and terms of the European Hun era may be interpreted
41
Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp. 346, 227.
42
K. Czeglédy, “From East to West: The Age of Nomadic Migrations in Eurasia” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 3
(1983), pp. 32-35, 62ff., 85ff.; M Érdy, “Hun and Xiong-nu Type Cauldron Finds Throughout Eurasia” Eurasian
Studies Yearbook 67 (1995), pp. 5-94; D.C. Wright, “The Hsiung-nu–Hun Equation revisited” Eurasian Studies
Yearbook 69 (1997), pp. 77-112;E. de la Vaisssière, Huns et Xiongnu,” Central Asiatic Journal 49/1 (2005), pp.
3-26.
43
See Czeglédy, “From East to West” AEMAe 3 (1983), pp.34, 92-97.
44
On European Hunnic, see among others Gy. Németh, “A hunnok nyelve” in Gy. Németh (ed.), Attila és hunjai
(Budapest, 1940), pp. 217-226 and his A honfoglaló magyarság kialakulása (Budapest, 1930, 2nd rev. ed. Budapest,
1991, henceforth HMK), pp. 111-119; G. Doerfer, “Zur Sprache der Hunnen” Central Asiatic Journal 17/1 (1973),
pp. 1-51 (which also has material on Xiongnu, see also the Russian translation “O jazyke gunnov” in Kononov,
Kljaštornyj (eds.), Zarubežnaja Tjurkologija, vyp. 1, pp.71-134); J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns, ed.
M. Knight (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1973), pp.376-443.
as Turkic (e.g. Ἀκάτζιροι/Ἀκάτιροι/Acatziri45), it is only with the advent of the Oğuric Turkic
groupings, refugees from Avar and Sabir pressure, in the 460’s into the Ponto-Caspian steppes,
whence they dispatched envoys to Constantinople,46 that we have firm evidence for
Turkic-speaking peoples. These are the Oğurs, Šara Oğurs, Onoğurs, Bulğars and others who
spoke a form of Turkic that is distinct from Common Turkic.47 Sinor’s conclusion that these
early Turkic peoples of the Western Eurasian steppes, as speakers of an “-r Turkic language” (i.e.
Oğuric) could not have come from “far away Mongolia where the Türks spoke a –z language,”48
is demonstrably wrong as the numerous early loanwords in Mongolic from Oğuric testify.49
Oğur is the Oğuric reflex of the better-known term Common Turkic Oğuz, initially a term
for “kindred, related groupings”50 that later developed ethnonymic status (e.g. Oğuz, Üč Oğuz
“the Three Oğuz,” Sekiz Oğuz “the Eight Oğuz,” Toquz Oğuz “the Nine Oğuz”). This is reflected
in the Chinese sources, which render the ethnonym Toquz Oğuz as Jiu Xing “the Nine Surnames/
Clans/Peoples.”51
Are Oğuric and Common Turkic two parallel branches of Archaic Turkic? If they
stemmed from a common Proto-Turkic language, which branch diverged from the “norm”? Is
45
See forms and discussion in J. Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica (2nd ed., Berlin, 1958), II, pp.58-59, in which this
ethnonnym is connected with *Ağačeri “wood–man” (“forest people”). This is unlikely as Jordanes, Getica (Iordan,
O proizxoždenii i dejanijax getov, ed. trans. E. Č. Skržinskaja, Moskva, 1960, p.136) describes the Acatziri as a
pastoral nomadic people: “gens Acatzirorum fortissima, frugum ignara, quae pecoribus et venationibus victitat” [the
most powerful people of the Acatzirs, who are ignorant of the produce of the field and who live from (their) cattle
and by hunting]. In any event, they were Hunnic only politically, but not ethnically, see Németh, HMK2, p.105
46
R.C. Blockley (ed., trans.), The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire. Eunapius,
Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus (henceforth: Blockley/Priscus, Liverpool, 1981, 1983), II, pp.344/345. See
discussion of this text in A. Mohay, “Priskos’ Fragment über die Wanderungen der Steppenvölker (Übersicht über
die neueren Forschungen)” in J. Harmatta (ed.), Studies in the Sources on the History of Pre-Islamic Central Asia
(Budapest, 1979), pp.129-144, which places the start of these movements some fifteen years before the Oğur
embassy to Constantinople in 463.
47
For an overview of the history of the Oğuric Turkic peoples, see P.B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of
the Turkic Peoples (Weisbaden, 1992), pp.92ff.
48
Sinor, “Early Turks in Western Central Eurasia” in Kellner-Heinkele and Zieme (eds.), Studia Ottomanica, p.
174.
49
See C. Schönig, “Türkisch-Mongolische Sprachbeziehungen – Versuch einer Zwischenbilanz” Ural-Altaische
Jahrbücher N.F. 19 (2005), pp.132ff. See also a briefer version of his study: “Turko-Mongolic Relations” in J.
Janhunen (ed.), The Mongolic Languages (London, 2003), pp. 404-410.
50
P.B. Golden, “The Migrations of the Oğuz” Archivum Ottomanicum IV (1972), pp.45-47.
51
Liu, CN, II, p. 591n.831, regularly renders it as “die Neun Stämme.” See also W.E. Scharlipp, Die frühen Türken
in Zentralazien (Darmstadt, 1992), p.82.
Oğuric or Common Turkic the more “archaic”? Did Oğuric/Bulğaric perhaps represent an earlier
form of Archaic Turkic, one that broke away before a series of phonetic changes occurred (e.g. z
> r, *lš or *lč > l), perhaps ca. 100-400 AD. Was it a separate, “Para-Turkic” tongue? These
remain matters of contention.52 In any event, an Oğuric type of language was a key source of
Turkic loanwords in early Mongolic (e.g. Mong. ikere “twins” < Oğuric *ikir [> Hung.
iker]/Common Turk. ikiz) an interaction that probably took place as early as the Xiongnu era.53
Clearly, Oğuric-speaking tribes must have been in the Mongolia-Manchurian borderlands before
the fifth century,54 and the Oğuric-Common Turkic division must have taken place by then.
52
Linguists date the most ancient period of Turkic to ca. 3000-500 BC. In the succeeding Old Turkic stage, lasting
until ca. 550 AD, evidence for Oğuric forms (with r for z , e.g. Oğuric tenger - Common Turkic tengiz “sea” and l
for š *tâl- tâš ”stone”) begins to surface. The chronological details of these features are still uncertain and there
appears to have been some overlap within the two groups, i.e. some features that are characteristic of Oğuric can
also be found in some Common Turkic dialects, but not always fully realized. See in brief A. Róna-Tas, “The
Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the genetic Question” in L. Johanson, É. A. Csató (eds.), The Turkic Languages
(London, 1998), pp. 69,76-77 and his earlier An Introduction to Turkology (Szeged, 1991), pp.24ff. Oğuric
continued to be spoken in Western Eurasia as we know from scattered Danubian-Balkan Bulğar (see O. Pritsak, Die
bulgarische Fürstenliste unde die Sprache der Protobulgaren, Wiesbaden, 1955, T. Tekin, Tuna Bulgarları ve
Dilleri, Ankara, 1987, Rašo Rašev, Bŭlgarskata ezičeska kultura VII-IX vek, Sofija, 2008, pp. 231-251) and Volga
Bulğaric inscriptions (T. Tekin, Volga Bulgar Kitabeleri ve Volga Bulgarcası, Ankara, 1988, M. Erdal, Die Sprache
der wolgabolgarischen Inschriften, Wiesbaden, 1993). The language survives today in Čuvaš. The possibility that
groups in the east continued to speak Oğuric cannot be discounted, see P.B. Golden, “Cumanica V: The Basmıls and
Qıpčaqs” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 15 (2006/2007), pp.27-29, 34-42.
53
Schönig, “Türkisch-Mongolische Sprachbeziehungen” UAJ N.F. 19 (2005), pp.132ff. and his: “Turko-Mongolic
Relations” in Janhunen (ed.), The Mongolic Languages, pp. 404-410; Janhunen, Manchuria, pp. 187-189; Róna-Tas,
“The Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the Genetic Question,” in. Johanson and Csató (eds.), The Turkic
Languages, pp. 76-77. L. Ligeti, A Magyar nyelv török kapcsolatai a honfoglalás előtt és az Árpádkorban (Budapest,
1986), pp. 431-434. Hungarian, because of its intimate interaction with Oğuric Turkic, remains an important source
for some of these terms.
54
Janhunen, Manchuria, pp. 135-138, 146-147. Schönig, “Türkisch-Mongolische Sprachbeziehungen”
Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher N.F. 19 (2005), pp.140-141, takes these contacts back to the second century AD and
places the “Pre-Proto-Mongolic Peoples” south of the Turkic peoples, in the steppes north of the Chinese borders.
This was territory that had been under the Xianbei who are, as we have noted, usually identified as Early Mongolic
(M.V. Krjukov et al., Drevnie kitajcy v époxu centralizovannyx imperij Moskva, 1983), p.62) or perhaps, indeed,
“Pre-Proto-Mongolic.” The Xianbei, however, had control over substantial parts of Mongolia during their brief
“imperial” period (second century AD when they eclipsed the Xiongnu), but were rather more associated with
Western Manchuria, see Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 184. The Turkic peoples, as loanwords indicate, served as the
cultural intermediaries between the Mongolic-speaking peoples and the Chinese, Iranian and Tokharian peoples who
bordered on Mongolia-Manchuria. As for the ethnicity of the Xianbei, one cannot automatically assume, as is often
done, that they were “Mongolic” of some type. Indeed, a recent study (A. Vovin, “Some Thoughts on the Origin of
the Old Turkic 12-year Cycle” Central Asiatic Journal 48 (2004), p. 130) suggests that they were “anything but
Mongolic-speaking.” Juha Janhunen, “Para-Mongolic” in J. Janhunen (ed.), The Mongolic Languages (London-New
York, 2003), pp. 391-392, cautions that Xianbei served as a “generic” name (up to ca. 300 AD) for some or most of
the Donghu (“Eastern Barbarians”) of Southern Manchuria and Northern Mongolia, the area in which peoples that
can be identified as “Mongolic” or “Para-Mongolic” are later found. Janhunen notes (p.392) that these
“conglomerations” were not “linguistically homogeneous.” They “certainly comprised the contemporary speakers of
Pre-Proto-Mongolic” which subdivided into Proto-Mongolic and a related branch that he terms “Para-Mongolic.”
The latter included Tabġač and Qitan, among others. See also C. Schönig, “Turko-Mongolic Relations” in Janhunen
These correspondences constitute further evidence that the early Turkic-speaking community,
before its various migrations, was located in the east, near Mongolic speakers.
These Oğuric groupings represent some of the earliest Turkic peoples about whom we
have some knowledge. None of them bore the ethnonym Türk. The Oğuric homeland is clearly in
the east. Indeed, the Byzantine source Priskos (b. 410?, 420?, d. post 472) reports that the
migration of Oğuric tribes to the Pontic steppes, where they came into the purview of
Constantinople, began in Inner Asia, touched off by the expansionist activities of the Avars, ca.
450.55 Immediately prior to that, Oğuric tribes appear to have lived in the Kazakh steppe and
Western Siberia, having come there from points further east – perhaps in late Xiongnu times.
They may have already at that time been in contact with Ugrian peoples.56
At the time of their migrations, the Oğuric groupings appear to have been part of a larger,
loose and still ill-defined confederation of nomadic tribes extending in an arc across Eurasia
from Southern Siberia and Northern Mongolia to the Western Eurasian steppes: the Tiele (EMC
*thet-lǝk)57 of the Chinese sources (noted above). The Chinese transcription may hide an “Altaic”
term for “cart” (*tegrek58) the portable dwellings so closely associated with the nomads.59 Tiele
appears to be a later name (or variant) of the ethnonym Dingling (EMC tɛjŋ-lɛjŋ) one of the
(ed.), The Mongolic Languages, p.405-406.

55
Blockley/Priscus, II, pp. 344/345.
56
V.F. Gening, A.X. Xalikov, Rannie bolgary na Volge (Moskva, 1964), p. 142-147 and discussion in Czeglédy,
“From East to West” AEMAe III (1983), pp.97-103.
57
Pulleyblank, Lexicon pp. 184, 308.
58
Clauson, ED, p.485, perhaps a rendering of *tegrek (Turk. tegrek “rim, ring” and hence “wheel”) which may have
been an Altaic term for “cart” (cf. Mong. tergen, telegen, terge). See also S. Starostin, A. Dybo, O. Mudrak,
Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Langauges (henceforth EDAL, Leiden, 2003), II, p. 1360 *tegá “round”
Mongo. *tög/körig, Turk. *deg-/*dög-/ *dog-, Jpn. *tánka, Kor. *thɨ-/*thǝ- : Proto-Mong. *tögörig “round,” Old
Turk. tegirmi “circle” Mod. Turk. Tat. tügäräk, Qırğ. tegerek “round” etc. There is also (II, p. 1433) *t’iárko
“carriage”: Tung. *turki, Mong. *terge, Kor. tàrkó: Proto-Mong. *terge “vehicle.”
59
The semantic association of “carts” with the Turkic nomads surfaces in the designation Gaoche/Gaoju “High
Carts,” one of the Chinese terms used for the Tiele and later the Uyğurs who derived from them, see P. Boodberg,
“Three Notes on the T’u-chüeh” in Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg, ed. A. Cohen (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 354,
356; J. Hamilton, “Toquz Oguz et On Uyγur” Journal Asiatique (1962), pp. 25-26; Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and
Their Neighbors” in Keightley (ed.), Origins, p.448; Czeglédy, “From East to West:” AEMAe, III 1983), p. 64. This
association of the Eurasian nomads was also reflected in the Graeco-Roman sources, cf. the Hamaxobii (Ἁµαξόβιοι)
“those who live in carts,” Aalto, Pekkanen, Latin Sources, I, p. 20.
names associated with early Turkic peoples.60 The Dingling/Tiele come into view in the second
century BC in the area north of the Xiongnu, in Northern Mongolia and the Irtyš region,
extending to Lake Baikal and the Middle Yenisei.61 The Tiele union included Mongolic, as well
as Turkic groupings. They were brought by force into the Xiongnu union and remained
recalcitrant vassals. After 350, they were largely in possession of the Kazakh steppelands,
supplanting Iranian nomads, and after 460, as we have seen, Oğuric groupings from them had
established themselves in the Black Sea Steppes.62 The Tiele formed a number of polities before
their incorporation into the Türk Empire. When the Tiele-derived Uyğurs succeeded to the
Qağanate in 744, they made sure to point out in the inscription for their ruler, Bögü Qağan
(759-779), that two earlier Uyğur kingdoms had existed, claiming, thus, for themselves a
distinguished royal lineage that antedated that of the Türks.63
I mention the Tiele and their various branches because they became an important, if often
rebellious component of the early Türk state. It also gives us an idea of the distribution of some
of the Turkic peoples in the era prior to the establishment of the state, which would unite most, if
not all of the Turkic peoples.
The Turkic Ancient Homeland
The modern Turkic languages appear to derive from a common tongue that retained a
high degree of mutual intelligibility into medieval-early modern times (Čuvaš with its Oğuric
origins and Yakut, isolated for a long period of time, have a rather more divergent history).64
60
Pulleyblank, “Why Tocharians?” The Journal of Indo-European Studies 23/3-4 (1995), p. 417 and his “Early
Contacts Between Indo-Europeans and Chinese” International Review of Chinese Linguistics 1, no. 1 (1996), p. 15,
who directly connects the Dingling > Tiele and Uyğurs who “emerged” from them.
61
T. Senga, “Az onogurok a kínai forrásokban” Uralica 5 (1980), pp. 105-106.
62
See discussion in Golden, Introduction, pp. 94-95.
63
See S. G. Kljaštornyj, “Nadpis’ uygurskogo Begju-kagana v Severo-Zapadnoj Mongolii” in B.B. Piotrovskij and
G.M. Bongard-Levin (eds.), Central’naja Azija. Novye pamjatniki pis’mennosti i iskusstva (Moskva, 1987), pp.
28-30.
64
The classification of the various languages that now comprise Turkic remains a matter of scholarly debate. For the
most recent surveys with indications of the literature, see T. Tekin,”Türk Dil ve Diyalektlerinin Yeni bir Tasnifi”
Erdem, 5/13 (Ocak, 1989), pp. 129-139, 141-168; N.Z. Gadžieva, “Tjurkskie jazyki” in E.R. Tenišev (ed.), Tjurkskie
Thus, al-Iṣṭaxrî (a mid-tenth century author of a geographical work reports that “the Turks, all of
them, such as the Tuġuzġuzz (Toquz Oğuz), the Xirxîz (Qırğız), the Kîmâk (Kimek), the Ġuzz
(Oğuz) and the Xarlux (Qarluq), have one (common) language and understand one another.”65
Maḥmûd al-Kâšġarî (ca. 1077), in his Compendium of the Turkic Languages Dialects (Dîwân
Luġât at-Turk), notes only dialect and regional differences (as well as groups that were becoming
Turkicized).66 More broadly, Turkic is considered to be part of the Altaic language grouping
consisting also of Mongolic and Manchu-Tungusic with possible connections to Koreanic and
Japanic. A search for the Turkic Primordial Homeland/”Urheimat” has to take this into account.
The Altaic Theory is not without problems. Whether this relationship is based on genetic ties or
is the consequence of long-standing ties of borrowing and interaction (convergence, areal
phenomena) remains an important and still hotly debated question.67 Some linguists propose that
the Altaic languages may be part of a yet larger language family (“Ural-Altaic,” “Nostratic” or
“Eurasiatic”). Others view these connections as resulting from convergence, i.e. the product of
prolonged periods of intense interaction and borrowing.68 Yet others deny the existence of an
jazyki (Bishkek, 1997), pp. 18-23 in the series Jazyki mira edited by the late V.N. Jartseva and others
(Moskva-Bishkek, 1997-2000) and E.R. Tenišev (ed.), Sravnitel’no-istoričeskaja grammatika tjurkskix jazykov.
Regional’nye rekonstrukcii (Moskva, 2002), pp.713-737. The Türk Lehçeleri Grameri, edited by Ahmet B.
Ercilasun (Ankara, 2007), lists some twenty languages.
65
Al-Iṣṭaxrî, Kitâb Masâlik wa Masâlik, ed. M.J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1870), p 9.
66
Maḥmûd al-Kâšġarî, Compendium of the Turkic Dialects. Dîwân Luγât at-Turk, ed. trans. R. Dankoff in
collaboration with J. Kelly, Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures, 7 (henceforth: Kâšġarî /Dankoff,
Cambridge, Mass., 1982-1985), I, pp.70 (boasting of the perfection of his knowledge of the Turkic dialects, the
elegance of his speech and the depth of his education – as well as his skill in “throwing the lance”), 82 (“the Turks
are, in origin, twenty tribes,” all descended from “Turk, son of Japheth, son of Noah,” there y providing a genealogy
that fit into the conceptions of his readers).
67
See an excellent summary of the principal issues in Janhunen, Manchuria, pp.237ff. Starostin et al., EDAL, I, pp.
11-236 have presented their case for the Altaic relationship, concluding (p. 236) that Proto-Altaic divided into
“Turco-Mongolian, Tungus-Manchu and Korean-Japanese around the 6th millennium B.C.” “Turko-Mongolian,” in
turn, divided ca. the 4th millennium B.C. J.H. Greenburg, Indo-European and its Closest Relatives. The Eurasiatic
Language Family, I, Grammar (Stanford, 2000), esp. pp.11ff. also present the current argument for an Altaic
genetic relationship. A highly critical review of Starostin et al. is that of B. Kempf in Acta Orientalia Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 61/3 (2008), pp. 403-408. See also M.I. Robbeets, Is Japanese Related to Korean,
Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? (Wiesbaden, 2005), who has been sharply criticized by R. A. Miller in a review in
Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher N.F. 21 (2007), pp.274-279. In in his Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages
(Chicago, 1971), however, Miller favored such a relationship. J. Patrie, The Genetic Relationship of the Ainu
Language (Honolulu, 1982) would add Ainu to the Altaic “family.”
67
Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 238; A. Róna-Tas “The Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the Genetic Question” in L.
Johanson and É. Csató (eds.), The Turkic Languages (London-New York, 1998), pp. 67-80.
68
Janhunen, Manchuria, pp. 237-242; D. Sinor, “The Problem of the Ural-Altaic Relationship” in D. Sinor (ed.),
“Altaic” as a “family,” melded or otherwise.69 Those who accept the notion of an “Altaic
language family,” have explained the difficulties of the “Altaic hypothesis” as resulting from the
early break up of Proto-Altaic (late 6th millennium BC) and the fact that the oldest written
remains of Altaic (the Turkic of the Orkhon inscriptions) are relatively modern, dating only to
the early 8th century.70 Whatever the nature of the relationships between these languages, it is
clear that they were in contact early on and this is an important clue about the origins of the
Turkic-speaking peoples. As the earliest homeland for these languages, except for Turkic,
appears to be Manchuria,71 it follows that the early Turkic peoples most probably lived near that
region. The early Turkic loanwords in Mongolic, noted above, give some indication where these
points of contiguity were located.
The lexical material of Turkic provides evidence about the topography, flora and fauna of
this territory, providing clues as to the location of the Primordial Homeland of the Turkic
peoples.72 It was located in a cold, northerly climate, subject to snow (qar), hail (tolı), ice (buz),
fog (tuman) and rain (yağ- “to rain), one in which “whirlwinds” of snow (or sand, qasurqa,
qasırqu) were not unknown. There were “snow storms” (tipü or tüpi, qâḏ > qay, borağan73) as
well as other forms of extreme, inclement weather. It was a land of mountains (tağ, qır74),
massive rocks or rock piles (qorum), cliffs (qaya), forests and dense thickets (orman,75 yıš),
The Uralic Languages (Leiden, 1988), pp. 706-741; J.H. Greenberg, Indo-European and its Closest Relatives. The
Eurasiatic Language Family (Stanford, 2000, 2002), esp. I, pp. 11ff; A.B. Ercilasun, Başlangıcından Yirminci
Yüzyıla Türk Dili Tarihi (Ankara, 2004), pp.17-32.
69
See C. I. Beckwith, Koguryo. The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives, (Leiden. 2004), pp. 184-194; A.
Vovin, “The End of the Altaic Controversy” Central Asiatic Journal, 49/1 (2005), pp.71-132.
70
Starostin et al., EDAL, I, pp. 234-236. See also Miller, Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages, pp.3-4 (the
Japanese material may come from the latter part of the 8th century).
71
Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 238. See also Beckwith, Koguryo, pp. 8ff. with Koguryo extending into Korea and
northeastern China. For a different perspective put forward by Kljaštornyj, see below.
72
On the reconstructed vocabulary of “Proto-Turks,” see E.R. Tenišev (ed.), Sravnitel’no-istoričeskaja grammatika
tjurkskix jazykov. Leksika (henceforth SIGTJaz. Leksika, 2nd ed. Moskva, 2001), pp.724 ff. For many of these terms
see also Clauson, ED, and E. V. Sevortjan et al., Étimologičeskij slovar’ tjurkskix jazykov (henceforth ÉSTJaz,
Moskva, 1974-ongoing, currently up to the letter “S,” volumes are noted by the letters with which they deal).
73
The latter attested earliest in Middle Qıpčaq, see R. Toparlı et al., Kıpçak Türkçesi Sözlüğü (Ankara, 2003), p. 38:
burğan, see discussion in Sevortjan, ÉSTJaz. “B,” pp.189-192.
74
In early Turkic qır denoted “an isolated mountain or block of mountains, high ground.” In Oğuz it came to mean
“plain, steppe,” see Clauson, ED, p. 641.
75
This may be an ancient borrowing from Indo-European Tokharian, see Tenišev (ed.), SIGTJaz. Leksika, p. 110.
groves of woods or thickets (bük76) around flowing water valleys (öz), ravines (yar), flatlands
and plains or steppes (yazı, qayır), with sand (qum) in some places, swamps or saltmarshes (qaq)
in others and traversed by rivers (ögüz, yırmaq “big river,” özen “brook”) and lakes (köl). Larger
bodies of water were not unknown (teŋiz/tengiz “sea,” talay “ocean, sea”77). The area had an
abundance of “wild game” (keyik78), e.g. elig (“roe”), buğu (“[male] deer”79), sığın (“stag”),
buŋğaq/muyğaq /mungaq (female of sığın80), ıvıq (“gazelle”), yegeren (“antelope”), bulan
(“elk”), qulan (“wild ass/onager”), tonguz (“wild boar”), arqar (mountain sheep/ram”), teyiŋ
(“squirrel”), koḏan, tabušqan (“hare”), kiš81(“sable”), qama82 (“beaver”), tilkü (“fox”), as well as
predatory animals such as lions (arslan), tigers, (bars83) and panthers (irbiš, yolbars). There is an
extensive vocabulary for domesticated animals, closely tied to the pastoral nomadic economy
followed by the Proto-Turks: horses (at as well as aḏğır “stallion,” bé, biye “mare,” qısraq
“young mare,” baytal “barren mare,” qulun “colt up to two years of age” etc.), cattle (uḏ), cows
(iŋek, sığır “milk-cow”), oxen (öküz84), rams and sheep (qoč, qoyn, qozı “lamb”), camels (teve,
buğra “male camel,” ingen “female camel”), asses (eškek), swine (čučqa), dogs (ıyt, köpek,
qančıq “bitch,” eker “wolfhound”), cats (pišik, četük, mačı). There are also numerous words for
different kinds of falcons (toyğan [toğan], lačın, toğrıl), some of which were probably trained by
humans for hunting and other birds (e.g. bürküt “golden eagle”), reptiles, fish and insects. There
is also a rich vocabulary for trees (terek “poplar,” toğaraq “white poplar,” emen “oak,”85 qaḏın
76
Clauson, ED, p. 324,
77
Probably a borrowing from Chinese, see Clauson, ED, p. 502.
78
Originally denoted “wild, four-legged game,” see Clauson, ED, p.753
79
See Starostin et al., EDAL., II, p. 1102: Altaic *pŏgV.
80
Clauson, ED, p. 772 “the female maral deer.”
81
According to Starostin et al., EDAL, I, p. 817, it goes back to *kīĺ < *k‘i̯ ūĺa “sable, squirrel.”
82
Apparently a loanword (see Sevortjan, ÉSTJaz “K’ “Ḳ”, p.242.
83
This is an ancient loan-word from Iranian, see Clauson, ED, p. 368; Sevortjan, ÉSTJaz. “B”, pp. 68-70.
84
Clauson, ED, p.120, was “almost” certain that it was a borrowing from Tokharian. From Turkic it was borrowed
into Mongolic as hüker. However, another Indo-European source for an original has been posited:*püker/*pökür, cf.
Lat pecus, gen. pectoris (M. de Vaan Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden, 2008,
p.454: pecū “flock, herd,” pecus “farm animals, livestock”) presumably > *füker > hüker etc., see also A.M.
Ščerbak, Rannie tjurksko-mongol’skie jazykovye svjazi (VIII-XIV vv.) (Sankt-Peterburg, 1997), pp. 52, 131.
85
Noted in Middle Turkic, see R. Toparlı et al. (eds.), Kitâb-ı Mecmû-ı Tercümân-ı Türkî ve Acemî ve Mugalî
(Ankara, 2000), pp.9,105 (Arabic ms. 8b). It is found today in Qazaq, Qırğız, Noğay, Qumıq, Qaračay-Balqar,
“birch,” qaḏı “pine,” bȫš “cedar,” kebrüč “ash tree,” *yeruk86 “alder” as well as berry-bearing
trees, plants etc. cf. yımurt “cherry-tree”), grains (tarığ “cereals, millet,” yögür “millet,” qoñaq
“coarse millet,” buğday “wheat,” arpa87 “barley” etc.) attesting a familiarity with agriculture
(tarlağ “ploughed field,” azal “wooden plough,” sarpan “plough,” orğaq “scythe” etc.). Pastoral
nomadism very likely evolved in agricultural communities in which animal husbandry became
the dominant economic activity. On the basis of this and other aspects of daily life reflected in
this ancient (and sometimes reconstructed) vocabulary, the argument has been made for placing
the Proto-Turkic homeland in the southern, taiga-steppe zone of the Sayan-Altay region.88 In
another, concluding work in this series of comparative studies of Turkic, on the basis of
reconstructed tree names, the authors concluded that the early Turkic-speaking community must
have dwelt at some point in the Ordos region as well.89 These are the very regions, as we shall
see, in which the emergence of a people bearing the ethnonym Türk takes place. Other scholars
have postulated homelands as far west as the Caspian and in the east extending to the
Trans-Baikal.90 While accepting the Sayan-Altay region as the Turkic Urheimat/Anayurdu, some
scholars have, nonetheless, made attempts to place Turkic groupings in Ancient Mesopotamia
and to link Turkic with Sumerian, Hurrian, Etruscan and Scythian (see above). While these latter
connections remain highly problematic, we can be reasonably certain that the Proto-Turks were
Qaraim (emen), Tatar, Baškir (imän) Uzbek, Uyğur (emän) and Čuvaš yuman/yoman (see also M. Räsänen, Versuch
eines etymologischen Wörterbuchs der Türksprachen (Helsinki1969), p. 42). Mod. Turk. Meşe is a borrowing from
Pers. bîsha “forest, wood,” Tenišev (ed.), SIGTJaz. Leksika, p. 125; H. Eren, Türk Dilinin Etimolojik Sözlüğü
(Ankara, 1999), p.293. According to Starostin et al., EDAL, I, p.736, Altaic has different root forms: *kuĺap: PTung.
*kolopo-kta “a kind of tree,” PJpn *kásípà “oak-tree,” PKor. *kàràp “oak-tree,” I, p.857, Alt. *k’usa “a k. of tree
(cedar, oak), PTung. *xusi-kta “acorn, oak, big nut, PMong. *kusi “cedar, thuja”, PJpn. *kasi “Quercus acuta
Thunb.”
86
Starostin et al. EDAL, II, p. 1542: *ǯi̯̯ aru(kV) “a.k. of foliage tree, alder” P. Turk. *jẹrük “alder, cedar” etc.
87
A loanword from Indo-European, see X. Tremblay,”Grammaire comparée et grammaire historique: quelle réaité
est reconstruite par la grammaire compare” in G. Fussman, J. Kellens, H.-P. Francfort, X. Tremblay, Âryas, Aryens
et Iraniens en Asie Centrale, Collège de France. Publications de l’Institut de civilization indienne, 72 (Paris, 2005),
p. 128: h2élbhi/ṇ “orge (blanche) > Iranian *arbẵ > Turk. arpa.
88
Tenišev (ed.), SIGTJaz. Leksika, p. 732. Memiş, Eskiçağda Türkler, p.39.
89
É. R. Tenišev and A.V. Dybo (eds.), Sravnitel’no-istoričeskaja grammatika tjurkskix jazykov. Pratjurkskij
jazyk-osnova. Kartina mira pratjurkskogo étnos po dannym jazyka (Moskva, 2006), pp. 372-434.
90
See summation of literature in Golden, Introduction, pp. 124-127.
in contact with Uralic91, Indo-European92 and some Palaeo-Siberian languages such as Yeneseic
(Kettic).93 The Indo-European Scytho-Iranians were their neighbors (and likely predecessors) in
Mongolia and South Siberia94 (and perhaps extending into areas of Western Siberia). In Eastern
Turkistan/Xinjiang, the early Turks interacted with both eastern Iranian and Tokharian-speaking
peoples. The latter consisted of a grouping of related Indo-European languages, which came to
the Xingiang region of modern northwestern China from the western zone of Indo-European
languages sometime in the first millennium BC. These languages continued to be spoken and
written until the eighth century. Thereafter, this ancient population of what became Eastern
Turkistan, now Xinjiang, was largely Turkicized.95
These connections, whether genetic or areal, clearly place the early, although not
necessarily the earliest stages of Turkic history in Inner Asia and most probably in the easterly
sections of that region. Mongolic, Manchu-Tungusic, Koreanic and Japanic appear to have
emerged from Southern Manchuria and adjoining regions while Turkic may have had its earliest
homeland in Southern and Eastern Mongolia,96 and hence also had contacts with peoples of the
91
On possible Uralic borrowings in Turkic, see D. Sinor, “Samoyed and Ugric Elements in Old Turkic” Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 3-4 (1979-1980), pp. 768-773 and his “The Origin of Turkic Balïq ‘Town’” Central Asiatic
Journal 25 (1981), pp. 95-102.
92
T. V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, trans. J. Nichols, ed. W. Winter,
Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, 80 (Berlin-New York, 1995), I, pp. 494-495, 539, 550, 565,
831-833.
93
Elements of the latter were probably being assimilated by the Qırğız in early medieval times. The assimilation of
Kettic peoples has continued into modern times, see K.H. Menges, The Turkic Languages and Peoples (2nd ed.,
Wiesbaden, 1995), p. 36; J. Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 19-23.
94
See Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies, pp. 32-37 for a good summation of the archaeological literature.
E.E. Kuz’mina, The Origin of the Indo-Iranians, ed. J.P. Mallory (Leiden, 2007), pp.63-66, suggests that the Turkic
yurt (now a technical term in English, Russian and other languages denoting the “tent” of the Turkic nomads in
Turkic actually means “dwelling-place, abode, see Clauson, ED, p. 958) has its origins in the “proto-yurts” of the
Central Asian Indo-Iranians.
95
S. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia. The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M.W. Thompson
(Berkeley, 1970); E.A. Novgorodova, Drevniaja Mongoliia (Moskva, 1989), pp. 316-321; J. P. Mallory, In Search
of the Indo-Europeans (London, 1989); pp. 56-63. Mallory and Mair, The Tarim Mummies deals in detail with the
ancient Indo-European population of modern Xinjiang. See also E.W. Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi (New
York-London, 1999). See also, X. Tremblay, Pour une histoire de la Sérinde (Wien, 2001), pp. 29-46, on the
languages of Xinjiang. He considers (p.45) the key cites of Hami, Bešbalıq (a Turkic toponym) and Turfan as
“Turkicized and Sinicized since 450.”
96
Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 238. Róna-Tas, “Reconstruction” in Johanson and Csató (eds.), The Turkic Languages,
p. 68 places the “last habitat,” i.e. the territory occupied by Turkic-speakers before their linguistic community broke
up, in “west and central Siberia and in the region south of it.”
western Manchurian borderlands.97 The Mongolian-Manchurian borderlands, as noted
previously, are probable areas of early contact between Turkic and the other Altaic languages,
regardless of how one views the Altaic theory. However, it is not clear if the Turks were
indigenous to this region. Perhaps, they expanded to the Mongolo-Manchurian borderlands from
points further north (Trans-Baikal- South Siberia) or west where they had early contacts with
Indo-European and Uralic? Of course, the reverse may be equally true. These are issues that
await further elucidation. What is important for us here is that ancient speakers of Turkic were
in close contact with other Altaic peoples (in particular speakers of Mongolic) and this occurred
in the Mongol-Manchurian zone.
There are other, for the most part slightly differing reconstructions. Sergej Kljaštornyj,
for example, locates the earliest “Altaic” tribes in a “huge territory” extending across the
southern zone of Siberia “between the Yenisei and Pacific Ocean - in Mongolia, Manchuria and
in the modern day provinces of Northern China.”98 In this reconstruction, the
Proto-Turko-Mongolic and Proto-Manchu-Tungus groupings emerged in the course of the
Second and into the First Millennia BC. The Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolic linguistic
communities then became fully differentiated during the First Millennium BC, with Turkic in
Central and Eastern Mongolia, from Lake Baikal to the Ordos and Mongolic in Northern
Manchuria and Eastern Mongolia. Areas to their west were occupied by Indo-Europeans, i.e.
Iranians, with whom they were in direct contact.99
The various reconstructions, based largely on linguistic evidence, are more or less in
concert that the early Turkic linguistic community must have been in a zone in which they had
contact with Indo-European, Uralic and Yeniseic in their West and Northwest and Mongolic in
their East. This was, as has been suggested, most probably in the forest-steppe zone of South
Siberia around the Altay extending into Mongolia, where they may also have acquired elements
97
Janhunen, Manchuria, pp. 242-242, sees these “intensive contacts” beginning in the pre-Xiongnu era between
Pre-Proto-Mongolic and Pre-Proto-Bulğaric (i.e. Oğuric). He concludes that the “conventional Altaic corpus turns
out to reflect a complex network of areal contacts between three separate genetic entities. Of these he sees (pp.
251-252) only Mongolic and Tungusic as perhaps possessing a genetic relationship.
98
See his chapter “Central’naja Azia v époxu antičnosti” in Abuseitova et al., Istorija Kazaxstana, p.48.
99
Abuseitova et al. Istorija Kazaxstana, pp. 48-49.
of equestrian culture and pastoral nomadism from the Indo-Europeans.100 Pastoral nomadism,
which “was a secondary development among farmers who occupied marginal ecological
areas,”101 is closely associated with the domestication of the horse, which occurred in the
Ponto-Caspian steppes sometime after 4800 BC.102 This was the core of the Indo-European
Urheimat which was located west of the Ural Mountains, extending westward to the southern
Russian-Ukrainian steppelands and southwards to the Caucasus.103 Subsequently, military
innovations such as heavy cavalry, may have been passed on to the Xiongnu of Mongolia (and
thence to the Turkic peoples) from Indo-Europeans (East Iranians or Yuezhi).104 We might note
here that Indo-European peoples were not only present in Mongolia (very likely they are to be
identified with at least some of the ancient Europoid populations of Western and Northwestern
Mongolia105) - and in the central Altay106 - but were the dominant elements in much of Western
Turkistan (Iranian)107 and Eastern Turkistan (Iranian and Tokharian) up to the emergence of the
Xiongnu and were, thus, a presence in the Chinese borderlands.108 It is not unlikely that the early
Turkic peoples are to be identified with the Mongoloid population, which began to mix with the
Scytho-Iranian peoples of Western and Northwestern Mongolia. The mixture of ethno-somatic
types has been typical of the region for millennia.109 Overall, however, the archaeological picture
in some regions that have been recently studied, such as the Eastern Altay, is far from clear.
100
See summation of these views in Golden, Introduction, pp. 124-125; Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 228.
101
On pastoral nomadism, see Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, pp. 85ff; L.L. Cavallli-Sforza, “The
Spread of Agriculture and Nomadic Pastoralism: Insights from Genetics, Linguistics and Arcaheology” in D. R.
Harris (ed.), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (Washington, D.C. 1996), p.54. See
also E.E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. V. H. Mair (Philadelphia, 2008), p.6, which notes several
theories: a) overpopulation in farming areas pushed groups into the steppelands which were only marginally suited
to agriculture and the population developed pastoral animal husbandry as a survival response b) there was a natural
“transition to a nomadic existence” that was the consequence of the “growth of livestock population and the
accumulation of experience in conducting the pastoralist economy.”
102
See D. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language. How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes
Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2007), pp.200-201
103
Anthony, The Horse, pp.98-99.
104
See G. Fajzraxmanov, Drevnie Tjurki v Sibiri i Central’noj Azii (Kazan’, 2000), pp.30-32,
105
É. A. Novgorodova, Drevnjaja Mongolija (Moskva, 1989), pp.316-321 (summary of her conclusions). These
Eastern Scythians were mixing with Mongoloids coming from the East, R. Rolle, The World of the Scythians, trans.
F.G. Walls (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 56-57.
106
See S.I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia, trans. M.W. Thompson (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1970), pp.45-53.
107
See B.I. Vajnberg, Étnogeografija Turana v drevnosti (Moskva, 1999).
108
See Mallory and Mair, The Tarim Mummies, pp.252-296.
109
See discussion in Horváth, “Uygur Scholar’s Disocvery” Eurasian Studies Yearbook, 79 (2007), pp. 60-63.
There is a considerable break between Scythian and Xiongnu finds (2nd century BC-2nd century
AD). Large-scale migrations from unspecified points in Inner Asia into the region apparently
took place after the Xiongnu collapse. There seems to have been some considerable diversity in
population, producing “micro-isolate” groupings. The most recent studies, moreover, have
shown that it is difficult to date some of the complexes and to reconcile the archaeological
records with the written sources.110 Among the tentative conclusions of these studies is the
notion that over time small groupings of Inner Asian immigrants made their way to inaccessible
places in the Altay highlands (Gornyj Altaj) as the larger struggles that saw power shift from the
Xiongnu to Xianbei to Rouran to Türk Ašina took place.111 The ethnic picture, in brief, is far
from clear. The Turko-Iranian symbiosis, a feature of many later Turkic polities, may have had
its beginnings here, at the very dawn of Turkic history.
When the Xiongnu ruler, Maodun (209-174 BC) launched his attack into the northern
regions, probably Southern Siberia, conquering a number of tribes, most of which are considered
Turkic (in particular the Dingling, Gekun and Xinli112), the name Türk is nowhere noted. Who,
then, were the Türks and why do we not find them among these peoples?
The Türk tradition, preserved in the Orxon inscriptions describes the circumstances
surrounding the founding of the Türk empire but says nothing of their origins: “when the blue
heavens above and the brown earth below were created, humankind was created between the
two. My ancestors [this is Kül Tegin speaking, in the early eighth century], Bumın Qağan and
İštemi Qağan sat (as Qağans) over humankind. Having taken the (qağanal) seat, they took hold
of the polity and law of the Türk nation and organized it.”113
The Chinese dynastic annals, the Zhoushu (ca. 629), the Suishu (ca. 629-636) and Beishi
(ca. 659), all contemporary documents of the First Türk Empire (552-630 in the East, lasting
until 659 in the West) report a number of ethnogonic tales, presumably gotten from the Türks
110
V.V. Bobrov, A.S. Vasjutin, S.A. Vasjutin, Vostočnyj Altaj v époxu velikogo pereselenija narodov (III-VII veka)
(Novosibirsk, 2003), pp.84-85.
111
Bobrov, Vasjutin, Vasjutin, Vostočnyj Altaj, pp. 85-86.
112
Sima Qian/Watson, II, p. 138. See above n. 36.
113
See text in T. Tekin, Orhon Yazıtları (Ankara, 1988), pp. 8/9.
themselves or peoples close to them.114 In them the Türk - and it must be emphasized here that
they are only referring to the Türk people themselves, not other Turkic groupings – were an
“independent branch” of the Xiongnu, with the family name Ashina (Ašina), which had earlier
lived on the right bank of the “Western Sea” (xihai). The latter could refer to anything from the
Mediterranean, Caspian or Aral Seas to much smaller bodies of water in East Turkistan,
Mongolia or Gansu.115 This ancestral grouping was completely destroyed by a neighboring state.
One boy, badly mutilated, was thrown into a swamp and survived thanks to the tender
ministrations of a she-wolf (a common progenetrix figure in Eurasian ethnogonic tales extending
as far west as Rome). Later, the lad impregnated the she-wolf. When his enemies discovered that
he was still alive, they sought to kill him and the she-wolf fled to a mountain lying to the north or
northwest of Gaochang (Qočo in Eastern Turkistan). There, in a cave, she gave birth to ten sons,
one of whom took the surname “Ashina” (EMC *ʔaʂɨ’na’116). He became their leader and placed
a wolf’s head on his standard to show his origins. Their numbers grew, through marriage with
local women, and several generations later they left the cave and acknowledged the overlordship
of the Rouran, whom they served as iron or metal workers. By this time they were living on the
slopes of the Jinshan, “Golden Mountain,” i.e. the Altay.
Another account in the Zhoushu places their homeland in the Suo (EMC, LMC *sak)
country, north of the Xiongnu.117 Here, their large family of 17 (or 70) brothers was led by
114
Liu, CN, I, pp.5-6,40-41; D. Sinor, “The Legendary Origins of the Türks” Folklorica: Festschrift for Felix J.
Oinas, ed. E.V. Zygas, P. Voorheis (Bloomington, Indiana, 1982), pp. 223-231; Taşağıl, Gök-Türkler, I, pp. 10-14,
95-96, 110-111. There are slight variations in the accounts.
115
See discussion in Liu, CN , II, p. 495n.41; S.G. Kljaštornyj, “Problemy rannej istorii plemeni Türk (Ašina)”
Novoe v Sovetskoj Arxeologii (Moskva, 1965), p.278.
116
Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp. 23, 283, 221.
117
Pulleyblank, Lexicon, p. 298; Liu, CN, I, p. 5, II, p. 489, n.8. The region was earlier associated with the Xianbei,
but Liu cautions that this does not necessarily point to their “rassische Abstammung” from the latter. On the
uncertainties surrounding the peoples denoted by this ethnonym, generally reckoned to be Mongolic of some sort,
see above. Beckwith, “The Frankish Name of the King of the Turks” AEMAe 15 (2006/2007), p.10, n. 30 identifies
Suo (*Sak) with the Saka and recalls Menander’s comment (Menander/Blockley, pp. 116/117) that the Türks “had
formerly been called the Sacae.” Whether Suo is a specific reference to the Saka, East Iranians in general, or a
learned topos for “nomads” is unclear. It is not used in this sense in the Chinese sources. Similarly, it could not point
to the Saka peoples of Xinjiang (e.g. the Khotanese Saka), which was south of this region. The name Suo (*Sak)
may have nothing to do with the Iranian Saka. Perhaps it is a Xianbei term. Nonetheless, Menander’s use of the
ethnonym Saka is striking. While “Scythian” is commonly used to denote Turkic nomads in Byzantine historical
literature (see Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica2, II, pp.279-283), Saka is not. Indeed, Menander (Menander/Blockley,
pp. 80/81, 114/115,118/119, 148/149, 150/151, 170/171 [“one hundred and six Scythians of the people called the
Turks”]) regularly uses “Scythian” to denote the language(s), people(s) and cultural objects of the Eurasian nomadic
Abangbu (EMC a paŋh bɔh, LMC a pɦaŋ̀ pɦuǝ 118

̀ ). All of them were “dull-witted except for
Yizhinishidu (EMC ʔji trih ŋɛjh ʂi tɔ, LMC ʔji tri ̀ŋiaj ̀ ʂŗ tuǝ̆ 119) who was born of a wolf,
possessed supernatural powers over rain and wind and had the mental acuity to save his lands.
He married the daughters of the spirit of Summer and Winter, one of whom bore him four sons,
one of which was Qigu (= Qırğız)120 another of which, the eldest, Nodulushi/Nadulishi/
Naduliushi/Nodulishe (šad)] who subsequently invented or made fire, saved a tribal grouping
descended from their common ancestor (Abangbu) and was given the name Türk. He had ten
wives. Their sons took their mother’s name. His youngest son was born of a concubine and had
his mother’s name, Ašina. He was elected leader after his Nodulushi’s death when he won a
jumping contest and was given the title Axian Šad. His grandson was Bumın, the first Türk
Qağan, who is an historical figure. These are very different accounts. In the wolf tale, the Ašina
are paramount. In the second, they appear (born of a concubine!) only late in the day and gain
leadership by virtue of their special skills.
In addition to these and another (less relevant) tale, the Suishu prefaces its version of the
wolf tale with a more traditional historical account. In it the Türks are portrayed as stemming
from “mixed Hu barbarians” from Pingliang (in Gansu), a turbulent area with a succession of
dynasties of Xiongnu, Xianbei and Chinese origin that created short-lived statelets. The Türks
had the family name Ašina. When the Tabġač/Tuoba/Northern Wei Emperor, Tai-wudi
(424-452) ended the Northern Liang (Xiongnu) statelet (397-439) in Gansu in 439,121 the Ašina
with some 500 families fled to the Rouran. Here, they lived on the Altay (Jinshan) “for
world.
118
Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp. 29, 43.
119
Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp. 81,224,281,365)
120
Sinor, “The Legendary Origin,” pp. 228-229, makes the important point that although the origins of the Türks
and Qırğız are linked, the later mid-ninth century, Youyang Zazu notes that the Qırğız “do not belong to the race of
the wolf.” Rather, their roots stem from the mating of a spirit and a cow. The tenth century miscellany, Taiping
guangji (see Z. K. Gabuev, Étnogoničeskie predstavlenija drevnix kočevnikov Velikoj Stepi. Irancy i tjurki (Mosvka,
2002), p. 27) links their ancestry with an eagle. Tales collected by nineteenth century ethnographers involve “Forty
Maidens” (qırq qız – a folk etymology) and a red dog who appears to be the regenerator of an otherwise destroyed
people, see J.-P. Roux, La religion des Turcs et des Mongols (Paris, 1984), pp.193-194. The latter tale with its dog
(wolf?) motif is vaguely reminiscent of the Ašina Türk legend.
121
The statelet of Juqu (EMC dziɨǝ̌’ gɨǝ̆ ), see Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp.164, 260. They are usually noted as
Xiongnu, L. A. Borovkova, Problema mestopoloženija csarstva Gaočan (Moskva, 1992), pp. 44f-49, suggests that
its founder Ju Qu (a Xiongnu title that became a clan name), Mengsun, was of Qian origin.
generations engaged in the preparation of iron implements.”122
When or how the Ašina-Türks came to Gansu is uncertain. Kljaštornyj suggests that they
arrived after 265 AD, a period of mass migrations, beginning after the fall of the Xiongnu polity
in 220, of Xiongnu and other tribes from Southern Siberia and adjoining regions. These peoples
came into northern China and subsequently established ruling dynasties there that frequently
warred with one another. This period of instability ended with the rise of the Tabġač/Tuoba or
Wei (386-532) who brought the region under their control by 439.123 In the course of their
migrations and residence in territories with Indo-European (Iranian and Tokharian) populations,
the Ašina were undoubtedly joined by Iranian and/or Tokharian elements,124 becoming thus the
“mixed Hu” of which the Suishu speaks. The Ašina-Türk then went to Gaochang (Xinjiang)
together with the surviving Northern Liang rulers and here they came under Rouran rule, ca. 460.
They were then brought to the Southern Altay region by the Rouran.125
While one of the mythic tales derives Ašina from Türk, the more straightforward
historical account of the Suishu, based presumably on Chinese intelligence, seems to present the
Ašina as the “family name” i.e. the name of the ruling clan of the Türks who stem from a
grouping of “mixed Hu barbarians.” Kljaštornyj suggests that the Ašina took the name Türk
only after they settled in the Altay.126 The term Hu in China (EMC *γɔ/*gá)127 was one of those
multi-purpose names denoting, at first, in the era before the Han dynasty (pre-206 BC),
“nomads” and then in Han times (206 BC-221 AD) usually associated with the Xiongnu.128 By
122
Liu, CN, I, p. 40; Taşağıl, Gök-Türkler, I, pp.12-13, 95110-111; see also N. Yamada, “The Original Turkish
Homeland” Journal of Turkish Studies, 9 (1985), 243-246.
123
S.G. Kljaštornyj, “Xunny i tjurki” in Litvinskij (ed.), Vostočnyj Turkestan, pp.121-125 (where he derives the
Türk from “late-Hunnic tribes that settled in Eastern Turkestan”).
124
G.-J. Pinault, “Tocharian Languages and Pre-Buddhist Culture” in V.H. Mair (ed.), The Bronze Age and Early
Iran Ages Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia (Philadelphia, 1998) I, p.368, concludes that the Tokharians were
“close to other peoples of the steppes.” They were “members of a cultural continuum that included the Altaic
peoples” and there were mutual influences between the two.
125
Liu, CN, I, p. 40, II, p. 519n. 209. See also Kljaštornyj, Drevnetjurkskie runičeskie pamjatniki kak istočnik po
istorii Srednej Azii (Moskva, 1964), pp.110-111, his “Xunny i tjurki” in Litvinskij (ed.), Vostočnyj Turketan v
drevnosti i rannem srednevekov’e. Étnos, jazyki , religii , pp.123-125, and in the recent collection of his earlier works
S.G. Kljaštornyj, Istorija Central’noj Azi i pamjatniki runičeskogo pis’ma (SPb. 2003), pp. 420ff.
126
Kljaštornyj, Ist. Central’noj Azii, p. 425.
127
Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and their Neighbors,” Keightley (ed.), Origins, p. 449.
128
Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and their Neighbors,” Keightley (ed.), Origins, pp. 449-450; Di Cosmo, Ancient
China and its Enemies, pp. 127-130.
the late sixth century, i. e. the Türk era, it was also used to denote Central Asian Iranians,
especially the Soġdians.129
The connection with the areas of Eastern Turkistan and Gansu, regions with East Iranian
and Tokharian populations is important. The skills of the Türk-Ašina in metallurgy are also
worthy of note. Although metal-working is known in the steppe, it is possible that the
Türk-Ašina may have acquired some special skills (perhaps in weapon-making) in a sedentary
environment. We might note here that the Qırğız, who had a mixed agricultural and pastoral
economy, were noted in the Tongdian for their knives and swords, which they fashioned from
materials they gathered “whenever the sky rains iron” (meteorites).130 Studies of the weaponry of
the Türks, which proved crucial in their military success over the Rouran, Tiele and others, point
to an “advanced close combat weapon and protective gear” that they brought with them from
Eastern Turkistan.131 The Ašina connection with the cultures of Eastern Turkistan was clearly of
considerable importance.
The name Ašina also appears in the Bugut Inscription (582), the earliest known
inscription of the Türk Empire, written, it must be added, in Soġdian. It mentions the trʼwkt
’’šyn’s : *Turkit/*Turukit/*Trukit Ašinas – although this reading is not without problems.132 If
*Turkit et al. is the correct reading, then both would appear to be plural forms. Soġdian plurals
can end in -t, but a plural ending in -s is not known there or in Khotanese Saka.133 It is found in
Tokharian,134 although this would seem to be an unlikely, but not impossible, hybrid here. The
plurals in -s and -t could also be Altaic. They are common in Mongol, but rare in Old Turkic
129
Liu, CN, II, pp. 490-491n.22, 584n. 786; see also E. de la Vaissière, Histoire des marchands sogdiens (2nd ed.,
Paris, 2004), pp.56, 58, 61, 65, 120-121 et passim; M. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia,
2008), pp. viii, 19-20, 87.
130
E. Pulleyblank, “The Name of the Kirghiz” Central Asiatic Journal 34/2 (1990), p. 105.
131
Ju. S. Khudiakov, “Armaments of Nomads of the Altai Mountains (First Half of the First Millennium AD)” Acta
Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 58/2 (2005), p. 127.
132
R. Moriyasu, A. Ochir, Provisional Report of Researches on Historical Sites and Inscriptions in Mongolia from
1996 to 1998 (Osaka, 1999), p. 123; S.G. Kljaštornyj, “Drevnetjurkskaja pis’mennost’ i kul’tura narodov Central’noj
Azii” Tjurkologičeskij Sbornik 1972 (Moskva, 1973), p.257; S.G. Kljaštornyj, V.A. Livšic, “The Sogdian Inscription
of Bugut Revised” Acta Orientalia Hungarica, 26/1 (1972) p.85. See the critical comments of C. I. Beckwith, “The
Chinese Names of the Tibetans, Tabghatch, and Türks” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 14 (2005), pp. 13-18.
133
V.S. Rastorgueva (ed.), Osnovy iranskogo jazykoznanija. Sredneiranskie jazyki (Moskva, 1981), pp. 250-264,
422-426.
134
W. Schulze, E. Sieg, W. Siegling, Tocharische Grammatik (Göttingen, 1931), pp.122ff.
where they appear exclusively in titles of foreign origin, (e.g. ıšbara/ıšvara, pl. išbaras from
Sanskrit îśvara “lord, prince” tegin, tegit, tarqan, tarqat135) and perhaps in some ethnonyms such
as Türges/Türgeš, Tölis.136 Here, they could be holdovers from the titles and ethnonymic usages
of the Rouran, if it can be demonstrated that the latter were indeed speakers of some
Proto-Mongolian language. The reading of Bugut tr’wkt as *Turkit /*Turukit /*Trukit, however,
is far from clear.137 Elsewhere in Soġdian texts, twrk is found. It seems likely from the context
and the depiction of a wolf sheltering a boy on the stone that *Türk and Ašina are, in some form,
represented here. Their pairing may imply two distinct, but now joined entities.
Sergej Kljaštornyj, building on a notion first put forward by Haussig and Bailey,138
suggests that Chinese Ashina is the transcription of Khotanese-Saka âṣṣeina/âššena “blue” (cf.
Puštun, Yazgulam šin “blue,” Old Iranian *axšaina, Old Pers. axšainnaka, Avestan axšaêna,
Middle Pers. axšên denoting “blue, dark-blue”, Soġdian ’γs’n’k,’γs’ynh,’γs’yn’y, axsênê, axsên,
ǝxsen “green, greenish”139) or perhaps Tokharian âśna “blue.”140 This nicely dovetails with the
usage Kök Türk “Blue Türk” found in the Kül Tegin (E, 3)/Bilge Qağan (E, 4) inscriptions.141
Both etymologies lead us back to the Eastern Iranian-Tokharian world of Eastern Turkistan.
Moreover, this expression, Kök Türk is noted only once (the two inscriptions repeat themselves)
and in the context of the origin tale of how the Türk state was founded. Prior to this, the Kök
Türks are described as idi oqsız “without a master and organization.”142 The name Ašina is
135
Clauson, ED, pp. 257, 479, 539-40.
136
T. Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (Bloomington, 1968), p. 122; A.N. Kononov, Grammatika jazyka
tjurkskix runičeskix pamjatnikov VII-IX vv. (Leningrad, 1980), pp.145-146. M. Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic
(Leiden, 2004), p. 158, notes that these plurals are almost exclusively found in the Orxon Türk and Uyğur
inscriptions.
137
Beckwith, “The Chinese Names” AEMAe 14 (2005), pp. 15-17, finds the reading and interpretation “extremely
problematic at best.” He concluded that tr’wkt is not *turkît ~*turkit and that such a form does not exist in Soġdian
hence the meaning of tr’wkt in the Bugut inscription is “unknown.”
138
H.W. Haussig, “Byzantinische Quellen über Mittelasiens in ihrer historischen Aussage” in J. Harmatta (ed.),
Prolegomena to the Sources on the History of Pre-Islamic Central Asia (Budapest, 1979), pp. 554-557; Bailey,
Khotanese Texts, VII, p.104.
139
V.S. Rastorgueva, D.I. Édel’man, Étimologičeskij slovar’ iranskix jazykov (henceforth ESIJaz, Moskva, 2000-
ongoing), I, pp.284-286; B. Gharib, Sogdian Dictionary. Sogdian-Persian-English (Tehran, 2004), p.27.
140
S.G. Kljaštornyj, “The Royal Clan of the Turks and the Problem of Early Turkic-Iranian Contacts” Acta
Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, XLVII (1994), pp. 445-447.
141
Tekin, Orhon Yazıtları, pp. 8/9,36/37.
142
Clauson, ED, p. 95, has a very different understanding of the text, rendering this part as “the Turkü whose
lineage (?) is completely without division into subtribes ?)”. This is not the general consensus, see Tekin, Orhon
nowhere mentioned in the Turkic inscriptions. Hence, it seems likely that Kök is the Turkic
translation of Ašina in the inscriptions just noted. Moreover, instead of rendering it as Kök Türks
perhaps the two are still indeed separate, the Köks and the Türks, coming together with the
founding of the state.
The ethnonym Türk – Türküt/Turkit may have similar linguistic connections. The Suishu
tells us that the name Türk in their tongue denotes “helmet” and that it comes from the fact that
the Jinshan (Altay mountains) where we find the Türks on the eve of their empire, “looks like a
helmet. The people call a ‘helmet’ tujue, therefore, they call themselves by this name.”143 This is
a folk etymology and there is no attested Turkic form of türk meaning “helmet.” Róna-Tas has
suggested a possible East Iranian connection, citing Khotanese-Saka tturakä “lid.144 This is not a
serious semantic stretch to “helmet,” but at this point must remain a conjecture. Bailey also
proffered an Iranian etymology (somewhat more tentatively from *tûra “strong.”145 Finally, a
Turkic etymology from the word türk, which means “one in the prime of youth, powerful,
mighty” cannot be dismissed, although the meanings “powerful” and “mighty” have been
contested.146
However one may etymologize or pair these names, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion
that the Türk-Ašina, per se, had strong connections with – if not ultimate origins in –
Irano-Tokharian East Turkistan, an area in which Iranians, Chinese, northern nomads (e.g.
Xiongnu) and Indian colonies had been in contact and mixing for centuries.147 The Türks, or at
least the Ašina, were migrants to South Siberia-Northern Mongolia where we seem to find the
Yazıtları, pp. 8/9, 36/37 70-71.

143
Liu CN, I, p. 40.
144
A. Róna-Tas, Hungarians and Europe in the Early Middle Ages, trans. N. Bodoczky (Budapest, 1999), pp.
278-281.
145
Bailey, Khotanese Texts, VII, p. 103.
146
Róna-Tas, An Introduction to Turkology, pp. 10-13. Németh, HMK2, p.84, proposed two Turkic possibilities:
törü- “to come into existence, to be created” (see Clauson, ED, p.533) and türk “strong, powerful, vigorous,
mighty.” Clauson, ED, 542-3 and his Studies, pp.84-88, however, views the ethnonym as Türkü (ethnonym) and
distinguishes it from türk “the culminating point of maturity, just fully ripe, in the prime of life, young and
vigorous” as two different words. Moreover, he (Studies, p. 87) disputes the notion of türk as meaning “strength.” It
is earliest attested in the latter, non-ethnonymic sense, in Uyğur writings of the eighth century. See also discussion in
Tryjarski, “Etnonim Türk ‘Turek; turecki’ i związane z nim kłopoty” in his In Confinibus Turcarum. Szkice
turkologiczne, pp.91-101.
147
De la Vaissière, Histoire, p. 185.
major concentration of Turkic-speaking peoples. Bumın (d. 552) who founded the state, and his
brother İštemi (552-575), the Yabğu Qağan who governed the western part of the realm, do not
bear Turkic names. It has been suggested that these were tabuicized names that hid their sacral
Turkic names.148 We have, however, no comparable evidence for this custom among their
successors. An Iranian etymology for Bumın deriving from *bûmî149 (< Aryan *bhûmî) “land”
(Soġd. bwmh, bwm [vum] “land, world”150 is not inconceivable. Among their successors we find
the names: *Muqan/Muğan/Mahân/ Muhân (553-572), Taspar (or more probably Tatpar,
572-581) and Nivar/Näbär/Nawâr (581-587). None of these names is Turkic151 – nor have they
thus far been etymologized.
In short, Türk origins are complex, multiple and in all likelihood involved significant
groupings of non-Turks as well. Indeed, their ruling house, the Ašina, has a decidedly un-Turkic
onomastic profile. Were they originally Turkic in speech? The Rus’ case, which has generated a
huge literature largely tinged by nationalism, comes immediately to mind.152 The first
generations of Kievan Rus’ rulers, Askol’d, Dir, Rjurik, Oleg, and Igor’, all bore names that
indicated their non-Slavic (Scandinavian) origins. By the third generation, that of Svjatoslav (d.
972), they were all at least bilingual and bore Slavic names, reflecting the numerically dominant
ethno-linguistic milieu in which they found themselves. Their kinsmen, the Normans of France
and England, underwent several, similar linguistic and cultural transformations.
Empires and Tribes
The imperial neighbors of the Tribal Zone were often active players in the shaping of
peoples here. For the Türks this meant China and in particular the Tuoba/Tabġač or Northern
148
Ju. Zuev, Rannie tjurki: očerki istorii i ideologii (Almaty, 2002), p.7.
149
Sanping Chen, “Son of Heaven Son of God: Interactions among Ancient Asiatic Cultures Regarding Sacral
Kingship and Theophoric Names” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, 12 (2002), p. 300.
150
Rastorgueva and Édel’man, ESIJaz., II, pp. 134-135; V. Rybatzki, “The Titles of Türk and Uigur Rulers in the
Old Turkic Inscriptions” Central Asiatic Journal, 44/2 (2000), p.218. Bumın’s name is given in Chinese as Tumen
(tu “land, earth, soil, ground, territory” + men “door, gateway”), which may hint at the meaning of his name.
151
Golden, Introduction, pp. 121-122; Rybatzki, “The Titles of Türk and Uigur Rulers” Central Asiatic Journal,
44/2 (2000), pp. 206-221.
152
See the thorough discussions in V. Ja. Petruxin, Načalo étnokul’turnoj istorii Rusi IX-XI vekov (Smolensk, 1995)
and G. Schramm, Altrusslands Anfang (Freiburg im Breisgau, 2002).
Wei (386-534), who ruled Northern China on the eve of their emergence. The Wei, themelves of
Altaic (most probably Xianbei) origin, were periodic protagonists of the Rouran. Thus, the initial
Türk encounter with China, their imperial neighbor, came through the cultural filter of a partly
sinicized people that shared elements, however attenuated, of their Altaic cultural and steppe
background. The Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-907) who succeeded the Wei also had
backgrounds in the complex Xianbei and Sino-Xianbei frontier world.153 The Tang, in particular,
were politically, economically and culturally deeply engaged in Central Asia.
The Türk-Ašina make their appearance in history at crucial moment in the sixth century.
The Tuoba/Tabġač had collapsed and divided into two, the Eastern Wei (534-550) and the
Western Wei (535-557). The former was soon replaced by the Qi (550-577) and the latter by the
Northern Zhou (557-581), dynasties that had a tenuous hold on power. These critical turnovers
occurred just as the Türk-Ašina were making the transition to a powerful polity, an early state
and were, indeed, connected with that process. As the Wei splintered, the Avars/Rouran, under
Anagui Qağan (520-552), because of growing internal divisions, also became very vulnerable.
Both the Wei and Avars were seeking allies to buttress their fragile power. When the Eastern
Wei made an alliance with Anagui, their rivals, the Western Wei, in 545, were now open to
connections with Bumın, the Türk-Ašina ruler, increasingly an unhappy vassal of the Avars.
Bumın had been probing the Chinese borderlands since the early 540s, actively seeking direct
access to China. In 546, the Türks, perhaps exploiting the situation to add to their own military
power, helped the Avars to defeat a Tiele attack. The Tiele, in any event, were potential rivals.
Elements of the latter (the Gaoju) – and other peoples (e.g. the Wusun) had earlier been
instigated to revolt by the Wei. When Bumın then asked for an Avar imperial bride as a reward
for his services, he received a haughty refusal. According to the Zhoushu, Anagui replied: “you
are my blacksmith slave. How dare you speak in this way”?154 Bumın turned to the Western Wei
153
See n. 12 above and Sanping Chen, “A-gan Revisiteed – The Tuoba’s Cultural and Political Heritage” Journal of
Asian History 30/1 (1996), pp.46-71 and his “Succession Struggle and the Ethnic Identity of the Tang Imperial
House” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, 6/3 (1996), pp. 379-405.
154
Liu, CN, I, p.7; A. Taşagıl, Gok-Türkler (Ankara, 1995), I, pp. 17, 96; R. Drompp, “Imperial State Formation in
Inner Asia: The Early Turkic Empires (6th to 9th Centuries)” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
58/1 (2005), pp.103-104.
who were ready to accommodate him. A royal bride was duly dispatched and Bumın promptly
revolted against the Avars in 552. The Avars were shattered and Anagui committed suicide.
Some of the surviving Avars fled to the Northern Qi, who returned them “to the north” in 553.
Rouran internecine strife continued and the Türks struck them again. Once more the Rouran fled
to the Northern Qi, who this time brought them under their control, settled them, provided
provisions and beat back the Türks who were pursuing them. The troubles continued and in 554
and 555, the Avars, pressed by the Northern Qi, were also battered by the Türks. They fled to the
Western Wei. The Türks repeatedly asked the Western Wei to kill off the “refugees.” Some 3000
Rouran were handed over to the Türk envoys and beheaded. The Western Wei retained the
remaining Rouran, all underage (probably the children of the entourage that had accompanied the
last members of the Rouran royal house), as slaves.155 The Rouran/Avars in the eastern steppe
zone were finished as an effective force. Meanwhile, Bumın’s brother, İštemi, the Sir Yabğu
Qağan, established Türk power as far as the Pontic steppes and by 568, if not earlier, was in
contact with Constantinople.156
In the complex twists and turns of Chinese policies, the northern Chinese dynasties,
clearly, had been playing the all too familiar game of turning “barbarian” against “barbarian.”
They occasionally hedged their bets, granting favors or assistance now to the Rouran, now to the
Türks. In the process, they provided the catalyst for Türk state formation. Was the Türk state
already in the process of becoming? Was it the result of internal forces, the domestic crises that
Di Cosmo157 would see as the primary catalyst for state formation in the Inner Asian steppe? Or,
was Chinese intervention the necessary external spark that brought the Türks to statehood? Did
China believe that it could replace the Rouran/Avars with another, perhaps more pliant and less
powerful regime? The Chinese or Sinicized regimes with which we are dealing here did not last
long enough for us to get a clear sense of what their purpose was – other than to keep the
northern nomads off balance. Whatever the goals of the Eastern Wei and their immediate
155
See varying accounts in Liu, CN, I, 10, 17,35-36; Taskin, Materialy, pp.294-295 (Beishi).
156
Golden, Introduction, pp. 127-128.
157
N. Di Cosmo, “State Formation and Periodicization in Inner Asian History” Journal of World History, 10/1
(Spring, 1999), pp. 1-40.
successors were, their actions set the Türks on the road to statehood. The dynasts of North China
were themselves too weak to impose a solution that would be completely satisfactory to them.
Nomadic polities became states usually in response to stimuli coming from the imperial,
sedentary world.158 In that sense, China was certainly the mid-wife, at the very least, in the birth
of the Türk state. The rise of the Mongol empire provides an interesting parallel. Here, the
politically weak Jin/Jurchen through their attempts at micro-manipulation of the Mongols and
other tribes either directly or through their proxies, the Tatars, touched off that chain of events
that produced Chinggis Khan.
The Türks quickly put together an ethnically diverse state as was typical of steppe realms.
The Tongdian reports that Muqan, Bumın’s son and successor, “in the west defeated the Rouran
(Avars) and Hephthalites (Yeda).159 In the east, he marched on the Qitan. He went to the north
and subjugated the Qigu (Qırğız). All the countries beyond the borders of China submitted to
him out of fear.” His lands extended from Liao-hai in the east to the Bei-hai (Baykal) in the north
and the Western Sea (Xi hai) in the west.160 Both the Northern Zhou and the Northern Qi now
sought marital alliances with him.161 The Türks brought under their sway the Tiele
confederation, that included many of the Oğuric tribes in the Western Eurasian steppes, the
Bayırqu, Ediz, Tarduš, Töliš and the powerful Toquz Oğuz confederation in the East. The latter
included groupings such as the Uyğurs, Turkic-speakers who themselves constituted a substantial
tribal union and the Basmıl, a people of possibly Oğuric speech, who would subsequently be led
by a branch of the Ašina.162 The Tatar, Qitań and Tatabı (= the Qay, Chin. Xi), Mongolic
158
Xazanov, Kočevniki, esp. pp. 362ff/Khazanov, Nomads, esp. pp.228ff.
159
This may be a reference to the Türk pursuit of what became the European Avars. A Türk ruler later berated the
Byzantines “for making a treaty with the Uarkhoniai, our slaves (he meant the Avars) who have fled their masters,
see Blockley/Menander, pp. 174/175.
160
Taşagıl, Gok-Türkler, I, p.97.
161
S. Jagchid and V. J. Symons, Peace, War, and Trade along the Great Wall (Blomington-Indianapolis, 1989),
p.146.
162
See P.B. Golden, “Cumanica V: The Basmıls and the Qıpčaq” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 15 (2006/2007),
pp.19-21,26ff. As late as the latter part of the eleventh century, Maḥmûd al-Kâšġarî lists them among the Qay,
Yabâqu and Tatâr (the Qay and Tatar are Mongolic peoples) “each of these groups,” he reports, “has its own
language, but they also know Turkic well.” Kâšġarî/Dankoff, I, p.83, pointing thus to the difference in their speech
from Common Turkic. The name Basmıl itself might reflect an Oğuric form of Common Turkic *Basmıš < bas- “to
press, crush, oppress, to make a surprise attack” (Clauson, ED, pp.370-371).
peoples, and probably the Qurıqan, who were also part of the Tiele, submitted. Among the
subject Turkic groupings were the Oğuz, Qarluqs and Qırğız, the latter recognized as having a
qağan (the imperial title) of their own. The Qarluq ruling house whose head bore the title of
elteber (subject ruler) also appears to have come to be led by a house of Ašina origin.163 The Sir,
who were probably located northwest of the Türks proper and were in close alliance with them,
were another powerful tribal union or subunion. Kljaštornyj, on the basis of circumstantial
evidence, has attempted to identify them with the later Qıpčaq union.164 With the exception of a
very fragmentary and doubtful notice in the early Uyğur inscriptions (Moyun Čur/Šine Usu, the
most recent reading omits the reconstruction of qıbčaq entirely),165 the Qıpčaqs do not appear in
any of the Türk or Uyğur runic inscriptions. The same may be said with regard to the Kimeks,
the tribal union from which the Qıpčaqs subsequently emerged in their own right onto the stage
of history.
Subjects of the Türk also included the Az, Čik and İzgil who may have been Iranian,
Uralic or of some other ethnicity and the Iranian Soġdians who played an important commercial
and cultural role in the Türk state. The Soġdians, here, were playing an already well-established
role in with regard to their relations with the nomads, one that would continue well into the
Middle Ages.166 Türk Qağans spent a good deal of their time, keeping this polyglot, polyethnic,
and fluid tribal mass under control – as the Orxon inscriptions eloquently attest.
The Türk experience, in many respects, was not greatly different (except in physical
scale) than ethnogenesis and state formation in other parts of Eurasia. In Europe, we also find a
163
Al-Mas‘ûdî, Murûj ad-Dahab wa Ma‘âdin al-Jawhar, ed. Ch. Pellat (Beirut, 1966), I, p. 155, writing in the 930’s
speaks of a Qarluq “Qağan of Qağans,” who was ruler of the Turks, apparently sometime after 840. He cites his
name as ‫( ﺵشﺍاﺏبﻩه‬Šâba), var. lect. ‫( ﺵشﺍاﻥنﻩه‬Šâna, perhaps a corruption of Ašina), see also O. Pritsak, “Von den Karluk
zu den Karachaniden” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 101 (1951), p. 281.
164
S.G. Kljaštornyj, “Kypčaki v runičeskix patmjatnikax” Turcologica 1986 (Leningrad, 1986), pp. 153-164. S.M.
Axinžanov, Kypčaki v istorii srednevekovogo Kazaxstana (Alma-Ata, 1989), pp.40-57, 62-63, who accepts
Kljaštornyj’s hypothesis, also places them among the Tiele tribes. He sees their earliest habitat as extending from
northwestern Mongolia and parts of the Altay to southern Kazakhstan and views them, under the name Sir, as
having played an equal role with the Türk in the period of the second Türk Qağanate (ca. 687-742), cf. the
references to the Türk Sir budun. After a disastrous defeat, they adopted the name Qıpčaq meaning “unlucky,
unfortunate” as a protective name to ward off further misfortunes. The collapse of the Türks brought them further
west where subsequently they became part of the Kimek union.
165
Moriyasu and Ochir, Provisional Report, pp.178, 182-183. The older reading, *Türk Qıbčaq, may be found in G.
Ajdarov, Jazyk orxonskix pamjatnikov drevnetjurkskoj pis’mennosti VIII veka (Alma-Ata, 1971), p. 344.
166
Golden, Introduction, pp.141-146; De la Vaissière, Histoire, pp. 185-188, 202-203.
great sedentary empire, Rome (and later Byzantium), like China, attempting to make sense of
and manage the welter of peoples on its periphery.167 In both the East and the West, tribal
“peoples” were created by the imperial powers – or perhaps more accurately one can say that
ethnic groupings that had the potential to coalesce into larger, more orderly units were
encouraged to do so by the great powers who gave or withheld, as they saw fit, the enormous
benefits and prestige that came to a “barbarian” chieftain from the granting to him of access to
imperial society and its goods. By privileging him in this fashion, by establishing him as the
chieftain with whom they would deal, the great empires helped to make him master of other
kindred tribes and attract followers from beyond his immediate circle.168 “Tribes,” R. Brian
Ferguson, has observed, “can evolve without states, but states make a lot of tribes and most
named tribes in the ethnographic record exist under the spell of states.”169 This is an essential
part of ethnogenesis in the frontier or tribal zones of the great states. Here, the latter can go
beyond the shaping of tribes. They can shape new ethnicities from groups that are either reacting
to their aggression or are directly manipulated by them.170 The Xiongnu, for example, became a
powerful steppe polity in response to Chinese expansion as Nicola Di Cosmo has recently
shown.171 At the very least, from the Imperial point of view, it was easier to deal with only one
“Barbarian” ruler rather than a host of chieftains.
Recent studies have shown that the ethnonyms that came to be associated with the
peoples called “Franks,” “Lombards,”172 “Goths,” et al. derived, it appears, from their warrior
elites. War-bands, led by dynamic, charismatic chieftains (some of them “kings” of some
particular grouping), took in or brought under their sway a variety of heterogeneous groupings.
The latter adopted the ideology of the charismatic chieftains and the name of the ruling group as
167
Useful discussions are found in P. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974, reprint: New
York-London, 1988), pp.107-109 on the Roman impact; Pohl, Die Völkerwanderung, p.15.
168
R. B. Ferguson and N.L. Whitehead (eds.), War in the Tribal Zone (Santa Fe, 1997), p. 13.
169
See R. Brian Ferguson, “A Paradigm for the study of War and Society” in War and society in the Ancient and
Medieval Worlds, ed. K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein (Cambridge, Mass. 1999), p.419.
170
D. A. Chapell, “Ethnogenesis and Frontiers” Journal of World History, 4/2 (1993), p. 272.
171
Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies.
172
For a survey of the material on Lombard/Langobard origins, see N. Christie, The Lombards (Oxford,1995), pp.
1-30. See also the remarks of C. R. Bowlus, “Ethnogenesis: The Tyranny of a Complex” in Gillet (ed.), On
Barbarian Identity, pp. 247-249, which is critical (pp.239-256) of the “Ethnogenesis Theory.”
political designations. Origin myths were created or refashioned. Despite - or more likely
because of this diversity, claims for the purity of blood or descent, especially of the ruling clans,
were put forth. These claims are sometimes reflected in our sources and must have had some
resonance in the tribal world.173 This reconstruction has its critics.174 Nonetheless, there are many
parallels with the Türks and the variety of Türk origin tales undoubtedly reflects their
heterogeneous origins.175
This pattern, well known to Europe, is also observable in the steppe world where tribal
genealogies were similarly manipulated for political purposes. In the western zone, the origin
myths - or at least the versions of them that have come down to us - were not uninfluenced by the
models of the Graeco-Roman traditions. There was a dual interaction here: the Romans/
Byzantines, trying to make sense of this bewildering array of armed and potentially dangerous
“barbarians,” classified them according to patterns known to their ethnographic traditions. The
Byzantines often used the same, by now archaic, names, taken from Herodotos and other
classical authors and hence conforming to the ethnographies of the ancient world.176 The tribal
elites, ever anxious to maintain access to the Roman world, were prepared to tailor their profiles,
as it were, to fit Roman preconceptions of what a “people” should be. These cultural filters were
passed along with literacy (in Latin) to “Barbarian” historians who interpreted their past, real and
invented, in ways, vocabularies and categories that would be understandable to the
Graeco-Roman literary world.
In the west, the Frankish confederation took shape in the third century AD in
considerable interaction with the Roman Empire177 in a pattern which David Harry Miller has
173
See Wolfram, Roman Empire, p.3.
174
Cf. Bowlus, “Ethnogenesis: The Tyranny of a Complex” in Gillet (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, pp.239-256,
among others in that volume and the defense offered by W. Pohl, “Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition: A Response” in
Gillet (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, pp.221-239.
175
See discussion in Sinor, “The Legendary Origins of the Türks” in Žegas and Voorheis (eds.), Folklorica:
Festschrift for Felix J. Oinas, pp.223-257.
176
“Scythian” was used to denote various Oğuric Turkic peoples, European Avars, Khazars, Turkic Bulğars,
Hungarians, Pečenegs, Oğuz, Cumans, the Selujuks, Mongols and early Ottomans, see Moravcsik,
Byzantinoturcica2, II, pp.279-283.
177
Wolfram, Roman Empire, pp. 48-49.
termed “frontier ethnogenesis.”178 Like the Xiongnu in Inner Asia, the groupings that became
the Franks were responding to the powerful imperial military presence that had come to their
borders.179 In a sense, the genesis of the Franks may be viewed as another example of Roman
engineering- in this instance putting into place - perhaps without always intending to do so –
political and ethnic infrastructures rather than roads and aqueducts. In the western Eurasian
steppes we have the example of the Černii Klobouci, an amalgam of steppe tribes, remnants that
had not been conquered by the Qıpčaqs, who were brought into the Rus’ state and served as
border guards.180 This was an early stage of ethnogenesis. Their various component parts, e.g.
the Berendiči, Kayepiči (Qay-opa), as well as some Pečeneg and Western Oğuz groupings,
having been organized politically by the Rus’, in time could have formed a distinct people. This
process was stopped short by the Mongol invasions.
Even once established, the actual components of a particular ethnonym could change
over time. These were highly fluid political entities. The Franks of the fourth century, as Patrick
Geary has noted, were not the same as the Franks of the sixth century. “Names were, “ he notes,
“renewable resources. They held the potential to convince people of continuity, even if radical
discontinuity was the lived reality.”181 “Ethnic names, “ as Edward James notes in his study of
the Franks, “are but labels. They may be applied to people who would not use that name of
themselves; they may gather together groups of people who would not think of themselves as
constituting one group.” 182 The steppe world has examples of that as well.
178
See D.H. Miller, “Ethnogenesis and Religious Revitalization beyond the Roman Frontier: The Case of Frankish
Origins” Journal of World History, 4/2 (Fall, 1993), pp. 277-285. See the brief overview of the early Franks in W.
Pohl, Die Germanen (München, 2000), pp. 33ff. and E. James, The Franks (Oxford, 1988), pp.11ff.and the critical
survey of the Traditionskern model by A. C. Murray, “Reinhard Wenskus on ‘Ethnogenesis’, Ethnicity, and the
Origin of the Franks” in Gillet (ed.), On Barbarian Identity, pp. 39-68.
179
See Wolfram, Roman Empire, pp. 41-42.
180
See P.B. Golden, “Černii klobouci” Symbolae Turcologicae – Studies in Honour of Lars Johanson, ed. Á. Berta,
B. Brendemoen, and C. Schönig, in the Transactions of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, vol. 6 (Uppsala,
1996), pp. 97-107.
181
See P.J. Geary, The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), p. 118. See also Pohl,
“Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies” Archaeologia Polona 29 (1991), pp. 39-49 and Curta, The
Making of the Slavs.
182
James, The Franks, p.6.
More directly related to our theme are the activities of Tang Taizong (627-649) with
respect to the Eastern Türks. The Tang played a key role in the collapse of the Eastern and
Western Türk Qaghanates (who were subjugated during the reign of his son, Gaozong (649-683).
After the collapse of the first Türk Qaghanate in the east, in 630, the Taizong, we are told, at the
behest of the nomads who had now come under his control, assumed the title of “Heavenly
Qaghan” and declared that he alone “loved” the “Barbarians” and as a consequence, they
followed him “like a father or mother.”183 His purposes – and those of his successors who
continued to use this title have been much debated. This was, in any event, an extraordinary
claim by the Tang, made all the more extraordinary by the apparent willingness of the northern
nomads to accept this.184 After having engineered the downfall of the first Türk Empire in the
east in 630, the Tang attempted to assimilate the Türks by bringing them south of the Yellow
River. The ruling clan, high ranking nobles and clan chiefs were given Chinese titles, brought
into Tang service, and settled in the capital. When assimilation failed, at least with regard to the
rank and file tribesmen, Tang Taizong resettled them on the frontier to function as part of the
border security against other nomads. The Türks were soon hard-pressed by the Xueyantuo
(perhaps to be identifed with the Sir Tarduš), one of their former subject confederations. Taizong
brought them to territories (644) within and on the borders of China (the sources are insufficient
to determine the full pattern), helping thus to preserve them as a distinct political and ethnic
grouping – and a still viable force to help in China’s frontier defense. There was resistance. In
639, one of the Türk leaders made an attempt against Taizong, causing the latter to shift policy
and move the Türks north of the Yellow River, to serve now as a “client state,” under an Ašina,
in protecting the borders. This was also aimed at the Xueyantuo (Sir Tarduš). Taizong made it
clear to the latter that he would help the Turks if the Xueyantuo attacked them and did so in 641.
He played different factions against each other and (640) rejected a request of a Sir Tarduš
Qağan, Yi’nan, for a Tang bride, hoping, thereby, to lessen his claims to qağanal status.
183
C. Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia 221 B.C. - A.D. 907 (Honolulu, 2000), p. 23.
184
See discussion in Pan, Yihong, Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan. Sui-Tang China and its Neighbors
(Bellingham, Washington, 1997), pp. 179-82, who attributes this as well as the dynasty’s openness to foreign,
especially Central Asian cultural influences, to the non-Chinese elements in their background.
Xueyantuo pressure on the Türks continued nonetheless and in 644 they were again allowed
within Chinese borders in the Ordos. After Yi’nan’s death (645), the Sir Tarduš quickly faded
(646) beset by internal problems and external foes within the steppe (the Uyğurs). In short,
Taizong deliberately preserved the Eastern Türks, coming to their aid when necessary,
determining who would govern them, and maintaining their viability as an ethno-political group
in the interests of Chinese policy. This was done so that the Türks “could continue to function”
as defenders of the Tang frontier. The Xueyantuo, now weakened, were also brought under Tang
rule. Such interventions and micromanagement, where possible, of the affairs of the peoples in
the tribal zone was standard practice. In this fashion, Tang power was extended to the Western
Türks as well by 659.185
Without Tang intervention, the Eastern Türks would have vanished. Taizong’s goal, of
course, typical of a ruler operating in the tribal zone, was to maintain an equilibrium, keeping all
the nomads capable of causing mischief off balance. Needless to say, he could not predict the
ultimate results. The Eastern Türks revived a generation later and founded the Second Türk
Empire (682-742), responding in part to the real fear that they would simply fade away among
the deracinated folk serving on the Chinese frontiers, while their leaders became Tang servitors.
Sanping Chen has recently suggested that the Türk revolt was not so much a national liberation
movement as a “consequence of the growing alienation felt by a (junior) partner in a
Sarbo-Turco-Chinese joint venture that was tilting more and more toward agrarian traditions.”186
This is not the impression left by the Old Türk inscriptions which depict their time in Tang
service as tantamount to servitude and warned the Türks not to be taken in again by the sweet
words and goods of China.187 Among the Türk elite, the China experience had heightened their
sense of Türk identity – perhaps because they, the elite, had come so close to succumbing to
Sinicization. This wariness of China is seen in the Orxon inscriptions. In the inscription devoted
185
See Pan, Son of Heaven, pp. 179, 187-196; H. Bielenstein, Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World 589-1276
(Leiden, 2005), pp.386-389, 413-415.
186
Chen,“Succession Struggle and the Ethnic Identity of the Tang Imperial House” Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, ser. 3, 6/3 (1996), pp. 396-397.
187
Tekin, Orhon Yazıtları, pp.2-4.
to Tonyuquq, the chief advisor to Elteriš/Ilteriš, the Ašina who renewed Türk Qağanate, he says
that he was “shaped in the Chinese state” (tabğač ilinge qılıntım) where the Türk people, having
surrendered, “had perished, had become used up, had ceased to exist” (Türk boḏun ölti alqıntı
yoq boltı).188 This from a man with a Chinese education189
As we have noted, all the imperial societies that bordered with the tribal northlands,
China, Iran, Rome, were anxious to create some order in their tribal zones. Those who ventured
directly into the tribal zone, such as China and Rome, created or manipulated peoples and
sometimes states with results that were not always favorable to them. Iran rarely became directly
involved with the steppe although it too sought to control the tribes through economic access and
even - in very special cases - marital ties with the royal house. But the Shahs had learned from
the fate of those who recklessly entered the steppes. The Achaemenid founder, Cyrus, died at the
hands of vengeful Scythians. The Sâsânid Peroz (459-484) was killed in a campaign in the steppe
against the Hephthalites, the very nomads who had helped him seize power.190 The Byzantines
never sent an army into the steppe, but sought through diplomacy, bribes and the constant
juggling of tribal alliances to maintain order in the tribal zone. They did, however, periodically
engage in military activity closer to home in the Balkans. Here, the Byzantine presence on the
Danubian frontier,191 as well as in the Balkans played a crucial role in the crystallization of the
Slavic peoples.
The Spread of the EthnonymTürk
188
Ajdarov, Jazyk orxonskix pamjatnikov, p. 324.
189
S.G. Kljaštornyj, “Ton’jukuk-Ashidé juan’čžen’” Tjurkologičeskij Sbornik (Moskva, 1966 ), pp. 202-205, who
derives Tonyuquq’s name from ton “first” + yuquq (< yoq-/yuq- “to preserve, value” = Chin. Yuan Zhen ““First
Treasure.” Yoq-/yuq-, however, is not noted in Clauson, ED, pp. 897-898 (yuq- “to stick (to something)”) in this
meaning. For ton, see Clauson, ED, p. 513: tun “first born.” In Chinese, he was Ashide Yuan Zhen. Ashide (EMC ʔa
ʂɨ tǝk, LMC ʔa ʂṛ tǝǝ̆k, Pulleyblank, Lexicon, pp. 2374, 283) is the name of his clan. It is also noted in a Tibetan
document (see F. Venturi, “An Old Tibetan Document on the Uighurs” Journal of Asian History 42/1 (2008), p. 21:
a-she sde. Zuev, Rannie tjurki, pp. 86,133, 168-169, believes that it renders *Aštaq, which represented the “in-law”
clan of the Ašina. He views the Tonyuquq inscription as a means to promote a notion of co-rulership with the Ašina.
The mother of An Lushan, the half Soġdian-half-Türk Tang general who revolted in 755 against the Tang was
descended on his mother’s side from the Ashide (Liu, CN, I, 267).
190
R.N. Frye, Ancient Iran, pp. 322-323; McGovern, The Early Empires of Central Asia (Chapel Hill, 1939), pp.
414-415.
191
See Curta, The Making of the Slavs, who argues that Slavic ethnicity was “invented” by the Byzantines.
Janhunen has pointed to the instability of ethnonyms in Eastern Inner Asia, remarking
that they can be transferred to smaller social units (“subethnic groups and clans”) or “borrowed
by alien groups.” Under such conditions of flux, long-term continuities are difficult to prove.192
In sum, ethnonyms take shape in multiple environments, in both that of the “host” and that of the
“significant other” - often a major neighboring state with which it is in contact. Languages
spread by conquest and by more pacific modes. Igor’ D’jakonov’s notion of the movement of
Indo-European languages in relay race fashion193 comes to mind in which the tongue of some
core group is adopted by peoples among whom they settle and then a new group, now a mix of
the two or more peoples, but bearing the ethnic designation of the dominant language, brings the
language - and ethnonym- to yet another grouping and the process of linguistic change and
further mixing continues. We should bear this in mind in looking at the Turks.
All of the peoples under Türk rule took the name Türk as a political designation. Rašîd
ad-Dîn (d. 1318), in his discussion of the Turkic and Mongolic tribes of Inner and Central Asia,
repeatedly notes that ethnonyms spread as political designations. Most of the Turkic peoples, he
remarks, now call themselves “Mongol” (Muġûl) after the latter had established their hegemony
in the steppe in the same way that earlier many peoples had adopted the name Tatar when they
were the paramount force in the eastern steppes.194 The Mongols themselves, he comments,
were, “in ancient times, one tribe of the collectivity of tribes of the steppe-dwelling Turks.”195
This shows how widespread the ethnonym Türk had become in the Muslim and steppe world as a
generic term for the pastoral nomadic, Turkic and Mongolic-speaking peoples. Muslim authors
remark on the sense of jinsiyya, a complicated Arabic term which we may translate here as
“national solidarity,” that the Turks and Mongols felt, and which was occasionally used as a ploy
by the Mongols to win over Turkic peoples.196
192
Janhunen, Manchuria, p. 25.
193
I.M. Diakonov, “Language Contacts in the Caucasus and the Near East” in T.L. Markey and John A.C. Greppin
(eds.), When Worlds Collide: Indo-Europeans and the Pre-Indo-Europeans (Ann Arbor, 1990) and his The Paths of
History (Cambridge, 1999), p.19.
194
Rašîd ad-Dîn, Jâmi‘ at-Tawârîx, ed. M. Rawšan and M. Mûsawî (Tehran, 1373/1994), I, 41-44, 50ff.
195
Rašîd ad-Dîn, ed. Rawšan and Mûsawî, I, p. 78.
196
Cf. Ibn al-Atîr, Al-Kâmil fî’t-Ta’rîx, ed. C.J. Tornberg (Beirut reprint, 1965-1966 which differs in pagination
During and after the Türk era, the designation Türk was used in reference to the Khazars
(ca. 650-965), a successor state that derived from the Western Türk empire197 and later the
Hungarians, some of whose political institutions had their origins in the Khazar state. The
Uyğurs who completed the overthrow of the Türk with their expulsion of the Ašina-led Basmıl in
744 continued to use the term Türk to denote both the Turkic peoples and the literary language
that had developed in the Türk state. The Uyğurs themselves made significant contributions,
during and after their imperial period (post 840), to its further development. Thus, for example,
the eleventh century Uyğur translator of the Chinese biography of Xuanzang, the famous
Chinese Buddhist pilgrim and traveler, refers to his translation tvğač tilintin...Türk tilinče “from
Chinese language... into the Türk tongue.”198 In that same work, as was noted previously, the
ethnonym Xiongnu is rendered as Türk yočul bodun “Turk nomadic people.”199 This expression
is also found in the Turkic translation from the Tokharian version of the Maytrisimit: erk Türk
yočul bodun “strong, Türk nomadic people.”200 Clearly, Türk is being used here as a generic, not
a specific reference to the actual Türks nor necessarily an indication that the Xiongnu were
Turks. Interestingly enough, a Soġdian document of the early eighth century uses xwn “Hun” to
denote “Turk.”201
The Khazar Cambridge Document published by Schechter, which dates to the mid-tenth
century, refers to the Oğuz and the Oğuz lands as ‫( טורקו‬Ṭwrqw or ) and ‫( טורקיא‬Ṭwrqia).202
The Rus’ chroniclers of the eleventh-twelfth century term the Oğuz Торкъ, Торчинъ, Торци.203
from the original Leiden edition of 1851-1876), XII, pp. 368, 375, 385-386, on the Mongol appeal to the Qıpčaqs.
197
E. Bretschneider, Medieval Researches From Eastern Asiatic Sources (London, 1910), II, p. 93 : the Gesa
[Ko-sa] “who belong to the stock of the T’u-chüe;” Maljavkin, Tanskie xroniki, pp.84 (Xin Tang-shu), 272n.652;
Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. c. de Boor (Lipsiae, 1883), I, pp.315, 407, 409, 433, 435 (Khazaria = Τουρκία),
K’art’lis C’xovreba, ed. S. Qauxč’išvili (T’bilisi, 1955), I, p. 223; al-Ya‘qûbî, Ta’rîx, ed. M. Th. Houtsma (Leiden,
1883), II, pp. 375-395.
198
L. Ju. Tuguševa (ed., trans.), Ujgurskaja versija biografii Sjuan’-czana (Moskva, 1991), p.96 (V87, lines 11-14).
199
Tuguševa, Ujgurskaja versija, pp. 17-22, 132 (VI, 43, lines 18-19), 133 (VI, 44, line24) and her “O
slovosočetanii “Türk Yočul Bodun’ v drevnetjurkskix pis’mennyx pamjatnikax” in S.G. Kljaštronyj, Ju. A.
Petrosjan (eds.), Tjurkskie i mongol’skie ous’mennye pamjatniki (Moskva, 1992), pp. 97-101.
200
Ş. Tekin (ed.), Maytrisimit (Ankara, 1976), p. 157 (85/21-22).
201
Kljaštornyj, Ist. Central’noj Azii, p. 422n. 39, citing B.A. Livšic, “Sogdijskiij bračnyj kontrakt načala VIII v.
n.é.” Sovetskaja Étnografija No. 5 (1960), p. 103.
202
N. Golb, O. Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century Ithaca, 1982), pp. 94, 112-115.
203
Cf. Polnoe sobranie russkix letopisej (Moskva-Sankt Peterburg/Petrograd/Leningrad, 1843-1995), I, cc.84, 162,
163 etc.
These forms may reflect Türk or a variant Törk. Both the Hebrew and Rus’ forms do not
conform to the usual systems of transcribing Türk. If this is Türk it would indicate a continuation
of this term among the Oğuz.
The Arabs’ first encounter with Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples was with the Western
Türks with whom they warred in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the seventh and eighth
century. The Islamic geographers, Arab and Persian, adopted it as a generic term for all the
Turkic peoples, following here the paradigm of the Arab tribes. As noted above, al-Iṣṭaxrî
(mid-tenth century) emphasized that the “Turks” have “one tongue”204 The notion of a Turkic
linguistic and cultural community, perhaps influenced by the Arabs’ understanding of their own
tribal past, was present in the earliest Turko-Islamic literature. Maḥmûd al-Kâšġarî cites a Turkic
saying that clearly juxtaposes Turk and non-Turk: “There is no Turk without a Tat (just as) there
can be no hat without a head” (tatsız Türk bolmas bašsız börk bolmas).205 Tat is the term used for
“alien” and in particular the Iranian population206 with which the Turks had been and were in
constant contact in Central Asia. Kâšġarî renders this saying into Arabic as “there is no Persian
except in the company of a Turk, just as there is no cap without a head to put it on,” probably
wishing to cast the Turks in a less dependent light. Kâšġarî blended the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
genealogical tradition with that of the Turks. As we noted above, Kâšġarî reported that “in
origin,” the Turks were twenty tribes. He also added that “each tribe has branches whose number
only God knows.” With the exception of the Oğuz (who were then rulers of the Middle East
under the Seljuk house), he limited his discussion only to the “great tribes.”207
Further indications for the generic use of the ethnonym Türk can be seen in the creation
by Muslim authors of a Persian-based folk etymology for the ethnonym Türkmen < Türk + suffix
of strengthing -men. This was a term that evolved in a Turko-Muslim milieu and was first
applied to Oğuz (with whom it ultimately became firmly affixed) and Qarluqs who had
Islamized. Al-Bîrûnî explained it as deriving from Turk-mânand “resembling a Turk.” Rašîd
204
Al-Iṣṭaxrî, Kitâb Masâlik wa Masâlik, ed. de Goeje, p 9.
205
Kâšġarî/Dankoff, II, p. 103. The translation is mine.
206
Clauson, ED, p.449.
207
Kâšġarî/Dankoff, I, p. 82.
ad-Dîn gives a more detailed explanation indicating that it developed as a result of Turk
acculturation to Iranian Transoxiana. He suggests that in this region they were influenced by “the
water and climate, by degrees, their appearance became like that of the Tâžîks, the Tâžîk peoples
called them Turkmân, that is ‘resembling Turks.’”208 Thus, the name Türk, originally associated
with a relatively small and distinct ethnos had thus become widely applied by Turkic-speakers
and their neighbors to the collectivity of peoples speaking Turkic and, in the Mongol era, to
Mongol as well. By this era it had come to denote Turko-Mongolian nomad, one coming out of
the Imperial Steppe political tradition and had taken on a life of its own in both the nomadic and
sedentary worlds.
208
Al-Bîrûnî, Kitâb al-Jamâhir fî Ma‘rifat al-Jawâhir, ed. S. Krenkow (Ḥaidarâbâd, 1355/1936-37), p. 205; Rašîd
ad-Dîn, ed. Rawšan and Mûsawî, I, p. 55. This etymology was also known to Maḥmûd al-Kâšġarî/Dankoff, I, p.
353, II, p. 362.

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Peter B.

ETHNOGENESIS IN THE TRIBAL ZONE: THE SHAPING OF THE

their imperial sedentary neighbors.10

political than biological11 – although political loyalty in “imagined communities” of tribal

juxtaposition13), and even by transient circumstances producing “situational ethnicity.”14 In

Soġdian plural form18), *Türkü,19 or *Turkwar ~ *Durkwar and ultimately Türk-wač/Türk-βač

Finnic and locate them on the Middle Kama.

tradition. Moreover, while Indo-Europeans (Indo-Iranians and Tokharians) clearly moved

38 The Loulan39 in Xinjiang and the Wusun are Indo-Europeans.

the Middle Ages.

perhaps Slavic and others) to the Hunnic union.

(ed.), The Mongolic Languages, p.405-406.

distinguished royal lineage that antedated that of the Türks.63

not all of the Turkic peoples.

The Turkic Ancient Homeland

is the consequence of long-standing ties of borrowing and interaction (convergence, areal

points of contiguity were located.

buŋğaq/muyğaq /mungaq (female of sığın80), ıvıq (“gazelle”), yegeren (“antelope”), bulan

Turkistan, now Xinjiang, was largely Turkicized.95

western Manchurian borderlands.97 The Mongolian-Manchurian borderlands, as noted

in the Mongol-Manchurian zone.

in the modern day provinces of Northern China.”98 In this reconstruction, the

Proto-Turko-Mongolic and Proto-Manchu-Tungus groupings emerged in the course of the

Iranians, with whom they were in direct contact.99

Russian-Ukrainian steppelands and southwards to the Caucasus.103 Subsequently, military

Scytho-Iranian peoples of Western and Northwestern Mongolia. The mixture of ethno-somatic

its beginnings here, at the very dawn of Turkic history.

ministrations of a she-wolf (a common progenetrix figure in Eurasian ethnogonic tales extending

slopes of the Jinshan, “Golden Mountain,” i.e. the Altay.

Abangbu (EMC a paŋh bɔh, LMC a pɦaŋ̀ pɦuǝ 118

leadership by virtue of their special skills.

generations engaged in the preparation of iron implements.”122

especially the Soġdians.129

’’šyn’s : *Turkit/*Turukit/*Trukit Ašinas – although this reading is not without problems.132 If

founding of the state.

Yazıtları, pp. 8/9, 36/37 70-71.

thus far been etymologized.

and England, underwent several, similar linguistic and cultural transformations.

Empires and Tribes

were politically, economically and culturally deeply engaged in Central Asia.

contact with Constantinople.156

that produced Chinggis Khan.

“Barbarian” ruler rather than a host of chieftains.

invented, in ways, vocabularies and categories that would be understandable to the

Graeco-Roman literary world.

process was stopped short by the Mongol invasions.

Türks as well by 659.185

movement as a “consequence of the growing alienation felt by a (junior) partner in a

yoq boltı).188 This from a man with a Chinese education189

The Spread of the EthnonymTürk

by the Mongols to win over Turkic peoples.196

of this term among the Oğuz.

Islamized. Al-Bîrûnî explained it as deriving from Turk-mânand “resembling a Turk.” Rašîd

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Soġdian plural form18), Türkü,19 or Turkwar ~ *Durkwar and ultimately Türk-wač/Türk-βač

’’šyn’s : Turkit/Turukit/*Trukit Ašinas – although this reading is not without problems.132 If