The earliest writhing in Turkish (with a runic alphabet) dates from the eight century, around Lake Baikal, and refers to dokuz oğuz 'nine tribes', ut quite soon he Uyghar version of the language, written vertically in the Chinese manner, prevailed, and it was used in the diplomatic correspondence of the great Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan.
Otherwise these early Turks do not leave a literary trace and you have to study them using outside sources - Chinese, Persian, Arab, Byzantine. They moved west and south-west, towards the great civilizations on the periphery of Central Asia. They came in waves, two of them of tidal proportions, as we shall see. Genghis Khan, in the early thirteen century, led a federation of related Mongol and Turkish (or Tatar) tribes. He had a successor a century later, a wrecked of world proportions, Tamerlane, of Turkish origin (Timor is a variant of the world meaning 'iron' and leno means 'lame'). They and their descendants took over China, much of Russia, and India; 'Mugal', a version of 'Mongol', reflects this: in Turkish, Tan Mahal means 'crown quarter'; and the language of Pakistan, Urdu, is a variant of the world ordu, meaning 'army'. There is a famous French book on these matters, René Grousset's L'empire des steppes (1939), and there are Turkish connections all over the are, including Afghanistan, where you can often be understood if you use the language; but the important link, as far as the Anatolian Turks is concerned, is with Persia. This was, of course, the greatest historic civilization of the whole Middle East and there are controversies as to the Turks relationship with it - controversies that involve not just cultural borrowings, but Islam itself.
As early as the eight century, Turkish mercenaries kid made their appearance in Persia, in the then capitol of which, Baghdad, the Caliphate reigned over all Islam. Some had gone to Syria or Egypt. However, the decisive moment come in the later tenth century, when one of the Oğuz (western Turks) tribes arrived on the Persian outskirts. Its chief was one Selçuk, meaning 'little flood' in Arabic and maybe something else in Turkish. The Turks brought a religious iconography that came from the world of Siberia: shamanism, with its own druids, the emblems being a peregrine and a hawk - tuğrul and çağrı - which are still used as first names. In 1055 they entered Baghdad and penetrated the state: at a great age, their leader, Tuğrul Bey, married the daughter of the Caliph in a ceremony under Turkish rites: as a French historian, Jean-Paul Roux, says, it was the equivalent of marrying an African chief to a Habsburg to the sound of tom-toms.
Then these Turks took over Persia altogether... (...)
The most interesting synthesis is Russian. Napoleon famously said, scratch the Russian and you discover Tatar. Russia in the thirteen century succumbed, fort two centuries, to the Mongols, or Tatars (originally, as with 'Turk' itself, just the name of a dominant tribe). A third of the old aristocracy had Tatar names: Yusupov (from 'Yusuf') or Muravyev (from 'Murat'), and Ivan the Terrible himself was descended from Genghis Khan. The Tatars knew how to build up state - reflected by the Russian words for 'handcuffs' and 'treasury'. The Russian princes eventually copied the Tatars, Moscow most successfully, and in 1552, Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatar capitol, Kazan, on the Volga. Nineteenth-century warhorses then presented Russian history as a sort of crusade in which indignant peasants freed themselves from 'the Tatar joke'. But the phrase was first used only in 1571, when the Orthodox Church was trying to resist Ivan the Terrible, who used Tatars to build up a state that did not tolerate Orthodox pretentions. Before then, the relationship was a great deal more complicated, including intermarriage.
As early as the eight century, Turkish mercenaries kid made their appearance in Persia, in the then capitol of which, Baghdad, the Caliphate reigned over all Islam. Some had gone to Syria or Egypt. However, the decisive moment come in the later tenth century, when one of the Oğuz (western Turks) tribes arrived on the Persian outskirts. Its chief was one Selçuk, meaning 'little flood' in Arabic and maybe something else in Turkish. The Turks brought a religious iconography that came from the world of Siberia: shamanism, with its own druids, the emblems being a peregrine and a hawk - tuğrul and çağrı - which are still used as first names. In 1055 they entered Baghdad and penetrated the state: at a great age, their leader, Tuğrul Bey, married the daughter of the Caliph in a ceremony under Turkish rites: as a French historian, Jean-Paul Roux, says, it was the equivalent of marrying an African chief to a Habsburg to the sound of tom-toms.
Then these Turks took over Persia altogether... (...)
The most interesting synthesis is Russian. Napoleon famously said, scratch the Russian and you discover Tatar. Russia in the thirteen century succumbed, fort two centuries, to the Mongols, or Tatars (originally, as with 'Turk' itself, just the name of a dominant tribe). A third of the old aristocracy had Tatar names: Yusupov (from 'Yusuf') or Muravyev (from 'Murat'), and Ivan the Terrible himself was descended from Genghis Khan. The Tatars knew how to build up state - reflected by the Russian words for 'handcuffs' and 'treasury'. The Russian princes eventually copied the Tatars, Moscow most successfully, and in 1552, Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatar capitol, Kazan, on the Volga. Nineteenth-century warhorses then presented Russian history as a sort of crusade in which indignant peasants freed themselves from 'the Tatar joke'. But the phrase was first used only in 1571, when the Orthodox Church was trying to resist Ivan the Terrible, who used Tatars to build up a state that did not tolerate Orthodox pretentions. Before then, the relationship was a great deal more complicated, including intermarriage.
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