Göktürk Games

The Sui Shu names two pastimes among the customs of the Göktürks: the men liked to play chupu, and the women kicked a ball.^[1] The Bei Shi has the same sentence. The Tongdian repeats it in a shorter form.^[2] Neither game is described. The only game told as an event is a round of chupu at the Sui court in 599, in which two Göktürk refugees were the players.^[1]

The sentence in the Sui Shu

The sentence stands near the end of the long passage on Göktürk custom, after the funeral and before the worship of spirits.^[1] In the fifth month, the passage says, the Göktürks killed many sheep and horses and sacrificed to Heaven.^[1] Then follow the games, the drinking of mare’s milk until drunk, and the song in which they shouted to one another.^[1] The text puts the games next to the feasting. It does not say that they belonged to the sacrifice or to a festival. It gives no date and names no ruler. It speaks of the Göktürks as a whole.^[1]

The older Zhou Shu has no such sentence.^[3] The Bei Shi and the Tongdian depend on the Sui Shu. Therefore the three notices are one witness and not three. The Tongdian writes the women’s game without the verb of liking and ends the passage at the worship of spirits.^[4]

The names

樗蒲ChineseSui Shu 84
踏鞠ChineseSui Shu 84

Chupu is a Chinese name. The chronicle does not say whether the Göktürk game was played as the Chinese one was. One rendering makes it knucklebones.^[5] A second makes it a game of dice.^[6] A third, in the same translation, has the men throw the shot.^[7]

The women’s game is written 踏鞠, “tread the ball”.^[1] The renderings agree on a ball.^[5] One of them calls it football.^[8] The text does not say how many played, where, or with what kind of ball.

The game of 599

The men’s game appears once in a story. In 599, during the civil war, Tulan Khan and Tardush attacked Yami. They killed his brothers, sons and nephews and crossed the river into Weizhou. Yami fled by night to the Sui court with five horsemen.^[1] The year follows from the order of the account.^[1] Tulan’s younger brother Dusuliu left his wife and children and came over with him.^[1] The emperor ordered Yami to play chupu with Dusuliu and to lose precious things to him little by little, to comfort him.^[1] The pronoun of the last clause, “his heart”, can point to either man.^[1]

The renderings divide over who lost. One has Yami lose again and again and the emperor give him precious objects to console him.^[9] Another has the emperor himself play with Yami and let him win the gifts.^[10] In each reading the game was a way for the emperor to pass precious things to one of the two refugees.

Playthings in the dictionary of Kashgari

No Old Turkic inscription names a game. The nearest evidence is the dictionary that Mahmud al-Kashgari finished in Arabic in 1074 or 1077, more than four centuries after the Sui Shu.^[11] It records the words of the Turkic peoples of his own day. It therefore cannot say what the Göktürks played.

The dictionary has top, “ball”, which it explains as shortened from topïq.^[12] Qïrma topïq is “a turned ball”, a ball worked on a lathe.^[13] Tapïγ is a thing of lead, shaped like a spindle whorl and wound with goat’s hair.^[14] Boys play with it by kicking.^[14] Čik is a word used in playing knuckles, called out when the piece falls on its underside.^[15] The entry on qoδurčuq describes figures in the shape of people that little girls make to play with.^[16]

None of these entries mentions the Göktürks, a game called chupu, or the women’s ball of the Sui Shu.^[17] They show that kicked balls and a game with knuckles were known among the Turkic peoples of the eleventh century.^[17] Whether the Göktürk women’s game was a kicked ball of this kind, the sources do not say.