First Turkic Khaganate

The first people to be called Turks

Drafted from Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)formation

In 552 a subject people of the Rouran, ironworkers of the Altai, revolted under Bumin and destroyed their overlords. The polity they created is the first in history whose people called themselves Turk, and within twenty-five years it reached from Manchuria to the Black Sea — the largest steppe empire before the Mongols.

Its western half, under Bumin's brother Istami, destroyed the Hephthalites in alliance with the Sasanians, then fell out with them over the silk trade and sent an embassy to Constantinople in 568 proposing a joint attack on Persia. That embassy is the point at which the steppe becomes a party to the diplomacy between the Mediterranean and Iran rather than a frontier problem for both.

The khaganate also produced a script: the runiform Old Turkic of the Orkhon inscriptions, raised by a later revival of the same house, which are the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language and the only place a steppe empire of this period explains itself at length in its own voice.

It split into eastern and western halves in 603, and both were eventually absorbed by Tang China. What followed is a fifty-year interruption, a second khaganate raised out of it by a man who went out with seventeen followers, and then the Uyghurs.

To the Iron Gate

Drafted from Tegin, The Orkhon Inscriptions (1930)expansion

Two hundred years after the event, the second khaganate's memorial stones set down what the founders had done, and the account is a compass:

Over the sons of men set themselves as rulers my forbears Bumin kagan and Istami kagan, and having set themselves as rulers they governed and kept in order the Turkish peoples' kingdoms and polity. All the peoples in the four quarters of the world were foes to them; but they waged wars against them and overcame all the peoples in the four quarters of the world, made them keep the peace and bow their head and bend their knee. Towards the East they made them settle as far as the mountain forest of Kadirkan, to the West as far as Tamir-kapig — the Iron Gate.

The Iron Gate is the pass at Buzgala, south of Samarkand, on the road into Bactria. Kadirkan is the Khingan range in Manchuria. Between those two points is about five thousand kilometres, and the claim is that two brothers took all of it in one generation, starting from a revolt of ironworkers against the Rouran in 552.

Why it could be done at all

The Turks were not the first people to hold this ground. They were the first to hold it as a single command with a working division of labour: Bumin in the east on the Orkhon, his brother Istami in the west from the Ili valley, each a sovereign in his own quarter and both parts of one house.

That structure is why the western half could conduct its own foreign policy. Istami destroyed the Hephthalites in alliance with the Sasanians, fell out with them almost at once over the silk trade — the Persians wanted the Sogdian merchants kept out of their market — and in 568 sent an embassy to Constantinople proposing a joint attack on Persia. The Byzantines sent one back. That is the moment the steppe stops being a frontier problem for the Mediterranean and Iran and becomes a third party in the diplomacy between them.

The inventory of the funeral

The inscription's best evidence for the reach is not a boast. It is a guest list.

When Bumin and Istami died, the monument says, there came to the funeral and the mourning, from the east, the far-off Bökli nation, the Chinese, the Tibetans, the Avars, the Kirghiz, the Three Kurikans, the Thirty Tatars, the Kitay and the Tatabi.

A century and a half later, at Kul Tegin's funeral in 732, the delegations are listed again and the list has changed shape: envoys from the Kitay and Tatabi; from the Chinese emperor, two named men bringing gold and silver by the ten thousand; from the Tibetan qaghan an official whose Tibetan title the Turkish scribe transcribed phonetically; from the Sogds, the Persians and the Bukhara tribes in the west, two more named men; from the Ten Arrows and the Türgish qaghan, two keepers of the seal; from the Kirghiz qaghan, one envoy.

Read those two paragraphs together and you have the political map of Inner Asia without a single sentence of narrative. Everyone who mattered from Manchuria to Bukhara sent somebody, twice, a hundred and fifty years apart, and the Turks recorded who came because who came was the point.

What holding it meant

Not administration. The inscriptions have no tax, no province, no governor and no city. What they have instead is a verb repeated until it becomes a formula:

From them that had a kingdom we took away their kingdom; them that had a qaghan we robbed of their qaghan; we made them bend their knee and bow their head.

An empire of this kind is a set of subordinated dynasties, each keeping its own people and its own ground, each obliged to send men when called and to send an envoy when the qaghan's brother died. That is a cheap way to hold five thousand kilometres and it has one structural weakness, which the same stones set out at length: every one of those subordinated peoples is a rebellion waiting for the centre to look weak.

The horses had names

Drafted from Tegin, The Orkhon Inscriptions (1930)peak

The second khaganate at its height is documented in a way nothing else on the steppe is: campaign by campaign, in the first person, with the horses named.

The Kul Tegin monument works through his brother's career as a ledger, and the form is worth noticing before the content. Age, enemy, place, horse, number of men killed by his own hand, result. It repeats about twenty times.

The ledger

At sixteen, against the Six Chub and the Sogds; a Chinese commander came with fifty thousand and Kul Tegin attacked at the run with the footmen, took the commander prisoner with his spearmen and brought them armed to the qaghan.

At twenty-one, against Chacha Sengün. He attacked riding Tadiq Chur's grey; the horse was killed. He attacked again on Ishbara Yamtar's grey; that horse was killed. He attacked a third time on Yegin Silig Beg's brown Kedimlig; that horse was killed too. His armour and his moon-diamond ornament they hit with more than 100 arrows, but not one hurt the plates or his head.

At twenty-six, against the Kirghiz: they cut a road through snow a lance deep, went over the Kögmen forest and fell on the Kirghiz as they slept. He rode Bayirku's white stallion, shot one man, pierced two others one after the other, and broke the stallion's leg in the charge. They killed the Kirghiz qaghan and took the realm.

In the same year, against the Türgish, over the Altai and across the Irtysh, falling on them as they slept as well.

At twenty-seven the Karluks. At thirty-one the Az, whose chief he took prisoner. Then the Izgil, destroyed, and his horse dead under him again. Then the Nine Oghuz five times in one year, on the white Azman, on the brown Az, on the black-brown Az.

What the ledger is for

None of it is the record of a state. There is no province in it, no tax, no governor, no city, no law. What is being recorded is a man's personal courage and the number of times he charged, and the reason is that this was the qualification.

A steppe empire of this kind holds together because subordinate peoples believe the centre will win. The monument is not boasting for its own sake; it is publishing the evidence, in the only currency that mattered, for a house whose authority rested on nothing else — no descent from a god, no scripture, no capital, no bureaucracy. Bumin and Istami had been wise qaghans, stout-hearted and so were their officials, the same text says, and that is offered as the whole explanation of why they could govern so great a realm.

The white horse and the camp

There is one entry that is not a victory, and it is the one the text builds towards.

After wintering, the army set out in the spring against the Oghuz and Kul Tegin was sent back to carry orders home. The hostile Oghuz fell on the camp. He transfixed nine men, riding his white Ögsiz — the motherless — and did not yield the camp.

My mother the katun, along with my stepmothers, my aunts, and elder sisters, my daughters-in-law, my princesses — all of those that were left alive, would have become slave-women, and those of you that were slain would have been left lying in the camp or on the road. If Kül tegin had not been there, it would have been all over with you all.

That is the peak of the second khaganate, stated by the man who ruled it: an empire from Manchuria to Bukhara, whose survival on one particular afternoon came down to one rider on one horse in front of the tents.

And then the mourning

Kul Tegin died in 731, in his forty-seventh year, and Bilge's account of it abandons the ledger entirely.

Now my brother Kül tegin is dead. I have myself mourned. My eyes, though seeing, have become as blinded; my thoughts, though conscious, have become as without consciousness... But the sons of men are all born to die, so soon as Heaven ordains the time.

The funeral was held on the twenty-seventh day of the ninth month, and the hall, the paintings and the inscribed stone were dedicated on 21 August 732. The dates are on the monument, which is the only place in this part of the world where a steppe empire dated anything of its own.

Fifty years

Drafted from Tegin, The Orkhon Inscriptions (1930)contraction

The most remarkable passage on the Orkhon stones is not a boast but an autopsy. Bilge Qaghan explains to his people how the first khaganate was lost, and he does not blame the Chinese army.

The sequence

After them their younger brothers became kagans, and their sons became kagans; but the younger brothers were now not like their elder brothers, the sons were not like their fathers. It was incapable kagans that mounted the throne, it was bad kagans; their buyruks were likewise incapable and they were bad.

Then the mechanism: want of harmony between the begs and the people, Chinese cunning and craft and intrigue, and younger and elder brothers taking counsel against one another and setting begs against people. That brought the old realm to dissolution and destroyed its lawful qaghans.

What followed is stated without softening. The sons of the nobles became the bondsmen of the Chinese people, their unsullied daughters became its slaves. The Turkish begs gave up their Turkish names, and bearing the Chinese names of Chinese begs they obeyed the Chinese Emperor, and served him during fifty years.

Fifty years — from about 630, when the eastern khaganate fell to the Tang, to the revolt of the 680s. In that half-century, the stone says, Turkish armies campaigned for the Chinese emperor eastward to the sunrise and westward as far as the Iron Gate, and conquered kingdoms and power for him.

The complaint that starts the revolt

Then the inscription does something no chronicle does. It quotes the ordinary people.

The whole of the common Turkish people said thus: "I have been a nation that had its own kingdom; where is now my kingdom? For whom do I win the kingdoms?" said they. "I have been a people that had its own kagan; where is my kagan? Which kagan is it I serve?" they said.

They rose, and — the text is candid about this too — having risen, they could not put themselves in order or take proper thought, and submitted again.

Seventeen men

The recovery, when it came, is counted in a way that reads like a ledger.

Heaven raised up Bilge's father Elterish and his mother Elbilge. My father the kagan went forth with seventeen men. When word spread that he was out, those in the towns came out and those on the mountains came down, and when they gathered they were seventy. Then, as Heaven gave them strength, his army was as wolves and their foes as sheep; making marches east and west he gathered people until there were seven hundred.

Seventeen, seventy, seven hundred. With that he reorganised a people that had lost its realm and its qaghan, whose institutions had been broken up, and divided it again into the Tölis and Tardush wings under a yabghu and a shad.

Then the tally: to the south the Chinese were hostile, to the north the Nine Oghuz, and the Kirghiz, Kurikans, Thirty Tatars, Kitay and Tatabi were all hostile too. Forty-seven times he went campaigning, and fought in twenty fights.

What is being argued

A monument raised by a restored dynasty for its own dead is a political document, and this one has a case to make: that the collapse was the people's fault and the recovery was the family's achievement. Every campaign in it is a victory and every difficulty is somebody's cowardice.

But the analysis it offers is not self-serving in the way you would expect. A qaghan who wanted only to flatter his house would blame the enemy. Bilge blames succession — brothers unlike brothers, sons unlike fathers — and then blames his own subjects for being seduced. He is describing the two failure modes of a steppe empire, accurately, on a stone he expected to be read for centuries, and he was right about both.

Stay in the forest

Drafted from Tegin, The Orkhon Inscriptions (1930)end

Bilge Qaghan knew what was going to destroy his people and said so on a stone, in the imperative, and it did not help.

The warning

While I have ruled here, I have become reconciled with the Chinese people. The Chinese people, who give in abundance gold, silver, millet and silk, have always used ingratiating words and have at their disposal enervating riches. While ensnaring them with their ingratiating talk and enervating riches, they have drawn the far-dwelling peoples nearer to themselves. But after settling down near them these have come to see their cunning.

The argument is not that the Chinese are enemies. It is that they are generous on purpose. And the counter-policy is geographic:

If thou then go forth to that land, O Turkish nation, thou wilt come to destruction; but if thou stay in the land of Ötüken, and send out caravans, thou wilt never suffer any need. If thou stay on in the mountain forest of Ötüken, thou shalt ever hold an everlasting kingdom, O Turkish nation, and thou shalt be full-fed.

Stay in the forest and trade outward. Do not go and live next to the market. The Ötükan forest, the stone says twice, has no foreign overlord, and is the place from which the kingdom is held together.

Then the sentence that gives the whole thing away, because it explains why nobody listens:

When thou art hungry, thou dost not remember what fullness is; but once thou art full-fed, thou hast no thought of what hunger is.

The trap he could not close

Bilge could see the mechanism and could not stop it, and the inscription records that too, in the middle of an address meant to inspire.

Some among the Turks, it says, decided to settle in the south, in the plain rather than in the Chugay forest, and wicked men encouraged them with the argument that when they are far away the Chinese give bad gifts and when they are near they give good ones. The foolish persons were taken by these words, and went down to their neighbourhood, whereby many among you have come to destruction.

He also had to reconquer his own people repeatedly. The Nine Oghuz, the stone says, was my own people, and they rose against him; within one year he fought them five times. The Karluks, free and independent, came to war. The Az people came to war. The Izgil people were destroyed. Every one of those is a subordinate the empire had taken, and every one of them had to be taken again.

The end, which is not in the text

The second khaganate outlived Bilge by about ten years. He was poisoned in 734; his sons did not hold it; in 744 the Uyghurs, with the Karluks and the Basmil, killed the last qaghan and took the Ötükan.

The monuments stayed where they were. What destroyed the state was not Chinese silk, in the end, but the ordinary thing — a subordinated people that saw the centre weaken and did what the inscription itself predicts subordinated peoples do. Bilge had named the mechanism in his autopsy of the first khaganate and it came for the second on schedule.

Who cut the stone

There is one more fact on the monument, and it is stranger than the warning.

From the Chinese Emperor I have had artists to come, and have set them to work. My request has not been refused. They have sent the Chinese Emperor's court painters. I have bidden them set up a separate hall, and inside and out I have had them to make various remarkable paintings.

The great anti-Chinese manifesto of the steppe was carved by masons and painted by artists requested from, and supplied by, the Chinese emperor — who also provided a Chinese inscription for the reverse of the same stone, saying entirely different things. The Turkish face warns against Chinese gifts. It was itself a Chinese gift.

A steppe empire in its own words

Drafted from Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)aside?What aside means

In the Orkhon valley in Mongolia stand stone monuments raised in the 730s for Kul Tegin and Bilge Qaghan of the second Turk khaganate, carrying long inscriptions in the runiform Turkic script. They are the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language, and the only place in the whole history of the steppe before the Mongols where a nomadic empire explains itself at length in its own voice.

They are two great square monoliths that stood in sockets and have fallen; the second is in four pieces. Three sides of each carry Turkish in runic characters, and the western side carries Chinese. The Chinese is beautifully cut and the runic is less elegant, though probably the work of the same Chinese stonecutters — and the two texts, as Ross notes, differ entirely in their contents.

That is the artefact worth dwelling on. On one face a steppe empire's account of itself; on the other, the same monument, a Tang court's account of the same people. They were carved at the same time by the same hands and they do not describe the same object.

Everything else in this part of the world survives only in the second kind of text. The Xiongnu are known through Sima Qian, the Rouran through the Wei histories, the Khazars through Arabic and Hebrew correspondence, the Mongols through everyone they attacked. The Orkhon stones are the one place where both versions sit on the same block of rock, and the difference between them is measurable.

The word, and the alphabet

Drafted from Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)afterlife

The khaganate lasted, in its two incarnations, about a hundred and ninety years. What it left is a noun that is now attached to a language family, a nation-state, and something like two hundred million people.

Türk

Before 552 there is no people that calls itself Türk. The word appears as the name of one confederation of Altai ironworkers who revolted against the Rouran, and by the seventh century it is in Chinese, Byzantine, Sogdian and Persian sources as the name of a power. Every later use runs through this one: the Türgish and the Uyghurs, the Karluks and the Oghuz, the Seljuks who took Baghdad, the Ottomans who took Constantinople, and the modern Turkic languages from the Balkans to Siberia.

That is not a claim that all those peoples descend from the Altai revolt. It is a claim about a name — that a political label attached to one confederation became the ethnonym of a family, because that confederation was the first to hold the whole steppe and to be written about by everybody who bordered it.

The alphabet nobody else used

The runiform script of the Orkhon stones is the other survival, and it is the odder one.

It has about thirty-eight characters, distinguishes front and back vowels in its consonant signs, and was written mostly right to left. Where it came from is argued — Sogdian derivation, Aramaic ultimately, with tamga clan-marks possibly feeding into the letter shapes — and it is attested from the Orkhon to the Yenisei and west into the Talas valley.

Then it stopped. The Uyghurs who took the Ötükan in 744 used it at first and then adopted the Sogdian-derived alphabet instead; Islam brought the Arabic script to the Turkic west; and the runiform letters were unreadable to everyone by about the tenth century. They stayed unreadable for nine hundred years, until Vilhelm Thomsen deciphered them in 1893 — reportedly by working out the words for Türk and Tengri first, from the Chinese face of the same stones.

So the first thing any Turkic-speaking people wrote about itself was inaccessible to Turkic-speaking people for most of the time it has existed, and came back into the world through a Danish philologist in Copenhagen.

What it was for

Almost every steppe power before and after this one is known only from the records of its neighbours: the Xiongnu through Sima Qian, the Rouran through the Wei histories, the Khazars through Arabic and Hebrew letters, the Mongols through everyone they attacked.

The Türks are the exception, and the exception is small — two monuments and some shorter texts, all raised within a decade, all by one dynasty about itself. It is not much. But it is the difference between a people described and a people speaking, and there is no other case of it in this part of the world for another five hundred years.