Hunting among the Göktürks

The Zhou Shu says of the Göktürks that they wandered after water and grass, lived in felt tents, and made herding and shooting and hunting their business.^[1] The Bei Shi repeats the sentence.^[2] The first Göktürks of the restored khaganate, in the years before their victories, lived on game.^[3]^[4] The Chinese histories show the khans hunting, in peace and on the edge of war. They also show that a people whose bows were taken away could not live by the hunt.^[5]

Game as food

In Tonyukuk’s inscription the khan’s first followers sat at Kara Kum, north of Čogay. They ate game and hare, and the throat of the people was full.^[6]^[7] The word for the game is kiyik, which the usual rendering takes as deer.^[3]^[8] It is a general word for a wild four-legged animal that is hunted.^[9]

Ishbara and the Sui envoy

When the Zhou princess Qianjin was taken to the camp of Ishbara, the Sui Shu says, Zhangsun Sheng went with her as deputy envoy.^[10] Of the dozens of envoys who came in those years Ishbara treated most without courtesy.^[10] He took to Sheng, hunted with him often, and kept him a whole year.^[10] Once two eagles flew up fighting over a piece of meat, and Ishbara gave Sheng two arrows and asked him to shoot them down.^[10] Sheng galloped out and found the eagles locked in each other’s claws. With one shot he pierced both.^[10] Ishbara was delighted.^[10] He told his sons and his nobles to make friends with Sheng. He hoped to learn shooting from him.^[10]

The hunts were also an errand. Sheng hunted with Ishbara’s brother Bagha, whom the Chinese call Chuluohou. By this means he learned how the land lay and how strong the tribes were.^[10] He reported it all to the man who was then chancellor of the Zhou, the later emperor Wen of the Sui.^[10] Only the Sui histories tell the story, and they tell it of their own agent.

In the first month of 587 Ishbara asked leave to hunt between Heng and Dai. He killed eighteen deer in a day. He died a little more than a month later.^[11] The hunt rests on one paragraph of the Sui Shu.^[11]

A hunt as a pretext

The Jiu Tang Shu records for the first year of Zhenguan, 627, a snowfall. It killed the sheep and horses of Ilig’s people and left them hungry.^[12] Ilig feared that the Tang army would use the moment. He led troops into Shuozhou and announced a joint hunt, but in truth he was making ready to defend himself.^[5] The Tang courtiers wanted to answer the broken oath with an attack.^[12] Taizong refused: a commoner must keep his word, and an emperor more so.^[12] A joint hunt was an occasion at which armed men of two courts could stand near each other without war.

The hunting ground of a captive

After the Tang took Ilig prisoner in 630, he grew worn and thin at the capital.^[12] The emperor saw it and made him prefect of Guozhou, a mountain land of roe and deer, to let him hunt freely and not lose his nature.^[5] Ilig declined. Instead he was given the rank of general and a house and fields.^[12]

Bows and arrows

In the reign of Bilge Khan the Tang commander Zhang Zhiyun took the weapons of the surrendered households and moved them south of the river.^[12] The inspector Jiang Hui heard their complaint that they had no bows and arrows and could not hunt. He gave the weapons back.^[13] The Xin Tang Shu says they complained that bows and arrows were forbidden. In that account they had no other way to live by the hunt.^[14] With the weapons they beat Zhang Zhiyun at Qinggang ridge and took him alive.^[13]

The Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian put a speech into the mouth of the old counsellor Tonyukuk at about the same time.^[13] Bilge Khan wished to build city walls and temples, and Tonyukuk answered that the Göktürks were few, not one hundredth of the Chinese.^[13] They could still resist, he said, because they followed water and grass, had no fixed dwelling, made shooting and hunting their business and were all trained in arms.^[13] When strong they advanced and raided. When weak they hid in the mountain forests, and a large Tang army found nothing to use itself on.^[13] Bilge Khan and his people thought the counsel right.^[13] The speech is known from the Chinese histories alone.

The camp at the hunt

In the Tang campaign that ended the western khaganate, the army of Su Dingfang came to within two hundred li of the camp of Helu, whose people happened to be out hunting.^[14] Su’s troops fell on the camp. They took tens of thousands of prisoners and seized drums, banners and weapons. Helu fled across the Ili.^[14]

Hunting and belief

The Yenisei and Mongolian epitaphs count game among the deeds of the dead.^[15] On the stele of Begre the dead man says that he killed seven wolves and did not kill the barïš or the kökmäk.^[16] Some scholars identify the spared animals as the totems of his own people and the killed ones as those of other peoples, since an enemy killed was thought to serve his killer in the next world.^[17] A Mongolian stone for Kül İç Čor, a beg of the Tardush in the time of Bilge Khan, says that he killed a roe at seven and a wild boar at nine.^[18] The ages are understood as those of the hunts by which a youth earned his man’s name.^[18]

In the sixty-third omen of the Irk Bitig, the khan takes the roe with his own hand. This has been seen as the leader taking on the hunt’s blood-guilt, in keeping with a rule that the blood of game was not to be shed.^[19] The Old Uyghur Buddhist and Manichaean texts treat the hunt as a sin: hunters stand beside fowlers and fishermen among those who kill living beings, and are reborn in the hells.^[20]

Later witnesses

The Irk Bitig was found at Dunhuang and was probably written in the ninth century.^[21] Its twelfth omen has a man go hunting and fall to the ground, saying that in heaven there is a mighty god. The omen is bad.^[22] One interpretation of the verb has him fall. An earlier interpretation has him practise shamanic tricks on the mountain.^[23] Its sixty-third omen has a khan’s army go out hunting, and a battue is named in it.^[24] A falcon or hawk appears in four others, in one of them hunting river birds (falconry).^[25]

In the 1070s Mahmud al-Kashgari takes, in his dictionary, beg qušladı, “the beg hunted birds”, as his example of a verb made from a noun.^[26] The same dictionary describes the ring hunt of kings with their subjects.^[27]

A wall painting in temple 9 of the monastery of Bezeklik near Turfan shows an armoured rider on a white horse. A greyhound runs beside him, and armed men are at his side. One description understands this part of the picture as a prince riding out to a hunt.^[28] Another description concerns a similar group at Bezeklik: an armoured rider received by two women and attended by eight companions, among them a dog keeper, an axe bearer, a club bearer, an archer and a standard bearer. It identifies the rider as a guardian god of the yaksha class. The two descriptions may concern the same painting.^[29] The same wall carries an armoured Lokapāla and demons. The picture belongs to a Buddhist cella, and its date is uncertain. Therefore it gives no evidence for hunting among the Göktürks.

The sources of the sixth to the eighth century show the hunt as food in lean years, as the pastime of khans and as an occasion for envoys and ruses. In the words given to Tonyukuk it is part of the way of life that kept the khaganate independent.

References

^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ a b Tonyukuk inscription
^ Tekin 1968, p. 284
^ a b c Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Tonyukuk inscription
^ Tekin 1968, p. 283–284
^ Tekin 1968, p. 350
^ Tekin 1993, p. 38
^ a b c d e f g h i Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 51
^ a b Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b c d e f Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ a b c d e f g Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Tongdian, juan 198
^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Tuncel 2023, p. 1124–1127
^ Tishin 2019, p. 202; 1126; Tuncel 2023, p. 202; 1126
^ Tuncel 2023, p. 1126, 1133
^ a b Tuncel 2023, p. 1127
^ Tuncel 2023, p. 1128–1129
^ Tuncel 2023, p. 1131
^ Tekin 1993, p. 1–2
^ Irk Bitig; Tekin 1993, p. 11
^ Tekin 1993, p. 32
^ Irk Bitig; Tekin 1993, p. 27
^ Irk Bitig; Tekin 1993, p. 9, 21, 27
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 79
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 281
^ von Le Coq 1913, pl. 31
^ Grünwedel 1920, i 63, 65

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 51, 84
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
Tongdian, juan 198 (after Sui Shu and Zhou Shu)
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Tonyukuk inscription
Irk Bitig
Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk

Literature

Talat Tekin, Irk Bitig: The Book of Omens (1993)
Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
Riza Tuncel, Eski Türk Avcılığının İnançsal ve Ritüelistik Boyutları (2023)
V. V. Tishin, K datirovke enisejskoj runičeskoj nadpisi Begre (E 11) [К датировке енисейской рунической надписи Бегре (Е 11)] (2019)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
Albert von Le Coq, Chotscho. Facsimile-Wiedergaben der wichtigeren Funde der ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan (1913)
Albert Grünwedel, Alt-Kutscha. Archäologische und religionsgeschichtliche Forschungen an Tempera-Gemälden aus buddhistischen Höhlen der ersten acht Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt (1920)