The Göktürks

Tūjué 突厥 is the Chinese name of the Türk qaghanate, in continuous use from the dynastic histories of the sixth century through the Tang annals that record the empire’s two incarnations and its fall. The transcription is phonetic, and its shape has long been read as evidence of the route the name traveled: the Middle Chinese value, roughly thwot-kjut, renders not the bare Türk but a form with a final dental, most plausibly the plural Türküt that the Rouran, the qaghanate’s first overlords, would have used of their sometime vassals. The Chinese court, on this reading, learned the Turks’ name from the power the Turks overthrew.

The entry preserves a fossil of steppe politics inside a phonetic spelling. The Orkhon inscriptions remember Tabγač, China, as the empire that subjugated the Türk people for fifty years; the Chinese name of the Türks remembers, in its final consonant, the earlier master neither empire mourned. Among the borrowed forms on this page Tūjué is also the earliest, on record within a couple of years of the qaghanate’s founding, so that the first foreign archive to register the name Türk did so already secondhand, in the grammatical clothing of a defeated intermediary.

Toûrkoi enters Greek with the diplomacy of 568, when an embassy from the qaghanate, led by the Sogdian Maniakh, reached Justin II to propose an alliance against Persia over the silk routes, and Zemarchus was sent back across the steppe to the qaghan; Menander Protector’s account of these exchanges is the West’s first record of the Turks under their own name. The form stayed in the Byzantine bureaucratic vocabulary long after the qaghanate itself dissolved, and with a referent that wandered: by the tenth century the De Administrando Imperio uses Toûrkoi chiefly of the Magyars, and later Byzantine writers of the Seljuks and Ottomans, the name shifting to whichever steppe-descended power currently mattered.

The first attestation is also a small history of how names travel: Byzantium learned the word for the Turks from a Sogdian merchant speaking for a Turkic empire against an Iranian one, three languages deep in a single sentence. And the later drift of Toûrkoi onto the Magyars and then the Ottomans makes this entry the hinge between two of the atlas’s threads, the qaghanate whose name it transcribes and the later powers, treated on their own pages, that inherited the label. Byzantium kept one word for a thousand years and let the steppe decide, generation by generation, whom it meant.

twrk is the Sogdian spelling of the Turks’ name, conventionally read Turk, with a plural tr’wkt, Türkit, and its earliest carrier is the qaghanate’s own first monument: the Bugut stele of the 580s, raised for Taspar Qaghan, is written not in Turkic but in Sogdian, the language of the merchants who ran the empire’s chancellery and its diplomacy. The form recurs across the Sogdian corpus wherever the steppe’s masters are named, and the rendering here uses the Old Sogdian letters this atlas employs for the language.

The entry documents the strangest fact in the whole family: the first empire of the Turks first wrote its own name in someone else’s language. For its opening decades the qaghanate spoke Turkic and wrote Sogdian, so the name Türk entered the written record at home and abroad through Sogdian intermediaries, the same merchants who carried it to Constantinople in 568. The plural tr’wkt, with its Sogdian ending, is very likely the shape that reached the Chinese court as Tūjué, making this small trading language the distribution point for the name in both directions. On this page the Sogdian form sits among the exonyms, but for a generation it was as close to an official spelling as the empire possessed.

The Middle Persian Turk, written twlk’ in Book Pahlavi, borrowed from the Turkic self-name once the qaghanate reached the Sasanian frontier in the sixth century. The word belongs above all to the apocalyptic and geographical layers of the Zoroastrian books: the Zand ī Wahman Yasn counts the Turks among the invading peoples whose irruptions mark the ages of the world’s decline, alongside Arabs and Romans, the frontier experience of the late empire recast as prophecy. Book Pahlavi has no Unicode encoding, so the entry carries transliteration only.

The borrowing carries an irony the Zoroastrian books themselves institutionalized. Persian tradition already possessed an ancient name for the steppe enemy, Tūrān, from the Avesta’s Tūra; when actual Turks appeared, the two names’ likeness proved irresistible, and the tradition folded the new people into the old category, Turks into Turanians, an equation Firdawsi’s epic would fix permanently in the Persian imagination, as the entries for Scythia and the Persian Turk on this page record. This Middle Persian word is where the confusion begins: the last generation of Zoroastrian scholarship met the first generation of Turks, and mistook them, creatively, for an enemy their scripture had always known.

al-Turk, with the collective Atrāk, is the Arabic name of the Turks, in use from the moment the conquests reached Transoxiana at the end of the seventh century and the armies of the caliphate met the western wing of the qaghanate along the Oxus and Jaxartes. Al-Ṭabarī’s history is dense with the name through the campaigns of Qutayba and the long wars against the Türgesh; the geographers made bilād al-Turk, the land of the Turks, a standing region of the world, and the lexicographers gave the word an entry beside the oldest words in the language.

No borrowing in this family had stranger consequences for the borrower. Within two centuries of learning the name, the caliphate was recruiting Turkish slave soldiers by the thousand; within three, Turkish generals made and unmade caliphs; and the later medieval Islamic world, from Cairo to Delhi, was ruled largely by dynasties the Arabic language filed under this word. The Persian Tāzīg on the Caliphate’s page records the Iranian world naming the Arabs who conquered it; al-Turk is the mirror image, the conquerors naming the steppe people who would, in the end, inherit their empire.

The endonym, Türük, written 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰜 in the runiform script of the Orkhon inscriptions, where the shorter spelling Türk also occurs. The stelae of Kül Tegin and Bilge Qaghan use the name relentlessly, above all in the formula Türük bodun, “the Türk people,” whom the inscriptions address, scold, mourn, and command; the name is at once the state’s, the people’s, and, in the qaghans’ rhetoric, a charge laid on both by heaven. Its further etymology is uncertain, and the tradition that reads it as “strong” is not securely older than the name itself.

This is the youngest endonym in the atlas to found a world-family, and it did so faster than any other. Within a single generation of the qaghanate’s rise the name stands in Chinese annals, and within two in Byzantine history; the page around this entry is the record of its spread. What the inscriptions themselves add is the interior view every borrowed form lacks: in other languages Turk names a power on the horizon, while on the Orkhon stones Türük names a fragile people whose kings plead with it, in writing, not to scatter. The world’s word for an empire began as an empire’s word for the people it feared to lose.

Turuṣka is the Sanskrit name of the Turks, the steppe ethnonym fitted with an Indic suffix and declined like any Sanskrit noun. It names the Turkic powers that pressed on India’s northwest from the seventh century onward, the Turk Shahi rulers of Kabul and Gandhara among them, and it runs through Kalhaṇa’s twelfth-century chronicle of Kashmir, where Turuṣka kings appear both as ancient invaders and as contemporary neighbors; the referent is the Turkic world at large rather than the Orkhon qaghanate alone, and the prose of the chroniclers extends it, in time, to every Muslim power from the northwest.

The entry marks the southern limit of the name’s spread and the furthest semantic drift in the family. In Kashmir’s chronicle the old word gradually stops being ethnic and becomes civilizational, so that Turuṣka ends as Sanskrit’s ordinary term for the Turco-Muslim world as such, the name of a steppe people repurposed as the name of a religion’s carriers. Every language on this page stretched the name Türk somewhere; Sanskrit stretched it furthest, from a qaghanate on the Orkhon to a category of civilization, and in doing so wrote the first chapter of the long Indian habit of naming ages after the peoples who arrive through the passes.

The Classical Persian Turk, inherited from the Middle Persian of the late Sasanian frontier and universal in the New Persian written from the tenth century onward. In the geographers it is plain ethnography; in the poets it is something larger, because Firdawsi’s Shāhnāmeh systematically identifies the Turks with Tūrān, the ancient enemy-land of Iranian epic, so that the historical qaghanate’s people inherit the role of Afrāsiyāb’s hordes in a story set long before any Turk existed. The Scythia page’s Tūrān entry records the older name; this one records the living people the epic poured into it.

The identification is the most consequential act of naming in the family. It gave a millennium of Persian literature its standing antagonist, made “Turk and Tajik” the shorthand for the steppe and the sown, and handed every Turkic dynasty that ruled Iran, and most did, a schizophrenic inheritance: sultans who patronized the Shāhnāmeh were financing the epic of their own villainy. The word also acquired, in the poets, a second life as the type of the beautiful beloved, so that in a single Persian ghazal Turk can mean marauder and darling in successive lines. No other language put the name to such contradictory work, or enjoyed the contradiction more.