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Bumin Khan

Bumin was a member of the Turkic Ashina clan, and he became the leader who broke the subjection of his people to the Rouran Khaganate. In 552 he assumed the title of khan over a new realm in the eastern steppe. He died within months of that victory. The sources therefore preserve almost entirely the record of the decade before it: a raid into Chinese territory, an embassy from the Western Wei, an unlikely victory over the Tiele, a refused marriage with the Rouran and, finally, the Göktürk War of Independence.

The sources are accordingly one-sided. Almost everything known about him comes from the perspective of states that had an interest in portraying him and his people as hostile barbarians. Even so, several Old Turkic sources name him. The Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan inscriptions in the Orkhon valley, written nearly two centuries later, open their historical part with Bumin and his younger brother Istemi as the first rulers of the Göktürks. They give Istemi the same title as Bumin. There the two are honoured as the men whom Tengri, the god of the Göktürks, set up to free the Ashina clan from foreign rule and, with it, to bring freedom to the Göktürks of the Altai.

A good twenty years after the Orkhon stones, Bumin's name stands on stone once more, in the Tariat inscription of the Uyghur Khaganate. The Uyghurs had overthrown the Göktürks in 744. The stone opens with the earlier rulers of the steppe, and Bumin is among them. The founder of the Uyghur order began his own stone with the founder of the Göktürk order. This may be a claim to succession and not a claim of conquest.

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