Turkic peoples

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Turkic peoples form one of the most geographically spread human groupings on earth, stretching from the forests of Siberia to the shores of the Mediterranean and from the steppes of Central Asia to the river valleys of Eastern Europe. Their story begins not with a single homeland but with a question that scholars have debated for generations: where exactly did the first Turkic speakers emerge, and how did a community whose original numbers may have been quite small eventually give rise to more than 170 million native speakers across dozens of modern ethnic groups?

  The answers involve nomadic herders pressing westward across Mongolia around 2,200 BC, a royal wolf-mother in the founding mythology of the Göktürks, a khaganate that rose and collapsed and rose again across the Eurasian steppe, and a DNA analysis of a woman named Empress Ashina who died between 568 and 578 AD and whose bones were eventually recovered from a mausoleum in Xianyang, China. What her genome revealed upended one long-standing theory about Turkic origins.

  Who exactly counts as Turkic? The answer is not straightforward. Medieval Muslim writers used the term to describe Tibetans and Hungarians. Chinese historians defined it by language and physiognomy. Modern geneticists find a shared ancestral signal in South Siberia and Mongolia but surrounded by layers of admixture that vary from group to group. Even the word itself, Turk, has been interpreted to mean everything from "strong" to "gathered and united" to simply "in the prime of life."

  This documentary follows the Turkic peoples from their contested origins in northeastern Asia, through the rise and fall of great steppe empires, through conversion and conquest and the slow fracturing of the Soviet Union, to the moment in 1991 when five new Turkic-majority states emerged on the map at once.

• 2. A Name and Its Meanings

  ›

  The earliest known written use of the term Turk in reference to a specific group appears in the 6th-century Khüis Tolgoi inscription, dated no later than 587 AD, where it refers exclusively to the Göktürks. That same label shows up in a letter from Ishbara Qaghan to Emperor Wen of Sui in 585, in which Ishbara calls himself "the Great Turk Khan."

  Where the word itself comes from is a matter of long scholarly dispute. The Chinese Book of Zhou, written in the 7th century, suggested the name derived from the word for helmet, because the Ashina clan lived near an Altai mountain shaped like one. Hungarian scholar András Róna-Tas, writing in 1991, pointed to a Khotanese-Saka word, tturakä, meaning lid, as a possible root for this folk explanation, though researcher Peter B. Golden considered the connection unproven.

  Gerard Clauson proposed a more precise reading: that türk originally meant not "strong" in a general sense but rather "the culminating point of maturity" in a fruit or person, something like "just fully ripe" or "in the prime of life and vigorous." Hakan Aydemir, writing in 2022, offered a different view entirely, arguing the word derived from a Pre-Proto-Turkic verb meaning to heap up, collect, or assemble, and that Türk originally signified something like "gathered" or "confederated."

  By the medieval period, the name had already slipped from its narrow ethnic mooring. Muslim writers including Ottoman historian Mustafa Âlî and explorer Evliya Çelebi routinely used Turk as a general term for Inner Asian peoples regardless of their actual language. Only in the modern era did historians standardize the label to mean people whose native tongue belongs to the Turkic language family.

• 3. Out of Northeast Asia

  ›

  Genetic evidence has gradually narrowed the debate over Turkic origins. Studies have found that almost all modern Turkic peoples share at least some ancestry associated with populations in what researchers call the "South Siberia and Mongolia" region, a zone that scholars have proposed as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the pioneer carriers of Turkic languages.

  Peter Benjamin Golden, one of the leading scholars on Turkic history, proposed two candidate homelands for Proto-Turkic speakers: the southern Altai-Sayan region and southern Siberia, running from Lake Baikal to eastern Mongolia. Other researchers pointed toward Mongolia or Tuva specifically. A 2022 study found that all Altaic-speaking populations, including Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic groups, showed dominant Siberian Neolithic ancestry, with origins most likely traced to the Amur river basin.

  The Proto-Turkic ancestors were probably both hunter-gatherers and farmers in their earliest phase. According to historians, their subsistence strategy included an agricultural component that ultimately traced back to the origin of millet farming in Northeast China. Around 2,200 BC, these agricultural ancestors likely migrated westward into Mongolia, where contact with Iranian peoples helped them shift toward a pastoral nomadic way of life.

  A 2023 genetic study of Empress Ashina, a Royal Göktürk who died between 568 and 578 AD, found that roughly 96-98% of her ancestry was of Ancient Northeast Asian origin, with only about 2-4% from western Eurasia. The authors concluded that this finding weakened the hypothesis of a western Eurasian origin for the Turkic peoples. At the same time, the study noted that early medieval Türk samples more broadly showed 37.8% West Eurasian ancestry and 62.2% Ancient Northeast Asian ancestry, indicating the Turkic empire contained genuine genetic diversity.

• 4. The Göktürks and the First Khaganate

  ›

  In the 540s AD, the Chinese Book of Zhou records the Turks appearing at China's border seeking silk goods and a trade relationship. A Sogdian diplomat carried out a series of embassies between the Western Wei dynasty and the Turks in 545 and 546. The Ashina clan, renowned as famed metalsmiths, had been granted land south of the Altai Mountains by their Rouran overlords.

  Within a generation, their position transformed entirely. In the 6th century, the Ashina's power had grown enough to conquer the Tiele on behalf of the Rourans, and then to overthrow the Rourans themselves, establishing what became the First Turkic Khaganate. Unlike the Xiongnu confederation that preceded it, the Göktürk state placed its supreme Khagans from the Ashina clan but kept them subordinate to a council of tribal chiefs.

  The Khaganate spread quickly westward to the Caspian Sea. Between 581 and 603, a civil war split it into the Western Turkic Khaganate in Kazakhstan and the Eastern Turkic Khaganate in Mongolia and Manchuria. Han Chinese forces overthrew the Eastern Turks in 630 and held control through a military Protectorate until 682. The Second Turkic Khaganate then ruled large portions of the old Göktürk territory until it was replaced by the Uyghur Khaganate in 744.

  The Göktürks left a durable cultural legacy. They were the first Turkic people to write Old Turkic in the runic Orkhon script, and their state was the first to bear the name Turk. Their original religion retained elements of animism and shamanism that later evolved into Tengrism, though they also hosted Buddhist missionaries and practiced a syncretic faith. The name Kök Türk itself derives from kök, the Old Turkic word for sky, sky-colored, or blue.

• 5. Writing in Stone

  ›

  Inscriptions in Turkic alphabets were found in Mongolia, and most of the preserved examples were dated to between the 8th and 10th centuries CE. The earliest positively dated and legible Turkic inscriptions are from the 8th century. The Orkhon script, the best-known of four groups into which Turkic alphabets are divided, was the writing system of the Göktürks and was later adopted by the Uyghur Empire.

  The Irk Bitig is the only known complete manuscript written in the Old Turkic script. A Yenisei variant of the Orkhon script appears in 9th-century Kyrgyz inscriptions, and the script has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and in the Old Hungarian script of the 10th century. The latest recorded use of a Turkic alphabet was documented in Hungary in 1699 CE.

  Before these runic inscriptions, there are older candidate traces. Excavations carried out in 1924 and 1925 in the Noin-Ula burial mounds along the Selenga River in northern Mongolia, north of Ulaanbaatar, produced objects bearing more than 20 carved characters. These characters were either identical or very similar to the runic letters of the Orkhon script. Some scholars have argued that these older Xiongnu-era markings from the rock art of the Yinshan and Helan Mountains, where petroglyphs date from the 9th millennium BCE to the 19th century, represent precursors to the Turkic alphabet.

  Unlike the Gothic runiform scripts, which are noted for exceptional uniformity of language and paleography, the Turkic runiform scripts did not develop a uniform paleography across their range. That diversity in written form mirrors the ethnic and geographic range of the peoples who used them.

• 6. Empires Across Faiths

  ›

  Mass conversion of Turkic peoples to Islam did not happen gradually or quietly. According to the source, it crystallized at the Battle of Talas in 751, when Turkic tribes sided with Arab forces against Chinese armies. From that point forward, much of the Turkic heartland became Muslim territory.

  Yet the picture before and alongside Islam was far more plural. The official state religion of the early Uyghur Khaganate was Manichaeism, introduced through the conversion of Bögü Qaghan by Sogdian missionaries after the An Lushan rebellion. The Khaganate simultaneously tolerated Buddhism, Christianity, shamanism, and Manichaeism within its borders. The Khazars, a Turkic group between the Caspian and Black Seas, converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century. The Chuvash of Russia adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity for the most part in the second half of the 19th century, and today the Gagauz of Moldova are also predominantly Orthodox Christian.

  The Göktürks had syncretized their original Tengrism with Buddhism and incorporated elements of Zoroastrianism. Among the Uyghurs of the Xinjiang region, Buddhism reached one of its high points in Turkic history. After Arab conquest of Central Asia spread Islam among local populations, Buddhism gradually lost ground, though traces of its influence persisted for centuries.

  Some Turkic groups resisted Islamization forcefully. The Basmil, Yabaqu, and Uyghur states all fought against the Kara-Khanid spread of Islam. The scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari, himself a Turkic Muslim writing in the medieval period, recorded his contempt for non-Muslim Turks in verse, calling Uyghur Buddhists "Uighur dogs" in his Diwan. His hostility is itself evidence of how contested the religious terrain was across the Turkic world.

• 7. Steppe, Settlement, and Spread

  ›

  The Turkic language family comprises around 30 languages spoken across a vast arc from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Manchuria and through to the Middle East. Turkish proper, or Anatolian Turkish, accounts for roughly 40% of all Turkic speakers; more than a third of those are ethnic Turks of Turkey.

  Beyond the core heartland, Turkic peoples spread through a combination of conquest, intermarriage, acculturation, and language shift. The Bulgars established themselves between the Caspian and Black Seas in the 5th and 6th centuries. One group settled in the Volga region and mixed with local Volga Finns, becoming the Volga Bulgars in what is today Tatarstan. Other Bulgars moved into southeastern Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries, mixed with Slavic populations, and eventually adopted what became the Slavic Bulgarian language.

  The Seljuk Empire, founded by Tughril Beg between 1016 and 1063 and his brother Chaghri Beg between 989 and 1060, stretched at its height from western Anatolia and the Levant to the Hindu Kush. Their victory at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 took most of Anatolia from the Byzantine Empire, an event that helped trigger the First Crusade of 1095-1099. The Ghaznavid dynasty, which ruled large parts of Iran, Afghanistan, Transoxiana, and northwestern South Asia from 977 to 1186, was of Turkic origin but thoroughly Persianized in language, culture, and habits.

  Modern genetic research suggests that the spread of Turkic-speaking populations into Central Asia actually came after Indo-European speakers had already moved into the area. A 2018 study modeled a slow transition over four thousand years, from Indo-European and Iranian-speaking groups with largely western Eurasian ancestry toward increasing East Asian ancestry as Turkic and Mongolian groups arrived from Mongolia.

• 8. Modern Nations and Organizations

  ›

  For most of the 20th century, Turkey was the only independent Turkic-majority country in the world. The Turkic peoples of Central Asia lived either within the Soviet Union or, after a brief independent attempt, within the Chinese Republic.

  In 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, five Turkic states gained independence simultaneously: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Turkey moved quickly to establish diplomatic relations with each of them. Political engagement between the Turkic countries increased steadily over the following years, leading to the establishment of TÜRKSOY in 1993, an organization carrying out activities to strengthen cultural ties, and the Turkic Council in 2009, which was later renamed the Organization of Turkic States in 2021.

  The founding of the Organization of Turkic States traced back to a proposal made by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2006. The founding agreement, called the Nakhchivan Agreement, brought together Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey as original members, with Azerbaijan joining as well. Hungary, which has historic connections to the Turkic world through the Pecheneg and Avar periods, announced interest in joining and received official observer status in August 2018. Turkmenistan also joined as an observer, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was admitted as an observer at the 2022 Samarkand Summit.

  Every year, TÜRKSOY selects one city in the Turkic world as the Cultural Capital of the Turkic World, gathering artists, scholars, and intellectuals to exchange knowledge and promote the city internationally. The Siberian Khanate, the northernmost Islamic state in recorded history, had survived until 1598 when Russia conquered it. Today, Turkic regions including Tatarstan, Tuva, and Yakutia remain part of the Russian Federation, while Chinese Turkestan remains part of the People's Republic of China.