Disputed

Abangbuminimal

• The number of his brothers: seventeen in the Zhou Shu and the Tongdian, seventy in the Bei Shi

Abaoji

• Whether the campaign of 924 defeated the Kirghiz, met only scattered groups, or did not touch them
• Whether the Kirghiz empire ended about 917, in 924, or never extended over Mongolia

Aetius

• When the usurper John hired the Huns that Aetius led: 424 in one account, 425 in another
• Whether Aetius and Attila were friends: allies until 451 in two studies; appeased but never friends in a third
• Whether he left the Alpine passes unguarded in 452 through negligence: so some argue; others say no fifth-century defender held them
• Why he let the Huns withdraw from Gaul: Jordanes says he feared for Rome if the Goths destroyed them; some scholars hold that he hoped to use the Huns again

Afrasiab

• When and how the Turanians of the Iranian epic came to be equated with the Turks: the Avesta speaks of Turanians and not of Turks, and the equation is evident in the eleventh century, in Kashgari and in the name of the Karakhanid house
• The place of the end: the lake Chaechasta of the Avesta, and the lake Khanjast, Urmia in Azerbaijan, of the Shahnameh

Afuzhiluo

• The year of the secession: 487 in the Gaoche chapter; the Rouran chapter tells it under 492

al-Jarrah ibn Abdallahminimal

• The numbers given for the battle, and the revenge campaign of Said ibn Amr, which the tradition embellishes
• The year of the battle: the Arabic accounts give 730, and Theophanes puts the defeat under the year 727/8

Amrak

• Whether he was the eldest of Bumin's grandsons, as one account of the assembly requires
• His fate after 582: the sources record nothing

An Lushan

• Whether An Lushan really worked as a commercial interpreter in the frontier markets, which some scholars reject as too typically Sogdian and Étienne de la Vaissière accepts

Anagaiminimal

• Whether the siege and fall of Bosporos belong to 576 or to about 579
• Whether his name is the same as that of the Rouran khan Anagui

Anagastes

• His office: master of the soldiers in Thrace according to some scholars; according to others that post was then held by Basiliscus
• His part in the trick of Chelchal: Chelchal served under Aspar in Priscus; under Anagastes according to some scholars

Anagui

• Circumstances of death
• Year of accession: 516 in one account, 520 in its index and in the usual dating
• The year of Gao Huan's marriage to Anagui's daughter: 546 in the Beishi, 545 in the Zizhi tongjian
• The suicide: reported without alternative in the Chinese account, but without parallel among steppe rulers of the period, and the court had motive
• Whether the khagans and the ruling nobility of the Avars of Europe came from the twenty thousand who fled west after his death, or the Avars were a group of other origin that took the name
• The victory over the Tiele in Dzungaria: Anagui's, in one account; Chounu's, in 516, in the Wei Shu, which gives Anagui only an undated later victory over Yifu

Anankhastminimal

• Whether Anankhast came to Constantinople as a Göktürk envoy or went to the Göktürks as a Roman one
• Whether the name is a form of the Germanic Anagast

Anluochen

• Whether he bore the title khan: not in the Zhou Shu; conferred by the Qi according to some scholars
• His end: the Zhou Shu stops at his flight, and the Bei Qi Shu at his flight north in the third month of 554
• The date of the revolt: the Bei Qi Shu gives the third month of 554; a second dating has September 553 with fifty thousand men

Aoshe Shadminimal

• Whether he and the Yushe Shad, whom the Xin Tang Shu also calls a son of Chula, are one man

Apa (Kirghiz Chancellor)

• The month of the march: spring 848 in the Jiu Tang Shu, 'apparently' March 848 in a modern dating from the Zizhi tongjian
• Whether he is the chief of the man on the Begre stele

Ardaric

• Whether the Gepids became Christian under him: assumed in older scholarship; others find no support for it in the texts

Are Khan

• What the name Are is: a Turkic word, a tribal name or a Chinese form of another title
• Whether the Kirghiz ruler invested by the Tang in 847 was Are or his successor

Arsilasminimal

• Whether Arsilas was the supreme ruler of the Göktürks or only the eldest of the eight leaders among whom the land was divided
• Whether the name is the Turkic arslan, 'lion', or the name of the Ashina house
• Whether Arsilas was the eldest son of Istemi, viceroy of Bukhara, and the Shir-i Kishvar of the tale of Abrui

Ashide Yuanzhen

• Year of death
• Circumstances of death
• Whether he is Tonyukuk: the identification is that of Friedrich Hirth; the Tang history has Yuanzhen die against the Türgesh before Ilterish, and Tonyukuk lived thirty years longer
• The year of his death: before Ilterish's death in 690 to 692 by the order of the Tang history's notices, if the notice is his

Ashina Funian

• Whether his execution broke a promise of safe conduct; the chapter records the surrender and the beheading without joining them

Ashina Helu

• Dates
• The year of his capture: 657 here, 658 in the Tang annals as Édouard Chavannes reads them, 659 in the dating of Peter B. Golden
• The beginning of his khanate: 651, the year of the Tingzhou raid and the first Tang campaign, in the Tang annals; 653 in Peter B. Golden

Ashina Simo

• Whether the suspicion about his descent reflects a real non-Ashina origin or only his appearance

Askelminimal

• Whether the Hermichiones of Theophanes were the Göktürks or the people who came to Europe as the Avars
• Whether Askel is the A-hsi-chieh of the western Göktürks
• Whether Askel is the Scultor of Corippus

Attila

• When Attila and Bleda succeeded Rua: 434 in one reckoning, after the end of 435 in a second
• The chronology of the Balkan wars: war in 441 and 442 and a peace of Anatolius in 447 in one reckoning; war from 441 to 443, peaces in 443, 448 and 450 in a second
• How Bleda died: killed by Attila's treachery in Jordanes and the chronicles; in one account Bleda lured Attila into a trap on a boar hunt, and Bleda's own men went over to Attila
• Who plotted against Attila: the eunuch Chrysaphius through Edeco in Priscus; in one account Attila survived two attempts on his life by Onegesius and his brother Scottas
• Why he invaded Gaul: Honoria's appeal, the Frankish succession and Gaiseric in Priscus; Gaiseric's bribe in Jordanes; the contest with Aetius for influence among the Franks according to some, the wish to remove Aetius first according to others
• How far his rule reached: estimates differ, from the Alps to the Baltic and from the Caspian to near the Rhine; from Central Asia to Gaul; or only Pannonia and the adjoining lands
• Whether his name is Gothic, a diminutive of atta, father, Turkic, or Yeniseian

Awusili Irkinminimal

• The year of the raid: 601 in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks, 602 in the Zizhi tongjian and the biography of Zhangsun Sheng
• The form of his name: Awusili in the Sui Shu and the Bei Shi, Sili in the Zizhi tongjian and the biography of Zhangsun Sheng

Axian Shadminimal

• Whether the Zhou Shu's 阿史那子 is Ashina's son or the son named Ashina; the Tongdian has the second
• Whether he belongs to the Suo story, as in the Zhou Shu, or to the story of the cave, as in the Sui Shu

Bagatur (Modu Chanyu)

• Whether 冒頓 renders *baġatur or a personal name that cannot be recovered; the reconstruction carries a question mark in the literature, and the competing view proposes no rival sound
• Whether the name was borne from birth or given on his rise
• Whether the twenty-four Ten Thousand Horsemen were his creation or an older order that the Shiji records under his reign
• Whether the Yuezhi left the Dunhuang country for the Ili after his campaign of 177 to 176 BC or only under Laoshang

Bagha Khan

• Year of death
• Circumstances of death
• Dates
• Whether he was the Šāba of the Persian tradition
• Whether he fell in 588 at the Hyrcanian rock or the defeat belongs to Tardush's son at Herat in 589
• Whether Bahram's arrow is history or a topos
• His end: the Sui Shu has him die of a stray arrow on a second campaign in the west, without a year; the Hyrcanian rock of 588 has been identified with that campaign

Bagha Shadminimal

• His relation to Tong Yabgu: served under him in the histories; his younger brother according to some scholars
• Whether he is the Ziebel of Theophanes, as Mikhail Artamonov proposed

Baghatur Khan

• The year of the murder: the end of 628 in the Zizhi tongjian, 627 in the Cefu yuangui, 630 in one modern account
• Who killed Tong Yabgu: his paternal uncle in the Chinese histories; one modern account reports the view that it was his own son
• Whether the Moheduo Khan who sent an embassy in 624 was the same man

Bahram Chobin

• Whether he killed the Göktürk leader with an arrow: Tabari, Thaʿālibī and the epic say so; some scholars regard it as a topos of Persian storytelling
• Where and when he beat the Göktürks: scholars give the Hyrcanian rock in April 588, Herat in 589, or two campaigning seasons in 587 and 588
• Why he revolted: the quarrel over the booty in Sebeos and Thaʿālibī, his defeat by the Romans in Albania in Theophylact
• How and where he died: at Suyab, at the court of a khagan beyond the Oxus, or at Balkh

Balamberminimal

• Whether Balamber existed: a shadowy figure for some; an invention of the Goths, to explain who conquered them, for others; repeated without comment as king of the Huns by a third group; at most the leader of a tribe or of a band of warriors for a fourth
• Whether his name is Hunnic or a Gothic form

Ban Chao

• The years in AD of his campaigns, which are reckoned from the reign names and not given as such in the sources
• The length of his stay in the Western Regions: the Hou Han Shu counts thirty-one years, his sister's petition thirty

Bars Beg

• When the Göktürks made him khan: 693 in one account, the beginning of the eighth century in another
• Whether the Kirghiz khan killed in the Soŋa forest is Bars Beg, and whether he fell in 710 or in 711
• Whether the stelae of Altyn-köl are his memorial

Basich

• Dates
• The date of the raid: scholars give 395, about 415 to 420 or a little later, or the war of 423 to 425
• The origin of the name: either a Turkish diminutive meaning little captain or a Turkic word meaning feline-like

Bayanchur Khan

• How much of the Šine-Usu text is recoverable; the stone is badly worn
• The year of his accession: 747 in the Chinese histories, 748 by the animal year of the Tariat inscription

Bi Chanyu

• Whether his claim as eldest son of the former chanyu meant the eldest son of Wuzhuliu or the eldest of Huhanye's grandsons

Bigilas

• How much gold Attila took from him: the fifty pounds for Edeco in the account of the embassy; a hundred pounds received from Chrysaphius in the following fragment

Bilge Khan

• Which of the two brothers was the elder: the Tang history and the inscriptions make Bilge the elder, at eight against seven when their father died; the literature available here has been read both ways
• The year of his death: 734 by the inscription's Dog year and by the Tang Huiyao, 732 by the Jiu Tang Shu's year-count
• His year of birth, 683 or 684, from his age at his father's death

Bleda

• Which part of the Huns he ruled: the eastern tribes according to some; unknown according to others
• How he died: through Attila's treachery in Jordanes and the chronicles; in one account after he had himself tried to trap Attila on a boar hunt
• Whether he was the elder brother: so in Theophanes, who drew on Priscus

Bochanminimal

• Whether Bochan's army took Bosporos in 576 or about 579

Bögü Khan

• Whether the conversion was a religious decision, a Sogdian one, or both

Börü Khanminimal

• Whether he was the son of Rudan Khan, as the Sui Shu, the Tongdian and the Zizhi tongjian have it, or Rudan Khan himself, as the Bei Shi has it
• Whether he was the Buli Khan who came with Mukan against the Qi in 563

Börü Shad

• The form of his name in the Armenian and Greek texts

Boyla Kutlug Yargan

• Dates
• Whether the stone dates from the end of the eighth century or from after 840
• Whether the first sentence says that he drove out the Yaglakar khans or that he came to them

Bulan

• Dates
• Whether a Khazar king named Bulan lived
• When the conversion took place: the long version of the reply gives a date that cannot stand
• Whether Bulan was a khagan or a military commander, the Beg
• Whether Bulan is the man called Bulkhan in the Georgian chronicle
• What the name means

Buli Shadminimal

• Who carried off the women of Bingzhou: Chula's men in the Jiu Tang Shu, Buli Shad's horsemen as the Xin Tang Shu can be read

Buluzhen Khan

• The year of his death: the Wei Shu tells his fall in one breath with his elevation in 414; Peter B. Golden begins Datan's reign in 414

Bumin Khan

• Whether Bumin personally led the raid of 542
• Date of Tuwu's death
• Months of the two engagements of 552
• Parentage of the Western Wei princess Changle

Charatonminimal

• Whether Charaton succeeded Donatus: so according to some scholars; according to others the text says nothing of a succession
• Where the Huns of Olympiodorus lived: north of the Black Sea, reached by sea, according to some scholars; in Hungary, reached across the Adriatic, according to others
• The origin of the name: Turkic qara ton, black mantle, or Iranian

Chebi Khan

• Where the Golden Mountain of his camp lay, and whether it is the Altai

Chelchal

• Under whom he served: next in rank after Aspar in Priscus; under Anagastes according to some scholars
• Who ordered the attack after the massacre: Aspar in Priscus; some scholars take the name for Anagastes
• Whether his words about the Huns living off the Goths refer to the days of Attila: so according to some scholars
• Whether the trick succeeded: the Goths and Huns soon made common cause again against the Romans, according to some scholars

Chorpan Tarkhanminimal

• Who sent him: the prince of the north in the Armenian account, Börü Shad as the yabgu's deputy according to some scholars
• Whether he was a Göktürk or a Khazar commander: the Armenian history calls his men Khazars

Chounu Khan

• The victory over the Tiele in Dzungaria: Chounu's in 516 by the Wei Shu; Anagui's after 520, as in the usual account

Chrysaphius

• How to judge his policy towards the Huns: as the payments of a weak government or as the only course open to him

Chula Khan

• Circumstances of death
• The cause of his death: sudden in the Jiu Tang Shu; poisoning by Zheng Yuanshu in the Zizhi Tongjian on one view
• The age of Shibi's son at the succession: seventeen on one view; 'young' in the Jiu Tang Shu

Datan Khan

• The size of his army in 424: up to sixty thousand according to some scholars; the Wei Shu gives no number for the raid, only the fifty-odd ranks around the emperor
• Whether his name was Tatar and whether the Otuz Tatar of the inscriptions descend from his following: a reconstruction reported by some scholars
• The blow that broke him: 424 in an older reckoning, 429 in the Wei Shu and in Peter B. Golden

Dengizich

• The date of the embassy of Attila's sons to Leo: about 466 in two studies, 468 or 469 in a third, 467 in a fourth
• The date of the attack on Bassiana: some scholars place it between 463 and 466

Dengzhu

• His relation to Anagui: uncle in the Zhou Shu and the Bei Shi, younger cousin 從弟 in the Bei Qi Shu, son according to some scholars
• Whether 登注 of the Bei Qi Shu and 鄧叔子 of the Zhou Shu are the same man: the names are close in sound, the careers are not reconcilable
• Where he went in 552: the Zhou Shu keeps him in the steppe as the remnant's ruler, the Bei Qi Shu has him flee south to the Qi with Anluochen
• The place of Issik's victory: Mount Mulai 木賴山 north of Woye in the Zhou Shu; the Bei Shi writes Mount Lai, and the Zhou Shu's own collation note records the variant
• Whether the Qi emperor forced him to march against the Göktürks in 553: some scholars think so; the Zhou Shu puts him among the Rouran who went west to the Wei

Dieluozhiminimal

• Whether the Dieluoshi taken in 630 after the killing of the princess Yicheng, her son or Ilig's, is the same man

Diqinchaminimal

• Whether he was Ishbara's younger cousin, as the Sui Shu has it, or his uncle, as one modern account has it
• Whether he went over to Apa, as the Sui Shu has it, or fled to Tardush

Diwan

• How much of the story is court gossip preserved by a hostile chronicler; it is the only record of a Rouran shaman by name

Dou Xian

• The size of the force that went out in 89: eight thousand Han horse with thirty thousand of the Southern Chanyu in chapter 89, and in chapter 23 columns of four thousand, ten thousand and eight thousand, plus the Southern Chanyu's own, while the inscription counts thirty thousand cavalry
• Whether the man Dou Xian proposed as Northern Chanyu is the Yuchujian of chapter 89 or the Atong of chapter 45
• Where Mount Jiluo, Mount Yanran and Mount Jinwei lay: the sources give routes and distances, and the identification with places on the map is modern; one modern reading puts Mount Jiluo near the Gaoque pass north of the Ordos, close to the frontier
• The year of his death: reckoned from the fourth year of Yongyuan, AD 92

Du-lü-shi Alpminimal

• Who escorted the princess: ten dagan, ten officials with the title tarqan, or a general named Du-lü-shi Alp

Duliuminimal

• Whether he is the same man as Yangsu Tegin, the father of Niri Khan, as some scholars hold
• Whether Shegui was his son and Tardush's grandson, as the Sui Shu has it, or a younger brother of Tardush, as other scholars have it

Duman (Touman)

• How long he reigned: the sources give no year of accession, only the year of his death
• Whether the Xiongnu union was formed under him in answer to Qin pressure, or existed before it

Duoxifuminimal

• Whether the Eletmiš Yabgu of the Ongin inscription is Duoxifu, and whether Duoxifu is the father of the dead man of the stone or the dead man himself

Dusuliuminimal

• Who lost the treasures at chupu: Yami, by the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian; the emperor, in one translation
• Whether the Dusu who submitted to Yami with other Göktürks in Zhangsun Sheng's biography is Dusuliu

Edeco

• Whether he meant to kill Attila: Priscus could not decide whether he agreed with the eunuch in pretence or revealed the plot from fear of Orestes
• Whether he was the father of Odoacer: so according to some scholars; rejected by others

Ellacminimal

• Whether Ellac is a name or a title: some scholars take it as the Turkic ilik, ruler, applied to the governor of the Akatziri
• Whether he was Attila's favourite: so in Jordanes; Priscus saw Attila show affection only to his younger son Ernak

Emperor Gaozu of Han

• The size of the force that encircled him: four hundred thousand horse in the Shiji, more than three hundred thousand in the Han Shu
• The size of Lu Wan's following when he went over to the Xiongnu: several thousand in the Shiji, nearly ten thousand in the Han Shu
• Why Bagatur opened the ring: the consort's words, the failure of Xin's generals to appear, or both

Emperor Wu of Han

• The years of his reign: 141 to 87 BC on one reckoning, 140 to 87 BC on the count by reign names
• The end of Wang Hui, who proposed the Mayi ambush: beheaded in the Shiji, dead in prison in the Han Shu annals
• How the chanyu took Wudi's message of 110 BC: with rage in the Shiji, with fear in the Han Shu annals
• The years in which the four commanderies of Hexi were set up: Wuwei and Jiuquan in 121 BC and Zhangye and Dunhuang in 111 BC in the annals of Wudi, other years in other sources
• The expedition of Li Guangli in 97 BC: with 100,000 foot in the Shiji, with 70,000 in the Han Shu; the Shiji also runs it together with the expedition of 90 BC

Emperor Wuzong of Tang

• Whether the valedictory edict of 22 April 846 is genuine

Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (846–859)

• Why he changed his mind in 847 and sent Li Ye after the debate had shelved the embassy

Emperor Yizong of Tangminimal

• Which Kirghiz ruler was invested in 867

Empress Ashina

• Her age at death: thirty-two sui in the Zhou Shu; thirty-one years by the study's dates 551–582, which some scholars follow; thirty-three where the same dates are counted differently
• The location of her tomb: the Xiaoling of the emperor Wu near Xianyang, Shaanxi, by the Zhou Shu and the study; Xinjiang has also been proposed

Er Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, since the Shiji dates by the Han eras and gives the length of the reign as three years
• The year of his accession against the Dayuan campaign: the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu sets the march on Dayuan in the year of his accession, the sixth of Yuanfeng, and the chapter on Dayuan and the annals of the Han Shu set it in the first year of Taichu, the year after
• The season of Zhao Ponu's march: spring in the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu, autumn in the annals of the Han Shu; the loss of his army falls in the summer according to the Shiji chapter on Dayuan

Ernakminimal

• Where he settled: at the far edge of Lesser Scythia, the Dobruja, according to Jordanes and some scholars; at the confluence of the Danube and the Tisza according to others, on an emended text
• Whether he is the Irnik of the Bulgarian princes' list, and whether that name stands first in it or second
• Whether the king who sent envoys to the Northern Wei to ransom the merchants of Sute was Ernak, as has been proposed on the basis of the Wei Shu

Faghfuraminimal

• Dates
• The year of the battle in which he fell: 588 or 589

Futu Khan

• The year of his accession: 506 in Peter B. Golden, from the first embassy; the Wei Shu gives none

Fuzhulei Chanyu

• Whether Huhanye's charge to pass the realm to his younger brother named Qiemoche alone or all his sons in turn
• How many sons Wang Zhaojun bore Huhanye: one in the Han Shu, two in the Hou Han Shu

Gaiseric

• Whether he bribed Attila to attack the Visigoths: so in Jordanes; in Priscus Attila only meant to earn his gratitude; the story is variously judged grotesque, unlikely, or an encouragement to a plan Attila already had

Heraclius

• Who his Göktürk ally was: Tong Yabgu himself, a Khazar leader under Göktürk rule, or the holder of the title Yabgu Khagan

Hermanaricminimal

• Year of death
• Circumstances of death
• How he died: a voluntary death in Ammianus; of a wound from the Rosomoni and at the age of 110 in Jordanes
• How large his realm was: wide and rich lands in Ammianus; an empire of many northern peoples, compared with Alexander's, in Jordanes

Hesa Khan

• Whether the khan Hesa and the minister Kürabir are one man
• How the khan before Hesa died, and whether the Jiu Tang Shu names him rightly

Heshana Khan

• His descent: one view makes Tardush his great-uncle; the competing theories on the descent of the later western khans, from Istemi or from Apa, are reported without deciding
• The number of Tiele chiefs he executed: several hundred in the Sui Shu

Hezhi Khanminimal

• Whether he was a Göktürk khan or the ruler of a neighbouring people

Honoria

• Whether the affair happened as told: told with gusto by Priscus and those who copied him; Byzantine court gossip unknown to any western writer, according to some scholars
• What she asked of Attila: rescue from a hateful marriage, sent with her ring and money; an offer of herself in marriage, as Attila understood it
• What part she played in Attila's turn to the West: his pretext according to some scholars; a story too slight to explain a great campaign, against geopolitical motives, according to others

Hormizd IV

• Whether his mother was a daughter of Istemi: Sebeos, Tabari and aṯ-Ṯaʿālibī name no khagan
• Whether the marriage came before the Hephthalite war, as in Tabari, or sealed the pact on the Oxus about 560
• The year and place of the decisive battle: April 588 at the Hyrcanian rock, or 589 at Herat

Huhanye Chanyu

• Whether the submission was a surrender or a use of the Han tributary system on Xiongnu terms
• Whether his instruction on the succession made the order of brothers the rule of the office or bound his own sons alone

Hulugu Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, not given in BC by the sources; the Han Shu dates his accession to the first year of Taishi and his successor's to the second year of Shiyuan
• Whether the Right Guli King, named by him as heir, would have taken the throne had the consort and Wei Lü not acted; the Han Shu reports the order as forged and does not say what the nobles would have done

Hunye King

• The year of the campaigns of Huo Qubing in the west: the second year of Yuanshou in Han Shu 6, which gives 121 BC, but the third year in Han Shu 55
• How many came over with him: more than forty thousand, styled a hundred thousand (Shiji 110, Han Shu 6 and 94A), or tens of thousands, styled a hundred thousand (Shiji 111 and Han Shu 55)
• The reading of the name: Hunye 渾邪 or Kunye 昆邪

Huo Qubing

• The years in BC, which are reckoned from the reign names of the Han emperors, since the sources give no year in BC
• The year of the first sortie out of Longxi: the second year of Yuanshou in the annals of Wudi and in the sequence of the Shiji, the third year in the Han Shu chapter on Huo Qubing as it is transcribed
• The heads taken in the first sortie: 8,960 in the Han Shu chapter on Huo Qubing, more than 8,000 in the Han Shu chapter on the Xiongnu, 18,000 in the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu
• How the Hunye king came over: by killing the Xiutu king, in the Shiji and Han Shu chapters on the Xiongnu, and with no such killing in the chapters on Huo Qubing
• The distance of the march out of Dai in 119 BC: more than 2,000 li in the Han Shu and the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu, more than 1,000 li in the Shiji chapter on Huo Qubing
• The fief for the night sortie of 123 BC: 1,600 households in the Shiji, 2,500 in the Han Shu

Huyandi Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, not given in BC by the sources; the Han Shu dates his accession to the second year of Shiyuan, his successor's to the second year of Dijie, and the five-army campaign to the second year of Benshi
• Whether the Zhuanqu Yanzhi who set him up with Wei Lü in 85 BC and the Zhuanqu Yanzhi whom his successor set aside are one woman; the Han Shu uses the title for both and does not say
• The haul of the Wusun and Chang Hui at the court of the Right Guli King: about forty thousand heads in the chapter on the Western Regions, and a figure in the Xiongnu chapter whose text is corrupt

Ildicominimal

• Whether she had any part in Attila's death: none in Priscus as Jordanes gives him; a rumour known to Marcellinus Comes had Attila killed by a woman

Ilig Khan

• His personal name: Duobi in the Jiu Tang Shu; it has also been argued that the name is unknown and Ilig a title, the same the Chinese give Bumin
• How he was taken: seized by Zhang Baoxiang in the camp of his kinsman Shaboluo in the Jiu Tang Shu; handed over by his uncle in other accounts
• The year of the Xueyantuo's secession: 629, with the khan's self-proclamation, in the Jiu Tang Shu; 628 in other treatments
• The Iron Mountain: the Jiu Tang Shu does not say where it was; the Altai has been proposed

Ilterish Khan

• The year of the rising: 682 in the Xin Tang Shu, 683 in the Jiu Tang Shu
• The year of his death: the Tianshou period, 690 to 692; the literature writes 691, and the ages of his sons in the inscriptions fit it; one survey writes 692
• Whether the counsellor who says he made him khan, Tonyukuk, is the Ashide Yuanzhen whom the Tang history gives him as commander

Inel Khan

• Whether the Fuju of 699, the Yinie Khan of 714, the Lesser Khan killed in 716 and the Inel Khan of the Tonyukuk stone are one man; some scholars treat them as one

Irbis Ishbara Yabgu Khan

• The year of his death: 641 by the sequence of the Jiu Tang Shu, whose last dated notice on him is the investiture of that year
• His name: Biheduo Yabgu in the Xin Tang Shu, Bobu Tegin in the Jiu Tang Shu

Irbis Shegui Khan

• Whether he is the Yipishekui who, by Artamonov's hypothesis, moved to the Khazar lands about 651 and founded their ruling house; it is reported with reservations
• The year of his accession: 642 by the sequence of the histories, after Yukuk Shad's flight

Ishbara Khan

• The reading of the Bugut inscription's khan as Ishbara
• When his reign began: 581 by Golden's dating; 582, after Amrak's abdication, by another
• The size of his army in 585: thirty or forty thousand by one estimate, against Tardush's hundred thousand

Ishbara Tolis Khan

• The side of the Ili each khan held after 638: the text gives the west to Yukuk Shad and the east to Ishbara Tolis; the translation shows that the text has them reversed
• Whether Jiana Shad, the father of his successor, was his elder brother Nishu under another name (Xin Tang Shu) or a younger brother (Jiu Tang Shu)

Issik Khan

• The reading of the name: Issik as a title meaning ruler of the state and Kara as the personal name are reconstructions
• His age: no source gives one

Istemi

• Date of the battle of Bukhara: 557 or 560
• Size of the army of 553: a hundred thousand in the Jiu Tang Shu and the older literature, thirty to fifty thousand in another estimate
• The location of Ektag, where he received Zemarchos: the Altai, or the Tian Shan
• Whether the marriage with Khosrow's house came before the Hephthalite war, as in Tabari, or sealed the settlement of 560
• Whether Hormizd IV of Persia was the son of his daughter: Sebeos, Tabari and aṯ-Ṯaʿālibī name no khagan
• Whether Tabari's Sinjibu and Theophylact's Stembischagan are Istemi
• Whether Menander's Silziboulos is Istemi, or one of eight Göktürk chiefs

Jin Midi

• What the golden image of the Xiutu king was: later commentators likened it to Buddha images, and other readings take it for the image of a Xiongnu cult of Heaven

Joseph of Khazaria

• Whether the reply of King Joseph is genuine, in whole or in part
• Whether Joseph was the khagan or the Beg
• Whether the two versions of the reply go back to one original

Jujian Teginminimal

• Whether the Lun Tegin of the Zizhi tongjian is the same man

Junchen Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, not given as such in the sources

Justin II

• Whether Zemarchos left in August 568 or in August 569

Kang Shaoliminimal

• The size of the aid: a thousand horses and two thousand riders in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian, two thousand horses and five hundred soldiers in the Xin Tang Shu, a thousand horses for trade and then five hundred soldiers with two thousand horses in the Zizhi tongjian

Kang Sumiminimal

• Who brought the Sui empress Xiao to the Tang: Kang Sumi in the chapters on the Göktürks, Zhishi Sili in his own biography

Kapgan Khan

• The year of his accession: the Tang history puts his brother's death in the Tianshou period, 690 to 692; the literature writes 691
• The age of twenty-seven in line 51 of the Tonyukuk inscription: his age at accession, or something else in a damaged line
• The year of the destruction of the Türgesh, 710 or 711

Katulph

• The origin of his name: Iranian and Mongolian, Turkic, or not to be determined
• Whether he was the last king of the Hephthalites, as one line of older scholarship held; the passage that line relied on does not exist

Kayen

• Whether her father was Istemi: Sebeos, Tabari and aṯ-Ṯaʿālibī leave the khagan unnamed
• The form of her name: Kayēn in Sebeos, a form given as Qāqin in Masʿudi

Kebinengminimal

• How much of the Xianbei he actually held, which the Chinese accounts have reason to exaggerate in both directions

Khosrow I

• The date of the Hephthalite war: given as 557, around 560, or between 563 and 567
• Whether Khosrow ever held Transoxiana: Dinawari says he did and Tabari's parallel account assumes it; some scholars reject it on Menander's evidence that the Sogdians were Göktürk subjects after the Hephthalite fall
• Whether the khagan whose daughter Khosrow married, and who in Tabari was the grandfather of Hormizd IV, was Istemi: the Perso-Arabic tradition answers it in two ways

Krekaminimal

• The form of the name: Kreka in the excerpts, Erekan in a later passage; Erekan is held to be original on one view
• The origin of the name: Turkic, the pure princess or pure ruler, or a Turkic or Mongolic word for wife

Kuhanzhenminimal

• The form of his name: Kuhanzhen in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks, Kuhezhen in the Bei Shi, the Zizhi tongjian and the annals of the Sui Shu, Kushezhen in the Tongdian

Kül Tegin

• Which of the two brothers was the elder: the Tang history calls Bilge his elder brother, and the inscription gives Kül Tegin as seven when their father died against Bilge's eight
• Whether the Chinese general Čača Seŋün of his inscription is the Shazha Zhongyi whom the Tang history has beaten at Mingsha in 705

Külüg Bagha

• Whether the Kirghiz left him on the Orkhon as their representative after 840
• Whether he is the Kutlug Baga Tarkan named in the Suji inscription

Kunaxolanminimal

• Dates
• The form of the name: Kunaxolan or Kunaxola
• The date of the revolt of Turum: about 582, 581–582, or about 598

Kürabir

• Whether the minister Jueluowu and the khan Hesa are one man, as the wording of the Tang Huiyao has been read
• How the khan of 839 died: killed by the minister in the Jiu Tang Shu, by his own hand in the Xin Tang Shu and the Tang Huiyao

Kursichminimal

• Dates
• The date of the raid: 395, or about 415 to 420 or a little later
• Whether the Apa Kurçik of the runic fragments from Syria is the Hun leader of 395: so it has been argued, if the text is authentic
• The origin of the name: a hybrid with a Turkish diminutive ending, or a Turkic word meaning brave-like or noble-like

Kutlug Bilge Kül Khan

• Whether the Yaglakar clan held the khanship from 744 or acquired it later

Kutluk Teginminimal

• Whether he came to the Tang court once in 618, as in the Xin Tang Shu, or twice, in the fifth and the ninth month, as in the Zizhi tongjian

Lady Poshiminimal

• Whether she came from the Tuyuhun: the Sui Shu calls them the mother's family of the Moheduo Shad, the title Ilig bore before he was khan, and the Tang histories give his mother only as Poshi

Lady Xiang

• Whether in 611 Pei Ju took the lady herself to the Jade Gate and sent her to her son, or only her trusted attendants and her messenger

Laoshang Chanyu

• The year of his death: 161 or 160 BC, reckoned from the Han reign years rather than given
• Whether the Yuezhi left the Dunhuang country for the Ili in his reign or already in his father's campaign of 177 to 176 BC; in a third view they reached the Ili under his father and moved on west in 162 BC

Li Deyu

• Whether the first two letters to the Kirghiz were two missions or one
• Whether Wuzong's valedictory edict naming Li Deyu regent is genuine

Li Guangli

• The years in BC, which are reckoned from the reign names of the Han emperors, since the sources give no year in BC
• When he went over to the Xiongnu: after the campaign of 97 BC in the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu as it stands, in 90 BC in the Han Shu and in the annals of Wudi
• The foot soldiers of the campaign of 97 BC: 100,000 in the Shiji, 70,000 in the Han Shu
• The army of the censor Shangqiu Cheng in 90 BC: 20,000 in the annals of Wudi, more than 30,000 in the Han Shu chapter on the Xiongnu
• The year of his death, reckoned from the Han Shu's 'a year or more' after the surrender

Li Jianminimal

• Whether his Chinese surname points to the Kirghiz claim of descent from Li Ling and kinship with the Tang house of Li

Li Ling

• Whether the Kirghiz descend from Li Ling
• What the Xiongnu title Right Xiao King (右校王) names, and whether Li Ling ruled a people with it; the Xin Tang Shu calls him Right Worthy King and places him in the Kirghiz past

Li Shi (Tang envoy)

• Whether the envoy of 845 is the Li Shi who became military governor of Hedong, and the Li Shi of Hedong whom the Xin Tang Shu names in 850

Li Ye (Tang envoy)minimal

• Whether he reached the Kirghiz, and which ruler he invested
• Whether he is the Li Ye of Fengxiang whom the Xin Tang Shu names in 850

Maniakh

• Whether the ruler who sent Maniakh, Sizabul, was Istemi or a lesser chief; and whether the claim that he alone held the power was true

Marcian

• How to judge his refusal of the tribute: as the end of a ruinous payment, or as an untimely act of audacity
• Whether he encouraged the revolt of the subject peoples after Attila's death: some scholars find it not improbable, others very likely, though without direct evidence

Marwan ibn Muhammadminimal

• How far the khagan's acceptance of Islam in 737 went, and how long it lasted
• The size of Marwan's army, for which the Arabic sources give figures

Maximinus

• The year of the embassy: 449 on one view; 448 in the edition and in one English account
• Whether he was the Maximinus whom Theodosius sent to Isauropolis in 450: so on one view
• His religion: a pagan according to the text printed in the edition; a Christian according to a second view, which a third doubts

Meng Tian

• The strength of his army: one hundred thousand in the Shiji, several hundred thousand in the Han Shu, and slightly over three hundred thousand on a modern count of the force that guarded the wall
• The year of his death: 210 BC on the modern account; the Shiji gives only the interval after Duman's retreat

Moduo Daguanminimal

• Whether daguan renders the title tarkhan, as one modern study holds

Mugulü

• Whether the story is history or a formulaic origin tale: Peter B. Golden calls it almost formulaic for the genesis of steppe polities; Yıldırım takes it as a rare precedent of a fugitive founding a state
• The dating: the Wei Shu places the capture at the end of the reign of Shenyuan (Liwei, d. 277) and the flight under Mudi (Yilu, 307–316), a span that strains one lifetime; some scholars date the founder by an emperor Mu of the Eastern Jin, 345 to 361

Mukan Khan

• The dates of the northern campaigns against the Kirghiz and the Khitan: between 554 and 560
• The storm of 568 and the khan's change of mind: on one view a Chinese narrative pattern rather than a record

Mundzucminimal

• Whether he ruled: no source names him as king according to some scholars; a third co-ruler beside Octar and Rua according to others
• The meaning of the name: the Turkic word for a bead or for the knob of a standard, or a Germanic name

Nadulu Shadminimal

• Whether Axian Shad was his grandson, as the Zhou Shu's wording is usually read, or his son Ashina under a title, as in the Tongdian
• Whether the story makes the name Türk a title of rule before it was the name of a people

Nagai Khan

• The year of his death: not in the Wei Shu; 506 in Golden, the year of Futu's first embassy

Natra

• The reading of the name, which the translator of Tabari marks with a query

Niri Khan

• Year of death
• Dates
• The year of his death: before 600 on the Sui Shu's account of his widow, after Tardush's flight in the Xin Tang Shu, probably 603 according to some, 604 according to others
• Whether the alliance with the khan of the west was the princess Dayi's, as in the Sui Shu and the Bei Shi, or Tulan's, as in the Tongdian
• His descent: a grandson of Mukan in one modern account; in another, a grandson of Tardush, if his father Yangsu Tegin is Duliu
• Whether he wrote the khagan's letter to the emperor Maurice, as one modern account holds

Nishu Bagha Shad

• The year of the Tang investiture: 633 in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian, 632 in the Zizhi tongjian and the Cefu yuangui
• Whether he was also called Jiana Shad, as the Xin Tang Shu reports

Nishufu Khan

• Whether he was of the Ashina; the chapter does not say

Obadiah of Khazariaminimal

• Dates
• Whether the reform of Obadiah took place, since the reply of King Joseph is the only source for it
• When he reigned: some scholars put the reform about 800
• Whether Obadiah was a khagan or the Beg, and whether he forced the khagan to take up Judaism
• Whether the passage on Obadiah belongs to the original reply or is a later insertion

Octarminimal

• Which part of the Huns he ruled: the western lands in modern Hungary, with dealings with the western Romans, according to some scholars
• How many Huns the Burgundians defeated: 10,000 in Socrates, a figure held to be much exaggerated

Ögä Khan

• Whether the clans raised him or he proclaimed himself khan
• Where he took refuge after Shahu Mountain: with the Shiwei in the Jiu Tang Shu, with the Black Carts in the Xin Tang Shu
• Where and by whom he was killed: by a Uyghur minister in the Altai region in the Jiu Tang Shu, by the Black Carts in the Xin Tang Shu

Onegesius

• Whether he plotted against Attila: in one account Attila survived two attempts on his life by Onegesius and his brother Scottas; in Priscus he refuses every Roman offer
• The origin of the name: Germanic according to some scholars, while others find the evidence inadequate to decide

Orestes

• When he entered Attila's service: perhaps in 433, when Attila may have come to Italy with Aetius, according to some scholars; in the second half of the 440s according to others
• To whom Aetius ceded the land on the Save where Orestes lived: to Attila according to some scholars, against the common view that it was Rua
• Whether Odoacer, who put him to death, was the son of his fellow envoy Edeco: so according to some scholars; rejected by others

Ozmish Khan

• Peter B. Golden makes Ozmïš the chieftain of the Basmïl who was proclaimed khan in 742; the Jiu Tang Shu makes him the Göktürk Left Shad against whom the Basmïl rose.
• Who he was: the Left Shad himself, in the Jiu Tang Shu; in the Xin Tang Shu the Left Shad is Pan Kül Tegin, who set up two sons of Bilge in turn before the yabgu Guduo killed them and took the throne, and Ozmish is Pan Kül Tegin's son, raised by the people after the coalition killed the yabgu

Parmudha

• Whether he and his father were Göktürk princes or rulers of one of the small Sogdian dynasties subject to the Göktürks
• Whether he is the Ye-li tegin who founded a temple in Kashmir

Pei Ju

• How Pei Ju brought about the death of Princess Dayi: by asking to go to Tulan and persuade him, in the biography of Pei Ju; by telling the envoys of Yami that the marriage would follow her death, in the chapter on the Göktürks; both in the Zizhi tongjian
• Whether Pei Ju and Yami were in secret correspondence during the war with Tulan, and whether Pei Ju offered Yami the princess Anyi in 597 as the price of Dayi's death
• The year of the sacrifice on Mount Heng to which the states drawn by Pei Ju came: 607 in the Sui Shu, 608 in the Zizhi tongjian
• Who gave Gaozu the advice to grant Tong Yabgu the marriage and to befriend the distant and attack the near: Pei Ju in the Tang Huiyao, the Cefu yuangui and the Zizhi tongjian; Feng Deyi in the Tongdian

Poliuhan Baling

• Dates
• The year of the rising: 523 in the Zizhi Tongjian, the third month of 524 in the annals of the Wei Shu
• Whether he descended from the Southern Xiongnu, as some scholars infer from the origin the Bei Qi Shu gives the Poliuhan surname
• Whether the Kongque whom Anagui beheaded in the Wei Shu is the Kongque who went over to Erzhu Rong in the Bei Qi Shu

Poluomen Khan

• Whether he counts as a khan of the Rouran: the Wei Shu records his elevation and title; the usual ruler lists pass from Chounu to Anagui without him

Poshi Teginminimal

• His father: one view makes him a son of Duliu and grandson of Tardush

Princess Qianjin

• Dates
• When she received the title Princess Dayi: with Xu Pinghe's embassy of 584 by the Zizhi tongjian, after Ishbara's submission of 585 by the Sui Shu
• The year of her death: 593 in the Zizhi tongjian; the Sui Shu gives no year; one account ties it to Yami's embassy of 597
• Who killed her: Tulan in his tent after Yami's slander, in the Sui Shu; Yami, in one account

Princess Taihe

• Which sister of Muzong she was: the tenth younger sister, or the fifth
• Her place among Xianzong's daughters: seventeenth of eighteen, or eighteenth of nineteen
• Whether the escort that the Kirghiz gave her was ten officers of the rank of dagan or a general with others
• The city that Ögä asked the Tang to lend him: Tiande, or Zhenwu
• The month of Wang Hui's mission to Ögä: the eighth month or the twelfth month of 841
• Where Ögä's camp lay on the night of the attack: at Zhenwu, or eighty li from the Youzhou frontier
• The day of her entry into Chang'an: the twenty-fifth day of the second month, a day at the start of the third month, or the third month
• Her title after the return: Dingan or Anding
• How many imperial princesses stayed away from her reception: six or seven

Princess Xinyiminimal

• The year of the marriage: the first month of 614 in the Sui Shu and the Bei Shi; 611, together with the title Heshana Khan, in one modern account

Qiedihou Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, not given in BC by the sources; the Han Shu dates his son's accession to the first year of Taishi, 96 BC, while one list of reigns ends his reign in 97 BC
• Whether Li Guangli's surrender belongs to the campaign of 97 BC, as the transmitted Shiji has it, or to the campaign of 90 BC, as the Han Shu has it

Qinyu Shadminimal

• The year of his death: the Sui Shu gives none; some scholars place the events around it in 593

Que Dadu Shad

• The order of events in 618: in the Zizhi tongjian he submitted to the Tang after his flight to the Tuyuhun, in the Xin Tang Shu before his alliance with Li Gui

Qutayba ibn Muslim

• How far the Göktürks and the Türgesh intervened in Sogdiana during his campaigns

Rehan Teginminimal

• The year of his release: 621 in the Jiu Tang Shu, 622 in the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian
• Whether Rehan is his name or the office the Tongdian writes 熱汗

Right Shad (d. 741)

• His name: the Tang history gives none
• The year: 741 by the order of the Jiu Tang Shu's notices; the lower chapter of the Xin Tang Shu tells the collapse with other men, Pan Kül Tegin and the yabgu Guduo, and does not mention the killing

Rua

• Year of death
• The year of his death: 434, after 435, or shortly after 425
• When the tribute of 350 pounds began: about 430 according to some scholars; in the 410s according to others
• Whether Aetius ceded him a part of Pannonia: so according to some scholars; according to others no text warrants it
• The origin of the name: Germanic according to some scholars, a Germanized Turkic name according to others

Rudan Khanminimal

• Whether he was the father of the Buli Khan, as the Sui Shu, the Tongdian and the Zizhi tongjian have it, or the Buli Khan himself, as the Bei Shi has it

Rudan Teginminimal

• The year of his embassy: 588 according to some scholars, with the Cefu Yuangui entering the jade staff under 587; the year of Qinyu Shad's death by the Sui Shu, which gives no number; 593 by one translation of the Sui Shu; the annals of the Sui Shu record a tegin from Tulan in 591

Šāba

• Dates
• His identity: Bagha Khan, Ishbara's brother, by an old equation; a son of Tardush on one view, identified with a younger son known from the Bukharan tradition; not a Turk in the strict sense by the translator's judgement
• The year of his death: 588, the eleventh year of Hormizd, by Tabari's reckoning; 589 at Herat on one view
• Whether the name is personal or the dynastic name Zhaowu of the Oxus princes

Scottas

• Whether he plotted against Attila: according to a modern account Attila survived two attempts on his life by Onegesius and his brother Scottas
• The origin of the name: hardly Turkish because of its double initial consonant according to some scholars; a Germanic Skutta according to others

Sebükteginminimal

• Whether the Pand-nama, which tells his origins, was written by Sebüktegin himself

Shegui Khan

• Year of death
• Dates
• His place in the Ashina genealogy: the Sui Shu and the Xin Tang Shu make him the son of Duliu and the grandson of Tardush, which puts him a generation lower than if he were Tardush's younger brother
• The end of his reign: 618 or 619 in one reckoning; the Xin Tang Shu still has him send envoys in 619; a different interpretation of the Tang notice on Persia puts Tong Yabgu on the throne before 616
• The year of the attack on Heshana: 611 in the literature; the Sui Shu sets the plan in the sixth year of Daye, 610, and dates the attack itself no closer

Shelun Khan

• Circumstances of death
• The year he took the title khan: the Wei Shu gives no year; Peter B. Golden writes 402–410; some scholars date the khaganate from about 400; others place the title between 394 and 402 from the order of the Wei Shu narrative
• Whether Shelun was the first to bear the title khan: yes according to some scholars, who take the earlier cases in the Chinese annals for later projections; no according to others, who find the title among the Xianbei in 261 and 278
• His death: on the road in flight, in the Wei Shu; of wounds in battle in May 410, according to some scholars
• Whether Wei Shu's 'no writing' describes the state he founded or the state the Wei wished to describe

Shi Xiong

• His office in 843: deputy commander of the Tiande field army, prefect of Fengzhou, or adjutant to Liu Mian
• Who found the princess in the camp: Shi Xiong's troops, or the spy Cai Xi, who claimed it for himself

Shibi Khan

• The false report by the Yicheng princess that raised the siege of Yanmen: in the Zizhi Tongjian according to some scholars; not in the Sui Shu, which has the relief armies arrive
• The two thousand horses and five hundred riders for Li Yuan: according to some scholars; the Jiu Tang Shu gives a thousand horses and two thousand riders

Shiboqu Azhan

• The year of the visit: 647 in the Tongdian and in a letter of Li Deyu, 648 in the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian
• Which guards he commanded: the Left in the Xin Tang Shu, the Right in the Zizhi tongjian
• Whether silifa renders the Turkic title ilteber

Si Yabgu Khan

• Circumstances of death
• Dates
• His death: soon after his flight to Kangju in the Tang histories; at Balkh after his attack on the New Monastery in Xuanzang's Record
• Why he killed the lesser khan Yili: without cause in the Jiu Tang Shu, on slander in the Xin Tang Shu, because Yili was not of his clan in the Zizhi tongjian

Silifaminimal

• Whether he was Tardush's nephew, as the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian have it, or his son, as the Bei Shi has it
• The form of his name: Silifa in the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian, Houlifa in the Bei Shi

Sparzeugunminimal

• Dates
• Whether Sparzeugun renders the Turkic Išbara Jabğu, and whether the name is a form of the title yabgu khan
• The date of the revolt of Turum: about 582, 581–582, or about 598

Su Wu

• The years of his mission and his return: reckoned from the year of Li Ling's surrender and from the nineteen years the Han Shu counts, not given as such in the chapter
• Where the North Sea lay: the Han Shu gives no direction and no distance, and some modern scholars identify it with Lake Baikal

Sulu Khan

• Whether his rise was made possible by the Göktürk withdrawal of 715 or by the Arab pressure from the south

Suni Shi

• How he was related to Ilig: an uncle in the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian, the son of a cousin in the Jiu Tang Shu
• Who seized Ilig: Suni Shi under Tang pressure in the Zizhi tongjian and the Tang Huiyao, his son Ashina Zhong in his own biography, Zhang Baoxiang in the chapters on the Göktürks

Suopi Shadminimal

• The form of his name: Suopi in the Sui Shu, Shapi in the Bei Shi

Ta-bu-he-zu

• Whether the first two envoys made two missions or one

Tagma Tarkhanminimal

• Whether the Göktürk embassy that urged Justin II to war with Persia was Tagma's

Tamim ibn Bahrminimal

• The year of the embassy, given as 821 with a query

Tanhan Khanminimal

• Whether he was one of the five khans who crossed the Long Wall in 582

Tanshihuai

• The years of his life: the chapter gives his age at death as forty-five and dates the death to the Guanghe period (AD 178 to 184), but not the year; 136 to 181 are reckoned in the literature
• Whether Qizhijian, who died in 133 and whom the literature credits with laying the foundation, stands in any line of office before him; the chapter does not connect them, and the confederation passed to nobody after 181
• Whether his three divisions were an administration or a war arrangement that lapsed with him

Tardu Shad

• Whether his Gaochang wife was the king's sister, as the biography says, or his daughter, as some scholars hold
• Whether his second wife was the younger sister of the first, as the translations have it

Tardush

• Year of death
• Circumstances of death
• When his revolt began: about 582 according to some; with Apa's flight to him in 583 according to others
• Whether he held supreme power over both khaganates from about 600 to 603, as some hold, or his eastern venture failed without a battle, as others hold
• Whether the army destroyed by Bahram Chobin in 588 or 589 was his, led by his son Šāba, or Bagha's
• His death: 603 in exile in Tibet, or disappearance among the Tuyuhun
• The year of his flight: the Sui Shu puts the Tiele defeat of Niri and the yabgu, the collapse of Tardush's realm and his flight to the Tuyuhun under the year 601; the literature writes about 603
• Whether Tardush confirmed the alliance with Byzantium in 576, as some scholars hold; Menander's last fragment on the embassy says that the taking of Bosporos showed the Göktürks had been provoked into war with the Romans, and that Turxanthos detained the envoys
• Who wrote the letter to Maurice that Theophylact records: Tardush about 598 according to some, a khagan of 581 or 582 according to others

Taspar Khan

• Whether his religion is to be entered as Buddhism: he was converted, by the Chinese account, and no other Ashina followed him
• His motive in taking up the Qi resistance: balance of power, according to some scholars; the sources give none

Tatik Iznanchu

• The month of his arrival: the eighth month of 844 in one source, the second month in another
• Whether the Chinese form Yi-si-nan-shu renders Iznanchu, Inanchu or Oz-Inanchu

Tengri Khan

• The year of his death, 741 in the literature; the Tang history says only that it followed the investiture of 740

Theodoric I

• How he died on the Catalaunian Plains: thrown from his horse and trampled by his own men, in Jordanes; killed by the spear of the Ostrogoth Andag, as others said
• Whether the Vandal king Gaiseric bribed Attila to attack him: so in Jordanes; grotesque according to some scholars; unlikely according to others

Theodosius II

• When the tribute to the Huns began: under Rua in the 410s, or about 430
• How to judge his policy towards the Huns: as the payments of a weak government, or as the only course open, its ill repute derived from Priscus

Thorismund

• Whether Attila fought a second campaign against the Alans beyond the Loire, where Thorismund beat him: so in Jordanes; mentioned by no other author and generally disbelieved
• Who killed him: enemies to whom his client Ascalc betrayed him, in Jordanes; his brothers and their followers, in other chronicles
• How he came to the throne: so mildly that no one disputed the succession, in Jordanes; according to others, amid a violent rivalry between the Visigothic princes

Töles Khan

• The year he went over to the Tang: 629, the third year of Zhenguan, in the Jiu Tang Shu; 21 April 628 in a modern account
• The princess he married: the Tang history has him marry the Sui princess Huainan when she came north; no other source names her

Tong Yabgu

• Year of death
• Dates
• Whether the reign began in 618 or 619
• The year of his murder: 627 in the Cefu yuangui, 628 in the Tiele chapter of the Jiu Tang Shu and in the Zizhi Tongjian, 630 in the reckoning that dates Xuanzang's audience to that year
• His descent: brother of Shegui by both accounts; the line back to Istemi or to Apa is the western succession problem
• The meaning of the name Tong: 'tiger' after Kashgari, 'hero' after Gerard Clauson, as the literature reports them
• Whether the Göktürk ruler who met Heraclius was Tong Yabgu himself, a subordinate, or a chief of the Khazars
• Who advised Gaozu to grant the marriage: Feng Deyi in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian, Pei Ju in the Zizhi Tongjian, the Tang Huiyao and the Cefu yuangui

Tonyukuk

• Whether he is the Ashide Yuanzhen of the Tang histories
• His year of birth: the Tang history's 'over seventy' in 716 puts it before 646, and his own inscription says he was born in the realm of China
• The date of his monument: 716, about 720, between 720 and 725, or 726 and a little later; and the year of his death, which no source gives
• Whether the name is a personal name or a title, tun yukuk, 'chief vizier'

Tör Apaminimal

• Year of death
• Dates
• Whether Tör Apa is the dead man, his chief or a title
• The date of the stele: the second half of the seventh century, 756 to 757, 842 to 843, or the second half of the ninth century and later
• Whether the man is the Kirghiz envoy of 866 or his chief the chancellor of 848

Töremen Apa

• His mother's standing: not Göktürks, and by Ishbara's claim of low rank
• Whether the later western khans descended from him, as the Sui Shu is understood to say
• Whether he dealt with the Sui before Ishbara turned on him

Tuhezhen Khan

• Year of death
• The year of accession: before 449, when the Wei Shu calls him newly established
• The year of death: 464 in the Wei Shu; the second month of 450 in Taiwu's letter to the Song
• The meaning of his title Chu Khan: 'only' or 'sole' by the usual interpretation of the Wei Shu gloss; or 'yes', a Mongolic or Tungusic word of assent

Tulan Khan

• His relation to Ishbara: a brother by the usual reckoning; the sources as reported do not say

Tuldichminimal

• Dates
• The date of the revolt of Turum: about 582, 581–582, or about 598

Tulun Khan

• The year of the Gaoche secession: 487 in the Gaoche chapter of the Wei Shu; the Rouran chapter tells it under the campaign of 492

Tun Bagha Tarkan

• Whether he rejected Manichaeism outright or only the Sogdian party that carried it

Türk-shad

• Whether Turxanthos is a name or a title: Türk-shad according to some scholars, *Turuq-shad, shad of the Duolu tribes, according to others
• Whether Turxanthos' father Silziboulos was Istemi, as most modern accounts have it, or one of the eight chiefs of the Göktürks
• Whether the embassy ended in a confirmed alliance, as some scholars have it, or in open war, as Menander's fragment on the taking of Bosporos says
• The fall of Bosporos: in 576 while Valentinos was with the Göktürks, by Menander's fragment; about 579 according to some scholars

Turumminimal

• Dates
• The date of his revolt: about 582, 581–582, or about 598
• Whether his revolt was a revolt of the Ogurs
• Against which khagan he rose

Tuwu

• His name: Tuwu only in the Xin Tang Shu, a compilation of the eleventh century; the Zhou Shu, the Sui Shu and the Bei Shi give only the title Great Yabgu, and the Zhou Shu gives neither
• His descent: son of the Axian Shad, against a view that makes him Axian's grandson
• The year of his death: 542, when Bumin appears at the head of the tribe, is an inference

Üç Tuğlu Khan

• The year of Guo Xiaoke's victory: 641 by the Jiu Tang Shu's arrangement, after the seventh month of 642 by the Tongjian gangmu
• The year of his flight to Tokharistan, 642 by the sequence of the histories; the year of his death, given only as the year of Cheng Zhijie's appointment against Helu, 655 or 656
• Whether he was of the Ashina: the office of shad implies it, and the histories do not say

Uldinminimal

• How far his rule reached: west and east of the Carpathians, though not over all the Huns, according to some scholars; the leader of a fraction of the Huns according to others
• Whether the Huns who served Stilicho and Honorius from 406 to 409 were Uldin's men: so according to some scholars; mercenaries of unknown origin according to others
• Whether he invaded Thrace once or twice: in 408, and probably already in the winter of 404 to 405, according to some scholars

Valamir

• Whether the Ostrogoths fought at the Nedao: in the coalition against Attila's sons according to some; already free and taking no part according to others; not on the field according to a third
• When Attila's sons attacked him: about 455 in a modern account; the year of Theodoric's birth, which has been put in 454, 455 and 456
• Whether he is the Balamer whom Priscus calls a Scythian: so according to some scholars

Valentinian III

• Whether his sister Honoria's appeal to Attila happened as told: told by Priscus and those who copied him; some regard it as Byzantine court gossip unknown to any western writer
• Who sent Pope Leo to Attila in 452: the emperor, who was at Rome, in two versions; in Jordanes an embassy simply came from Rome

Valentinos

• Whether the Valentinos who went to the Avars about 558 is the envoy of 576
• Whether Menander's two earlier embassies of Valentinos to the Göktürks include the embassy of 576
• Whether Arsilas, whom Menander names as the elder ruler of the Göktürks, was their supreme ruler or only the eldest of their leaders
• Whether the Ektel of 576 is the Ektag of 569
• Whether the embassy ended in war, as Menander's fragment on the fall of Bosporos says, or in a renewal of the alliance, as some scholars have it

Wang Zhaojun

• Whether she asked to go to the Xiongnu, as the Hou Han Shu has it, or was given, as the Han Shu has it
• Her name and courtesy name, which the Han Shu and the Hou Han Shu give in reverse order
• The year in BC, which is reckoned from the reign name Jingning

Wei Jie

• Whether the censor of the western journey, the censor of the summons of 610 and the author of the Xifan ji are one man
• The year of the western journey: 606 by one dating, 610 by an earlier
• Whether Wangshe cheng, where the envoys received Buddhist scriptures, is the Hephthalite royal seat or Rajagriha in India

Wei Qing

• The years in BC, which are reckoned from the reign names of the Han emperors, since the sources give no year in BC
• The mother's standing: a concubine of the marquis of Pingyang in the Shiji, a servant of the princess's household in the Han Shu
• The fief added after the campaign of 124 BC: 6,000 households in the Shiji, 8,700 in the Han Shu, and the totals of his fiefs, which the two works count differently

Wen-wu Alp

• The year of the letter that answers him: the summer of 843 or of 844

Woyanqudi Chanyu

• How far he stood from the direct line of the chanyus: the Han Shu calls him an erxun of Wuwei, and some scholars make Wuwei his great-grandfather

Wuti Khan

• The end of his reign: the Wei Shu gives no year; Tuhezhen is 'newly established' in 449; 444 in one reckoning
• The campaign of 443: a Wei victory at the Egen river in the Wei Shu, a Wei defeat in the Song Shu

Wuwei Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, since the Shiji dates by the Han eras and gives the length of the reign as ten years
• Whether the Xiongnu raided in these years: the Shiji says the chanyu would not raid the Han frontier, the annals of the Han Shu record a raid on Wuyuan in the year of the revolt in Nanyue

Xulihu Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, since the Shiji dates by the Han eras and gives the length of the reign as one year
• Why the chanyu did not intercept Li Guangli on his way home from Dayuan: he could not reach him in the Shiji, he did not dare in the Han Shu
• How the Xiongnu name is to be read, Xulihu or Goulihu, since the commentaries give two readings of the first character

Xulüquanqu Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, not given in BC by the sources; the Han Shu dates his accession to the second year of Dijie and his death to the second year of Shenjue, and counts the reign as nine years
• Whether the Zhuanqu Yanzhi whom he set aside in 68 BC is the consort who set up Huyandi with Wei Lü in 85 BC; the Han Shu uses the title for both
• Whether the Left Great Qiequ was the father or the brother of the Zhuanqu Yanzhi: the Han Shu calls him her father in 68 BC and, by the name Du Longqi, her brother in 60 BC

Yami Khan

• The year of his death: 609 by the usual reckoning and by some scholars; the Sui Shu's 'that year' after the court visit of 608 could be understood as 608
• His father: Ishbara in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks; Ishbara's brother Chuluohou, Bagha Khan, in the Tongdian, in Zhangsun Sheng's speech in the Zizhi Tongjian and in the Sui Shu's biography of Zhangsun Sheng
• His relation to Tulan: brother by the Sui Shu, where both are sons of Ishbara; Turkic Atlas carries the question under Tulan

Yangsu Teginminimal

• Whether he is the same man as Duliu, the son of Tardush and father of Shegui, as some scholars hold

Yinan Khan

• The year of his death: the chapters date it by the campaign that followed

Yiran Khan

• Whether he is the son who speaks in the Bilge Khan inscription and held the funeral in 735, or whether that was already Tengri

Yiwu Tudun Shadminimal

• The year of the meeting at Mount Yanzhi: 609 in the Zizhi tongjian, 608 in a modern account

Yizhi Nishiduminimal

• Whether he summoned wind and rain, 徵召 in the Zhou Shu, or divined them, 徵占 in the Bei Shi

Yizhi-lianjiminimal

• Whether he came in 866, as the Tang huiyao is reported to have it, or in 867, as the Zizhi tongjian has it
• Whether the Chinese name renders the Turkic rank ičräki
• Whether he is the man commemorated on the Begre stele

Yizhixie Chanyu

• The years of his reign: reckoned from the Han reign years, since the Shiji dates by the Han eras and gives the length of the reign as thirteen years
• The number killed and taken in Huo Qubing's first sortie of 121 BC: more than 18,000 in the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu, more than 8,000 in the decree quoted in the chapter on Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, 8,960 in the Han Shu
• How the chanyu left the field at Mobei: alone with several hundred strong riders in one chapter, on six mules in another

Yucheng Khan

• The beginning of the reign: 464 in the Wei Shu; 450 by the letter of Taiwu in the Song Shu

Yukuk Shad

• Year of death
• Circumstances of death
• How he was related to Ilig: his son, his nephew or his younger brother
• His fate in 627: put to flight in the Chinese histories, killed in one modern account

Yushe Shad

• Whether he and the Aoshe Shad, the son of Chula whom the princess Yicheng passed over in 620, are one man
• Whether the Yushe Shad Ashina Momo of Liu Lan's biography is Chula's son

Yuwen Tai

• Year of death: the tenth month of 556 in the annals of the Zhou Shu; 557, after the founding of the state, in other accounts
• Whether the embassy of 545 answered a Göktürk wish to trade, as the Zhou Shu tells it, or a threat from Bumin

Zemarchos

• Whether he came from Cilicia, as Menander says, or was a Thracian, as some scholars propose
• The year of his embassy: 569 in Menander, the seventh year of Justin II in John of Ephesus

Zercon

• Whose attendant his wife had been: a Hun queen's, which would make the passage evidence of a hereditary nobility among the Huns; or the empress's at Constantinople
• The attribution of the passage on Bleda to Priscus, which goes back to the editor Valesius

Zhang Qian

• Whether chapter 123 of the Shiji is Sima Qian's text or a later reconstruction from the Han Shu; the account of Zhang Qian stands in both

Zhao Fanminimal

• Whether he ever set out for the Kirghiz country: the first letter of Li Deyu, which names him as its bearer, may never have been sent

Zhenzhu Tong Irkinminimal

• The purpose of the gifts: to seal the agreement in the Xin Tang Shu, to fetch the princess in the Zizhi tongjian

Zhishi Sili

• Who brought the Sui empress Xiao to the Tang in 630: Kang Sumi in the chapters on the Göktürks, Zhishi Sili in his own biography

Zhizhi Chanyu

• How far west his realm reached, and whether the Talas settlement was a city he built or one he took
• Where Jiankun lay: the country of the Yenisei Kirghiz according to some, the northern slope of the Tianshan south of the Altai according to others

Zhonghang Yue

Zhu-wu Alp Sol

• Whether the first two envoys made two missions or one
• How far he went with the Tang escort of the princess: to Taiyuan, or only to a place outside Chang'an

Buyeo

• Whether the descent of Goguryeo from Buyeo is a historical relation or a claim made by the Goguryeo house and copied into the Chinese histories
• Its end: the Chinese record has it beaten repeatedly from the third century and absorbed by Goguryeo in 494; no year is given for the state itself

Byzantium

• The year of Zemarchos's departure: 568 in one view, the beginning of August 569 by Menander's reckoning from the fourth year of Justin II
• Whether the Göktürk–Roman alliance survived 576: one view has it confirmed; Menander has Turxanthos detain and mock Valentinos and the Göktürks take Bosporos
• The fall of Bosporos: 576, while Valentinos was with the Göktürks, by Menander's fragment; about 579 in one view
• Who Heraclius's Göktürk ally was: Tong Yabgu himself, the Yabgu Khagan, in one view; Tong Yabgu with Börü Shad in command, in a second

Danube Bulgariaminimal

• Whether Asparuch crossed the Danube about 679 or well before
• Whether the runic-looking marks of the first Bulgar state are letters, property marks or magic signs, and what language they would write

Eastern Wei

• The year of the division of the Wei: 534, when the emperor Xiaowu went west and a second emperor was raised at Ye, or 535, the first year of the Western Wei's own emperor

First Göktürk Khaganate

• Whether the polity was divided into two wings at Bumin's death, whether the western command was a standing structure that only became visible afterward, or whether there were four commands from the start
• Extent: the figures of two, five to seven, and six to seven million square kilometres are modern estimates
• The end of the western wing: 657, 659 and the 740s are all used, for different things
• The reading and meaning of kök türk
• The fall of 630: Ilig handed over by his uncle, or taken by Zhang Baoxiang in Shaboluo's camp, as the Jiu Tang Shu has it
• The Xueyantuo secession: 628 in the literature; 629 in the Jiu Tang Shu, which has the risings north of the Yinshan in 627 and the shad driven off, not killed

Five Divisions of the Xiongnu

• The year of the division: the Jin Shu and the Tongdian place it in the Jian'an era, and the Zizhi Tongjian's placing directly after 216 has no evident basis
• Whether the Xiongnu of the divisions stood outside the Jin household registers and, if they did, whether they still bore the dues of registered households
• Whether the Liu Meng who revolted in 271 was a chanyu, as one chapter of the Jin Shu has it, or the commander of a single division

Former Yanminimal

• How far the Yan states were Xianbei polities and how far Chinese dynasties with a Xianbei house at the head

Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdomminimal

• Whether the Tangut conquest of the Gansu Uyghurs fell in 1028 or 1031

Gaocheminimal

Goguryeo

• Whether the Bökli of the Kül Tegin inscription are the Goguryeo
• Whether the Göktürk attack on the Korean frontier in 551 took place

Han dynasty

• When the four commanderies of Hexi were set up: Wuwei and Jiuquan in 121 BC and Zhangye and Dunhuang in 111 BC in the annals of Wudi, Jiuquan first and the others split off later in the chapter on the Western Regions, other years again in the geographical treatise of the Han Shu and in the Zizhi tongjian

Hunnic Empire

• When the Huns became one realm: under Rua in the 420s and 430s according to some scholars; a confederacy of tribes without a single ruler in the 390s according to others; a tangible state in the Hungarian plain after the conquest of the Alans and Goths according to a third group; a federation of tribes at the beginning of the fifth century that became a state under a central power only under Attila according to a fourth
• Where the centre of Hunnic power lay: in the Carpathian basin in most accounts; on the Pontic steppe, with the basin thinly held, according to some scholars
• How far Attila ruled: from the Caucasus to the confines of France and Denmark according to some scholars; over a fairly well-defined territory, never a real danger to Rome, according to others
• Whether the dual kingship of Bleda and Attila was an institution or a territorial division
• Who the logades were: an order of the realm according to some scholars; simply the prominent men according to others
• The descent of the Huns and their relation to the Xiongnu

Kara-Khanid Khanateminimal

• Dates
• When the dynasty began: some scholars have the khaganate claimed after the fall of the Uyghur khaganate in 840, others start it with the pagan Turks who took Balasaghun around 943
• Who the Karakhanids were: Karluks, Yaghma related to the Uyghur ruling house, or a line of the Ashina kind that belonged to no tribe

Karluk Yabgu Stateminimal

• Who held the title of khagan among the Karluks after 840: the yabgu in one account; a ruler of the union of Yaghma, Chigil and Tukhsi as a descendant of the Ashina in a second; and whether the Yaghma took Kashgar from the Karluks
• Whether the Karluk realm was the forerunner of the Karakhanid state, and whether the pagan Turks who seized Balasagun about 940 destroyed it

Khazar Khaganate

• Whether the Khazar ruling house descended from the Ashina: Peter B. Golden holds it strongly suggested, and names the objections
• Where the Khazars came from: five hypotheses in the literature, none established
• What the name means: from qaz- 'to wander', from Qasar, or from Caesar through Middle Persian
• Whether the Khazars spoke an Oghuric or a Common Turkic language
• When and how far the court took up Judaism, and how many of the Khazars followed it

Kimek Khaganateminimal

• Whether the Hudud al-Alam describes a real court and officers or reshapes a tribal structure

Kushan Empire

• The era of Kanishka: 78, 127 or 232; the date of 127 is now most widely followed
• Whether Gaofu was ever one of the five xihou of the Yuezhi: the Han Shu counts it, the Hou Han Shu denies it
• When the Guishuang xihou united the five: the Hou Han Shu says only a hundred and more years after the division of Daxia

Later Yanminimal

• Whether the fragments that used the Yan name after 407 are continuations of the state or separate polities

Northern Qi

• Whether the Qi attack on Göktürk territory in 552 was an attempt to undo the new khaganate or a frontier operation

Northern Wei

• The language and origin of the Tuoba: Xianbei and para-Mongolic by the usual classification; Turkic and Mongolic families, that is Turko-Mongol, following Grousset; and, as a third possibility, a conglomerate of clans of several origins
• The blow that broke Datan: 424 in the older account, 429 in the Wei Shu

Northern Zhou

• Whether the Göktürks joined the Luoyang offensive of 564: the Zhou Shu has them come at the appointed time and withdraw after Yuwen Hu's defeat; a modern account has them stay away
• The year of a Göktürk embassy with horses: 573 in the Zhou Shu's Göktürk chapter, the first month of 574 in the annals of Emperor Wu
• Why Mukan held the bridal embassy for three years: the storm of the Zhou Shu, or the Qi bid and the failed campaigns

Oghuz Yabgu Stateminimal

• Whether the yabgu title of the Oghuz dates from the rearrangement of 744
• Where the Oghuz of the Syr Darya came from: the Ten Arrows of the western Göktürks, or a westward move of the Nine Oghuz of the Orkhon

Old Great Bulgariaminimal

• Whether Organas, the uncle of Kubrat, is the Göktürk Mohetu (Qara Bagatur)
• Whether Kubrat died in the 660s or in 642

Rouran Khaganate

• Reading of the Chinese name: the demeaning gloss of the Wei Shu, or Ögel's proposal of an underlying Börü, wolf
• Language of the ruling house: para-Mongolic by the usual classification, with Turkic elements in the confederation argued
• Whether the nobility among the twenty thousand who fled west in 552 became the rulers of the Avars of Europe
• Taiwu's blow: 424 in one reckoning; the Wei Shu has Datan's raid and the emperor's escape in 424, a five-road campaign in 425 and the crushing one across the desert in 429
• The western victory over the Tiele: Anagui, after 520, in the literature; Chounu, in 516, in the Wei Shu, which gives Anagui only an undated victory over the Gaoche king Yifu
• A chancery with Chinese secretaries, the subjection of the Tölös in 460 and the extent to Lake Balkhash and the Seven Rivers: the literature's; the Wei Shu says the Rouran kept no written records and draws the extent from Karashahr to Korea

Sasanian Persia

• The number of Göktürk–Persian wars: three great wars by one count, in 588, 606 and 627, after Istemi's campaign of 569 or 570; a second count gives the war of 588 and the Caucasian campaign of 627
• Whether Khosrow I ever held Transoxiana: asserted by Dinawari, denied by some scholars on Menander's evidence
• The descent of Hormizd IV from a daughter of Istemi: Tabari makes his mother a daughter of the khagan; that the khagan was Istemi is a modern identification

Second Göktürk Khaganate

• The year of the rising: 682 in the Xin Tang Shu and the literature, 683 in the Jiu Tang Shu
• The year of Ilterish's death, in the Tianshou period 690 to 692; the literature writes 691
• The year of Bolchu and the destruction of the Türgesh: 710 or 711
• The year of Bilge Khan's death: 734 by his inscription, 732 by the Jiu Tang Shu's year-heading
• Who Ozmish was: the Göktürk Left Shad, as the Jiu Tang Shu has it, or a Basmïl chieftain, as Peter B. Golden has it
• The end of the state: 744 in the usual reckoning and in the Uyghur chapter of the Jiu Tang Shu; 745 in two surveys, the year of Baimei's death in the Xin Tang Shu
• Where the Iron Gate of the inscriptions lay: between Samarkand and Balkh, or between Sogdiana and Ferghana
• Whether the Sir of türk sir bodun are the Xueyantuo

Shanshan

• When the name Shanshan began: with the renaming of 77 BC, after the town of Loulan was given up in the fourth or fifth century, or earlier still as a smaller realm round Yuni

Southern Xiongnu

• Whether it was a Xiongnu state under Han protection or a Han frontier command with a Xiongnu title at its head
• The year it ended: the chanyu was held at Ye from 216, but the tribes and the Luandi name outlasted it
• Whether the title of Southern Chanyu ended in 216 or survived without land at the Wei and Jin courts until Liu Yuan's rising in 304
• The year of Yuan An's memorial against a new Northern Chanyu: AD 92, or 91 by one count

Sui

• Whether the Sui defeated the Göktürks by arms in 583 or by agents and the khaganate's own divisions: some argue the latter

Suo

• Whether Suo is the old name of the Xianbei homeland, as the Chinese commentary holds
• Whether the brothers numbered seventeen, as most texts have it, or seventy, as the Bei Shi writes
• Which river the Afu is: Uvs Nuur or the Abakan

Tang

• Where the Li house came from: a Chinese family of Longxi, as the Jiu Tang Shu has it, or a clan of partly Turkish blood
• Whether the fifty years after 630 are better described as Tang rule over the Göktürks or as Göktürk service within a Tang framework
• How much of the collapse of 630 the Tang caused and how much it inherited

The Abbasid Caliphate

• What the battle of the Talas decided, as against the withdrawal of the Tang armies after 755

The Göktürk interregnum, 630–682

• Whether the settlement of 630 was a deliberate policy of absorption or an improvisation
• Whether Ashina Simo's khanate of 639 was meant to restore a state or to build a buffer
• When the southern protectorate received the name Shanyu: at its founding in 650 in one account, or only after 664 in the Xin Tang Shu

The Tibetan Empire

• Whether the empire begins with Songtsen Gampo or with his father
• How far Tibetan control of the Tarim reached at any one date

The Umayyad Caliphate

• How far the conquest of Transoxiana was consolidated before the Abbasid revolution

Türgesh Khaganateminimal

Turk Shahi of Kabul and Kapisa

• Dates
• When Turkic rule began at Kapisa: about 625 with a western Göktürk prince, about 666 with Barhatakin, or about 711 to 719
• Whether the Turk Shahi of the Arabic and Indian accounts are one line with the kings of Jibin whom the Tang invested
• Whether the Xin Tang Shu says that Zabulistan subdued Kapisa after 710 or that Zabulistan became a vassal of Kapisa
• How the dynasty ended: with the Hindu Shahi in 843, or in the 860s and 870, with Lalliya and the Saffarid conquest of Kabul
• Whether the Wusan Tegin Sa of the Chinese texts was the son of the founder Barhatakin or a prince of Zabulistan

Uyghur Khaganate

• How the khan of 839 died: killed by his minister in the Jiu Tang Shu, by his own hand in the Xin Tang Shu
• The identity of the 'Heavenly Khaghan' of the Chinese Karabalghasun inscription
• The dates of the khaghans the Chinese call Huaixin and Baoyi
• Whether the drought of 783 to 850 weakened the khaganate, or trade and the Sogdians shielded it from the worst

Uyghur Kingdom of Qocho

• When the state began: Menglig Tegin in the area by 856, or Toquz Oguz tribes entering in 866; Menglig proclaimed khagan before 848 in a third account
• Which city was the capital: Gaochang on one view, Beshbalik in a second

Volga Bulgariaminimal

• When the Bulgars reached the middle Volga: the middle of the seventh century, or the middle of the eighth or early ninth

Western Göktürk Khaganate

• Dates
• When the western wing became a polity of its own: under Istemi, about 583, or only after Tardush's collapse in 603
• From whom the later western khans descended: from Istemi, or from Apa Khan, or from Istemi's line only after 603
• Whether the after-effects run to the 740s, if the Ten Arrows and the Türgeş are counted
• Whether Tong Yabgu's reign began in 618 or in 619
• The year of Tong Yabgu's murder: 627, 628 or 630
• Whether the Göktürk ruler who met Heraclius before Tiflis was Tong Yabgu or a chief of the Khazars

Western Roman Empireminimal

• What the Huns meant for its fall: they were indirectly responsible, by driving the Germanic peoples into the empire; or they held the Germanic invasions back between 430 and 455 and sped them up before and after

Western Wei

• The year of the division of the Wei: 534, when the emperor went west and a second emperor was raised at Ye, or 535, the first year of the Western Wei's own emperor
• Whether the emperor Xiaowu died a natural death, as the Zhou Shu records it without comment, or of poison, as the Bei Shi states
• The year in which the Western Wei handed the Rouran fugitives to the Göktürks: 555 in the Bei Shi's Rouran chapter; the Zhou Shu gives no year, and the handover is often dated to 553
• The year of the joint campaign of Mukan and Shi Ning against the Tuyuhun: 555 in the Zhou Shu's Tuyuhun chapter, 556 by the reading of its Göktürk chapter

Xiongnu

• Language of the confederation as a whole: Turkic, Yeniseian, Iranian or mixed
• Whether the Ashina descended from the Xiongnu, as the Zhou Shu and Sui Shu assert
• Whether the Han Shu's gloss of Gutu as 'son' or the Turkic derivation as Kut is correct
• Whether the Northern Xiongnu who went west after 91 AD became the Huns of Europe
• Whether the Xiongnu polity was a state or a military confederation
• The last dates of the Northern Xiongnu in the east: an attempt on their old lands in 150 and a Xianbei victory in 155, or a last raid on Yiwu in 151 and a move west around 158

Xiongnu Hanminimal

• Whether the claim to the Han succession was a dynastic fiction for a Chinese audience or was meant seriously within the house

Xueyantuo Khaganate (Syr Tardush)

• Whether the name is one ethnonym or two joined
• Whether Xueyantuo renders Sır Tarduš: Hirth's equation against Boodberg's objection
• Whether their rising or the winters of 627 and 628 did more to bring Ilig down

Yabgus of Tokharistan

• The year the line began: about 625, by one dating of Tong Yabgu's campaign, though the yabgu title is first attested at Huo in 643 or 644
• Whether the ruler Xuanzang met at Huo on his return was a nephew of Tong Yabgu, as the translations of the Life have it, or his grandson, the tegin who had seized the rank of shad
• Whether the entry of 645 in the Cefu yuangui names one Tokharian yabgu called Shabolo or two yabgus side by side
• Whether the Wushibo of the Cefu yuangui, the Wujingbo of the Tang Huiyao and the Sem of the coins are one man
• When the Yuezhi Area Command was set up: in the Xianqing years, 656 to 661, as the Xin Tang Shu says, in 652 as the Tang Huiyao has it, or in 661 with the other Tang area commands of the west

Yenisei Kirghiz Khaganate

• How far Kirghiz authority reached into Mongolia after 840 and how long it lasted: a hold of a few years on the plateau, a state from Lake Baikal to the Irtysh, or a Great Kirghiz State to about 917 or 924
• Whether the Kirghiz khan who took Ordu-Balık was still alive when the Tang invested the Kirghiz in 847
• Where the khan's seat lay: Midizhi of the Tang histories and Kemijkat of the Ḥudūd, equated, or Kemijkat on the Kem in Tuva
• The name Are: a title, a clan name or the ruler's own name
• The religion of the Kirghiz nobility: Nestorian or Manichaean
• The date of the Yenisei runic inscriptions and of the stone of Suji

Arab–Khazar Wars (642–737)

• Whether the army that beat the Arabs at the Gate of the Huns in 655 was Khazar
• How the Arab counterstroke after Ardabil went, and how large the armies of 730 and 737 were
• Whether the khagan's Islam of 737 was more than a gesture made under the sword, and how long it lasted

Attila's Balkan wars

• The chronology: a war in 441 and 442 and one great invasion in 447 in one reckoning; a war from 441 to 443, ended by a first peace of Anatolius, and a second invasion in 447 in a second
• What the bishop of Margus robbed: the royal tombs, as the Greek can be construed; the royal treasure in the Latin of the edition
• Why the Huns invaded in 447: the sources may give no reason at all; alternatively the refused fugitives and arrears, together with Huns raiding on their own
• When Sirmium fell: 441 by some datings; the fragment of Priscus is undated

Fall of the Second Khaganate, 741–744

• Whether Ozmish was the Left Shad himself, his son, or the Basmïl chieftain
• Who began the killing in 741: the Left Shad in the Jiu Tang Shu, the yabgu Guduo in the Xin Tang Shu
• Whether the dynasty ends in 744 with Ozmish or in 745 with his brother Baimei Khan

Gaoche secession (487)

• The year: 487 (Taihe 11) in the Gaoche chapter; the Rouran chapter tells the secession under the Wei campaign of 492 (Taihe 16); a third account has 485 or 486
• The number: 'more than 100,000 tents' in the Wei Shu, a figure of the usual round kind

Göktürk Expansion along the Silk Road

• The year of the Hephthalite collapse: about 560 in one reckoning, 557 in a second, between 563 and 567 in a third
• Where the decisive battle against the Hephthalites was fought: Bukhara in one reconstruction, Nasaf in an older statement
• When the Göktürk bride went to Khosrow I: in 554, before the war, or at the pact that closed it
• Who led the Göktürk army of 588: Bagha, a son of Tardush named Šāba, or a Sogdian prince of the Oxus lands
• Whether the Göktürks drew Rome into the war with Persia of 571–590, or Rome the Göktürks
• Whether the Jebu Xak'an of the Armenian history and the Ziebel of Theophanes is Tong Yabgu, as Josef Marquart held and Édouard Chavannes denied

Göktürk Expansion into Europe

• Whether Askel, whose envoys Theophanes records at Constantinople in 563, was a Göktürk ruler or a chief of the Avars
• Whether Turxanthos named the Alans and the Utigurs as subject peoples, or the Alans and the Onogurs
• The date of the fall of Bosporos: 576, while Valentinos was still with the Göktürks, or about 579
• Whether the alliance with Byzantium outlasted the events of 576, or whether open war followed, as Menander says
• Whether the Göktürks besieged Chersonesos, or whether the Göktürks near Cherson in 580 were a pretext of the emperor
• Whether the Sul of Tabari lay in Gurgan or at the Caucasus pass of Čor
• The date of the revolt of Turum in Theophylact: 581 and 582, or the 590s
• Whether the Ogor of the khagan's letter are the Ogurs of the Volga or the Uyghurs

Göktürk war of restoration, 679–687

• Whether the rising of 682 belongs to 682 or 683: the Xin Tang Shu gives 682, the Jiu Tang Shu 683
• Whether the Apa Tarkan Ashide Yuanzhen of the Tang history is the Tonyukuk of the inscription
• Whether the first rising of 679–681 and Ilterish's of 682 are one war or two

Göktürk–Persian war, 588–589

• Who led the Göktürk army: Bagha Khan on one view, a son of Tardush called Šāba on a second, a prince of the Oxus states on a third, a Kushan king whom the romance of Bahram merged into the story on a fourth
• The year and place of the decisive battle: April 588 at the Hyrcanian rock, 589 at Herat, or two campaigning seasons in 587 and 588
• Whether the leader's death by Bahram's arrow is a report or a topos of Persian storytelling
• The numbers: 12,000 Persians against 300,000 Göktürks in Tabari and the epic; a more realistic figure for the Göktürks lies between 20,000 and 30,000
• Why Bahram revolted: the quarrel over the booty in the Armenian and Persian accounts, his defeat by the Romans in Albania in Theophylact

Han campaigns against the Northern Xiongnu

• Whether the Northern Xiongnu who moved west after these defeats became the Huns of Europe
• How much of the fighting was Han and how much was done by the Southern Xiongnu and the Xianbei on Han pay
• Whether the northern chanyu's people held the Wusun country on the Ili until about 158 or went on at once towards Kangju

Hegemony Wars in Northern China

• Whether the wars of northern China from 534 to 630 form one series at all, or only a sequence under a modern name
• Where the series begins and ends: the wider frame runs from about 200 to 750, the narrower from 534 to 630
• Which decades belong to the Göktürks as arbiters and which to the Göktürks as instrument

Hunnic conquest of the Goths

• The date: usually 375; undatable for some scholars, soon after 370 for others, about 375 for a third group
• How Hermanaric died: by his own hand in Ammianus; of a wound and of grief at the Hun attacks, at the age of 110, in Jordanes
• Whether the Hun king Balamber of Jordanes existed: shadowy but perhaps a king for some scholars, a Gothic invention for others
• Whom Vithimiris fought: the Alans, with hired Huns on his side, in Ammianus; in the Gothic tradition of Jordanes Vinitharius fought the Huns of Balamber and fell at the river Erac
• Whether the Huns fought at Adrianople in 378: perhaps leading the decisive cavalry charge according to some scholars, staying away according to others

Hunnic invasion of 395

• Whether the raid of Basich and Kursich that Priscus reports belongs to 395: two views say yes; a third dates it to about 415 to 420 or a little later
• Whether Huns also crossed the frozen Danube into Thrace in 395: two views say yes; a third holds that the invasion of Thrace in that year rests on a misreading of the sources
• Whether the raids over the Danube and over the Caucasus were concerted: one view sees two unrelated groups; a second sees the raid into Asia as a concerted action of many Hun groups
• How the war in the East ended: the Huns were unopposed until Eutropius took the field, and peace returned at the end of 398 (first view); the Huns left about 398 of their own accord (second); the Huns were back in the steppe in 395 and only a few hordes reached Roman Armenia in 397 (third)
• Which way Basich and Kursich rode: down the Tigris and Euphrates as far as Ctesiphon (first view); or from Erzurum through Melitene, Cilicia, Edessa, Antioch and Tyre, and home through Cappadocia and Galatia (second)
• Who the invaders were: Sabirs (first view), Hephthalites (second), or Huns from the Danube, because their leaders later came to Rome (third)

Hunnic invasion of Gaul, 451

• Why Attila turned on Gaul: a bribe from the Vandal king Gaiseric in Jordanes; Honoria and the Frankish succession in Priscus; the contest with Aetius for influence among the Franks, as some argue; others hold that the reason is not known
• What happened at Orléans: in Jordanes the city was fortified before Attila came; the Huns besieged it and broke in before the allies drove them off, according to some; according to others the Alans held it against a siege, and Attila withdrew towards Hungary
• Whether Attila fought a second campaign against the Alans beyond the Loire: so in Jordanes; mentioned by no other author and generally disbelieved

Hunnic invasion of Italy, 452

• Why Attila withdrew: the embassy of Pope Leo in the chronicle of Prosper; famine, disease and the attack of an eastern army on the Huns at home, as two explanations; in Jordanes, after Priscus, his men warned him with the fate of Alaric; the pope, Alaric's fate, plague and want of fodder together, as a further explanation
• Whether the Huns crossed the Po: they devastated Aemilia south of the river according to some scholars; Attila never set foot south of the Po according to others
• Whether Aetius was caught off guard: so according to some scholars; no fifth-century defender held the Julian Alps according to others
• What became of Milan and Ticinum: devastated in Jordanes; taken but not plundered according to some scholars

Kapgan's wars with the Tang, 698–716

• Whether the six prefectures of 698 were handed over as the price of an alliance or extorted
• When Kapgan sent his son Yangwozhi Tegin to the Tang court: once the Princess of Jinshan was named, as in the Jiu Tang Shu, or after Xuanzong ended the marriage talks, as in the Xin Tang Shu

Kapgan's western war, 709–713

• The year of Bolchu: 710 or 711
• Which Türgesh khan fell there

Mukan's Eastern and Northern Wars

• The years: the Zhou Shu gives none; the Zizhi tongjian enters the passage under 555; one reckoning dates the annexation of the Kirghiz about 560
• Which people the Sui edict of 583 put in the Göktürks' rear: the Qigu in the Bei Shi's text, the Khitan in the Sui Shu's
• Where the three seas of the Zhou Shu lay: the Western Sea is understood as the Caspian, the Northern Sea as Lake Baikal

Revolt of the Six Garrisons

• The year of the outbreak: 523 in the Zizhi Tongjian, the third month of 524 in the annals of the Wei Shu
• Whether the Kongque whom Anagui beheaded in the Wei Shu is the Kongque who went over to Erzhu Rong in the Bei Qi Shu

Rouran civil war (520–521)

• Anagui's accession: 520 in the Wei Shu; 516 in another chronology

Rouran Domination of the Turkic Peoples

• The secession of the Gaoche: 487 in the Gaoche chapter of the Wei Shu, 492 in the Rouran chapter
• The subjection of the Tiele: about 400 under Shelun in the Wei Shu; 460 in one modern reckoning
• The reconquest of the west: Chounu's, in 516, in the Wei Shu; Anagui's, after 520, in a modern account

Taiwu's campaign against the Rouran (429)

• The decisive blow: 424 by one reckoning; 429 in the Wei Shu and in Peter B. Golden
• Whether Taiwu could have captured Datan and hesitated for fear of a trap, as some suggest; the Wei Shu says no one knew where Datan had gone

Tang conquest of the eastern Khaganate, 626–630

• Whether Ilig was handed over by his kinsman Shaboluo's camp or by his own uncle
• Whether the cold of 626 and 627 is a cause of the collapse or a circumstance of it

The Caucasus campaign, 627–629

• Whether Jebu Xak'an, the Ziebel of Theophanes, is Tong Yabgu, khan of the western Göktürks, as Josef Marquart held and Édouard Chavannes denied
• The year of the meeting before Tiflis: 626 on the reckoning of Theophanes, 627 in one reconstruction, 628 on the Armenian count of Khosrow's years
• The fall of Tiflis: to the northern army alone in a second siege, as the Armenian account has it, or to Heraclius and an officer he left behind, as the Georgian chronicle tells it
• Whether the northern army is Göktürk, Khazar, or a Göktürk command over Khazar troops

The Göktürk Civil War

• When the war began: 584 in part of the literature; about 582, with Tardush's revolt, in Peter B. Golden; 581–582 in Czeglédy's dating of the civil war Theophylact reports
• When the realm was divided: 583 by one dating, 587 by Ishbara's death and Apa's capture, 603 by a third
• Whether the Göktürk succession system or the Sui agents were the cause

The Göktürk–Hephthalite war, 555–563

• The year of the destruction: reckonings differ between 557 and 563
• Where the decisive battle was fought; Bukhara is one proposal
• Whether the Oxus partition was agreed in advance or settled after the fact

The Göktürk–Rouran Wars

• Whether the khagans and the ruling nobility of the Avars who reached the Alans about 557 came from the Rouran, or the Avars were a people of other origin that took the name
• Whether Anagui killed himself after the defeat of 552, as the Chinese histories say
• Whether Dengzhu, whom the Qi sent north in 553, and Dengshuzi, whom Issik broke at Mount Mulai, were one man

The Göktürk–Sasanian Trade Conflict

• The year of the embassies to Khosrow: 568 in one reckoning; Menander places them only before Maniakh's arrival in Constantinople at the beginning of Justin II's fourth year
• Whether Persian policy was a blockade of the silk trade or a control of frontier trade combined with a political refusal of the Göktürks
• Whether the deaths of the second embassy were murder, as Menander has it, or the heat, as the Persians gave out
• Whether the trade motive reaches as far as the war of 588–589

The Göktürk–Sui wars, 582–603

• Whether the invasion of 582 was caused by the princess's grievance, by the end of the Zhou subsidies, or by both
• Where Tardush went after 603 and when he died

The revolt of the subject peoples, 714–716

• Whether the defections of 715 were caused by Kapgan's harshness, by the western war, or by both

The Rouran–Wei wars, 402–449

• Whether the Rouran were ever as weak after 429 as the Wei Shu presents them

The Tang conquest of the western Khaganate, 640–659

• Where Ashina Helu was taken, and by whom
• Whether the Ten Arrows had become a fixed political division before the conquest or as a result of it

The Turkic War of Independence

• Whether the war is to be dated from 542 or from 546: the better date is 546, since the raid of 542 was one of the yearly winter raids on the Wei frontier
• What Bumin did between 547 and 550: not recorded
• The months of the two engagements of 552

The Xiongnu–Han Wars

• The size of the armies and of the losses, which the annals give as round numbers of the Han court and which the Shiji and the Han Shu report differently: 18,000 or 8,000 killed in Huo Qubing's first sortie of 121 BC
• The years in BC, which are reckoned from the reign names of the Han emperors, since the sources themselves give a year in BC for very few events
• The years in which the four commanderies of Hexi were set up: Wuwei and Jiuquan in 121 BC and Zhangye and Dunhuang in 111 BC in the annals of Wudi, other years in other sources

The Zhou–Qi war, 557–577

• Whether the Göktürk withdrawal in the spring of 564 was a defeat or a decision to stop paying for someone else's war

Uyghur–Kirghiz War

• When the war began: about 820, in 821, or, on reports from Kirghiz-language histories, in 810 or 836
• What brought the Uyghurs down: the drought of 783 to 850, the quarrels at court, or the Kirghiz attack
• How the khan of 839 died: killed by his minister in the Jiu Tang Shu, by his own hand in the Xin Tang Shu
• What the Kirghiz held after 840: a raid on the Orkhon and a return to the Yenisei, or an empire over Mongolia

Abaoji's campaign to the Orkhon (924)

• Whether the campaign defeated the Kirghiz, met only scattered groups, or did not touch them
• Whether the Kirghiz empire ended about 917, in 924, or never extended over Mongolia

Abrui and Shir-i Kishvar

• Whether the tale remembers a tyrant or personifies the river: read as a legend of the Zarafshan, as history, and as the last Hephthalite king
• Who the king of Chin was whose daughter brought the pagoda to Ramitin
• Who Qara Jurin Turk, Biyaghu and Shir-i Kishvar are: they have been identified as Istemi and a son of his, as a khan named Chuluo, and as Tardu and a son of his

Battle of Ardabil (730)

• How the Arab counterstroke under Said ibn Amr went, which comes down in a form close to romance
• Whether Bulan, to whom the Judaism of the Khazar court is traced, belongs to the years after this campaign

Battle of Baidao (583)

• The month: the fourth month by the Chinese record, June by one account

Battle of Bolchu

• Dates
• The year: 710 by Kül Tegin's age of twenty-six if he was born in 684, 711 by Peter B. Golden; the Tang history gives the Jingyun period, 710 to 711
• The Türgesh khan taken: Suoge, as the Tang history names the khan Kapgan destroyed; Golden has both Suoge and his brother Zhenu perish
• Where Bolchu lay: beyond the Irtysh from the Altai, which puts it on the Dzungarian side; no closer identification is secure

Battle of Bukhara

• The year: about 560, against 557 and 563 to 567 in the literature
• The place: Bukhara in some views; the hills at Nasaf in a reconstruction from Firdausi; no place in Tabari, in Menander or in the History of Bukhara
• The name of the Hephthalite king: Wrz in Tabari, Axšunwāz in Masʿudi, Ghadfar or Gatfar in the Persian epic tradition
• Whether Khosrow fought at all: Tabari gives the killing of the king to the khagan alone; the Chinese chapters give the victory to the Göktürk khan alone

Battle of Dzungaria, 552

• The engagement itself: the Chinese histories record only the battle north of Huaihuang

Battle of Huaihuang, 552

• The month: the first month of the Chinese year by the Zhou Shu, March in one modern reckoning
• Whether Bumin and Anagui met in person: likely, not attested
• Anagui's suicide

Battle of Jingyang (626)

• The month of the invasion: the seventh in the Jiu Tang Shu, the Tongdian and the Xin Tang Shu, the eighth in the Zizhi tongjian and in the annals of the Jiu Tang Shu
• The year in Yuchi Jingde's biography, which tells the fight under the first year of Zhenguan

Battle of Lake Sevan (629–630)

• Who sent Čorpan Tarxan: the prince of the north in the Armenian account, Börü Shad as the yabgu's deputy in another account

Battle of Mount Dajin (600)

• Dates
• The year: 600 in the Zizhi tongjian; after Tulan's death of 599 in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks; 599, before Tulan's death, in the annals of the Sui Shu as translated
• The road by which Shi Wansui marched: Shuozhou, Mayi or Dingxiang
• The Göktürk dead: more than 2,000 heads and prisoners in the Sui Shu, several thousand heads in the Zizhi tongjian

Battle of Mount Mulai (553)

• The year: the Zizhi tongjian has 553; the Zhou Shu allows any time between Issik's accession and the spring of 553
• Whether Dengzhu, whom the Qi sent back north in 553, and Dengshuzi, whom Issik beat, were one man: the Zizhi tongjian keeps them apart

Battle of the Catalaunian Plains

• Who won: a Roman and Gothic victory in Jordanes and the Gothic tradition; strictly undecided, though a lost battle for the Huns, according to some; a strategic Roman victory according to others; a failure for Attila that left his strength unbroken according to still others
• Where it was fought: Châlons-sur-Marne, Méry-sur-Seine and Beauvoir east of Troyes have all been proposed
• The numbers: 500,000 men in Attila's army and 165,000 dead in Jordanes; up to 300,000 combatants in one reckoning; no more than a fifth of Attila's figure in another
• Why Attila came to Gaul: a bribe from the Vandal king Gaiseric in Jordanes, which some reject; Honoria and the Franks in Priscus; the contest with Aetius for influence among the Franks, as others argue
• Whether Attila besieged Orléans before the battle: so in one account; in Jordanes the Alan king Sangiban offered to hand over the city, and Aetius and Theodorid fortified it before Attila arrived

Battle of the Iron Mountain (630)

• Where the battle was fought: at the Iron Mountain in the Göktürk chapters, at the Yinshan in the Zizhi tongjian and the annals; the site of the Iron Mountain itself is not settled

Battle of the Nedao

• The year: 454 by one dating, probably 455 by another
• Who began the revolt: Ardaric in Jordanes; Ostrogoths in the Tisza valley, as a prelude to Ardaric's rising, according to some scholars
• The river: probably a tributary of the Sava in southern Pannonia; the name occurs nowhere else

Battle of Zhoupan (582)

• The outcome: the Göktürk chapter and the annals of the Sui Shu count Daxi Zhangru among the commanders the Göktürks defeated; his biography and the Zizhi tongjian tell a stand after which the Göktürks withdrew
• Why the Göktürks went home: Tardush refused to go further and a false report of a Tiele rising turned Ishbara back, by the Zizhi tongjian; a real Tiele rising drew Tardush away, by one account

Bilge Khan's Tent Banquet (725)

Campaign of Marwan (737)

• How large the Arab armies were
• Whether the khagan's Islam was more than a gesture made under the sword, and how long it lasted

Capture of Apa (587)

• Whether Ishbara had already captured Apa in 585, as one sentence of the Sui Shu says
• Apa's fate: the Chinese histories say no more of him after he was spared; one account has him die in 587

Capture of Ilig Khan (630)

• Who seized Ilig: the Tang deputy commander Zhang Baoxiang in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Xin Tang Shu; his uncle Suni Shi, before Zhang Baoxiang arrived, in the Zizhi tongjian and in one modern account
• Suni Shi's kinship: a younger brother of Yami, and so Ilig's uncle, in the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian; a cousin's son of Ilig in the Jiu Tang Shu
• The five crimes: the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian give two different lists

Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism

• Dates
• When the court took up Judaism: about 740, between 786 and 809, in the 830s, after 861, or over a long process into the late 850s
• Whether the conversion happened at all, or is a legend of the later Hebrew sources
• How far beyond the elite and the inner core of the tribes it reached
• How much of the court's own account of the conversion, in the letter of King Joseph, is history

Death of Attila

• Whether Attila died of a haemorrhage, as Priscus reports through Jordanes, or was killed by a woman, as a tradition known to Marcellinus Comes had it; the second is generally held to be a rumour
• Whether strava is a Hunnic word, as Jordanes gives it, or a Slavic word for a funeral feast

Death of Princess Dayi

• Dates
• The year: 593 in the Zizhi tongjian; the Sui Shu gives no year, and some scholars tie the killing to Yami's embassy of 597
• Yami's father: Ishbara in the Sui Shu, Ishbara's brother Bagha in the Zizhi tongjian and the Tongdian
• Yang Qin: seized by Tulan and reported to the Sui in the Sui Shu; believed and hidden by Tulan, and taken by Zhangsun Sheng, in the Zizhi tongjian

Death of Tulan Khan

• Dates
• The year: the twelfth month of 599 in the Zizhi tongjian and the annals of the Sui Shu; 600 in the biography of Zhangsun Sheng; 603 in a further dating
• Whom the Sui armies beat before the killing: Tardush in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks, Tulan himself in the Tongdian

Defeat of the Tiele, 546

• The figure of fifty thousand: households or persons
• The strength of the two forces, for which no source gives a number

Defection of Töles (628)

• The year of the memorial asking to come to court: 628 in the Zizhi tongjian, 629 in the biography of Töles
• When Töles went to the Tang: at the end of 629 with his people in the Chinese histories; soon after his release in 627, with a submission at Chang'an on 21 April 628, in one modern account

Edict of Emperor Wen against the Göktürks (583)

• Which people the edict sets north of the Göktürks: the Khitan in the Sui Shu, the Qigu in the Bei Shi
• Who the five chiefs were: the edict does not name them

Embassy of Cui Junsu (608)

• Dates
• The year: 608 in the Zizhi tongjian; early in the Daye era, from 605, in the Sui Shu
• When the threat to the khan's mother was made: on Cui Junsu's embassy in the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian; after Heshana's flight to Gaochang in some views

Embassy of Maximinus to Attila

• Dates
• The year: 449 in two modern accounts; 448 in the edition and in one English account
• Where Attila's residence lay: beyond the Tisza according to some scholars; the rivers Priscus names cannot be identified with certainty

Embassy of Valentinos (576)

• Whether the embassy ended in open war, as Menander's fragment on Bosporos says, or in a renewal of the alliance by Tardush
• Whether Arsilas, whom Menander calls the senior ruler of the Göktürks, was their supreme ruler or only the eldest of the leaders

Embassy of Yu Qingze (584)

• Whom Ishbara gave Yu Qingze in marriage: a cousin in the Sui Shu, a daughter in Yu Qingze's biography
• When Qianjin received the title Princess Dayi: with the embassy of 584 by the Zizhi tongjian, after the submission of 585 by the Sui Shu

Fall of Heshana Khan (611)

• When the title Heshana Khan and the Sui bride were conferred: during the Goguryeo war, with the princess Xinyi in the first month of 614, in the Sui Shu; in the first month of 612, for the title, in the Zizhi tongjian; in 611 for both in some views
• The summons Heshana refused: in the sixth year of Daye, 610, in the Sui Shu; during the emperor's western journey of 609 in the Zizhi tongjian

Fall of Tardush (603)

• Dates
• The year: 603 in the Zizhi tongjian and the biography of Zhangsun Sheng; the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks tells it after the events of 601, and some scholars hold that its 'that year' cannot be earlier than 602
• Who left Tardush: the Tiele tribes in the Zizhi tongjian and the biography of Zhangsun Sheng; five tribes of the Xi and the Xi in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks and the Tongdian
• Tardush's end: lost from the record among the Tuyuhun, or dead in exile in northern Tibet in 603 on one view

Fall of the Khazar Khaganate (about 965–969)

• The year: 965 or 968 to 969, and whether the fall came in one campaign or two
• Whether the Rus acted alone or with the Oghuz
• Whether the Khazar ruler took Islam at the time, as the Muslim sources have it
• Why the khaganate fell, and whether the Judaism of the court had a part in it

Flight of the Avars (557)

• Who the fugitives were: whether the khagans and the ruling nobility of the Avars came from the nobility of the fallen Rouran state, or the fugitives were Avars of the Inner Asian steppe after a defeat by the Göktürks, or a people of Hephthalite origin that took in other groups on the way
• The date of the arrival among the Alans: 557 or 558 in most reckonings, 559 or 560 in one
• Whether Theophylact's account of the Var and Chunni, who took the name of the Avars, has any value of its own

Flight of the Tarniach and Kotzagerminimal

• Dates
• The date: either 582, with the suppression of Turum's revolt, or 598
• Whether the revolt of Turum was a revolt of the Ogurs, and the flight a flight of Ogur tribes

Funeral of Istemi (576)

• The year of Istemi's death: 575 in one reckoning, 576 by the date of the embassy that found his son in mourning
• Whether Silzibul, the dead man, was Istemi, as most modern accounts have it, or one of eight Göktürk chiefs
• What was done with the four Hunnic captives: the text breaks off; some scholars take them for a sacrifice

Göktürk Aid to Li Yuan (617)

• The size of the aid: 1,000 horses and 2,000 riders in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian; 2,000 horses and 500 soldiers in the Xin Tang Shu; 1,000 horses for trade and later 500 soldiers with 2,000 horses in the Zizhi tongjian
• Whether the Göktürk troops fought at Huoyi: decisive there in some accounts; in the Zizhi tongjian they reached Li Yuan at Longmen twelve days after Huoyi fell

Göktürk campaign against the Kirghiz (710)

• Dates
• The year: 710 by Kül Tegin's age of twenty-six if he was born in 684, or the following year
• Whether the khan killed in the winter campaign is the Bars Beg of the inscription
• The word soŋa in the account of the fight: the name of a forest, or an adverb meaning then or beyond
• Where the Kögmen lay: the Tannu-Ola or the Sayan

Göktürk prisoners with the cross (591)

• Who the Christians were who advised the sign: Nestorian missionaries, as some suggest
• How the story agrees with Theophylact's other statement that the Göktürks had never known an epidemic

Göktürk raid of 542

• Whether Bumin led the raid in person: the Zhou Shu names no Göktürk commander

Göktürk Succession Crisis (581)

• Whether the lateral succession rule was a rule, or a pattern the sources happen to show
• The status of Töremen's mother: non-Göktürks and, by Ishbara's claim, low-born

Göktürk–Wei Campaign against Tuyuhun (556)

• The year: 555 in the Tuyuhun chapter of the Zhou Shu; 556 as its editors date it and in the Zizhi tongjian; 554 in the Göktürk chapter, as some understand it

Horse Market at the Western Shouxiang City (727)minimal

• Whether the yearly silk was a gift to Bilge Khan or the price of the horses bought at the market
• How much silk was delivered: several hundred thousand bolts a year in the Tang texts, 100,000 pieces for the year 727 in one survey

Huaixin's campaign against the Kirghizminimal

• Dates
• Whose exploit the stele tells: the prince who became Huaixin Khan, or the khan of 808 to 821
• The date: before 795, after 795, or in the years 808 to 821
• How far the Kirghiz state was broken: the stele has it end, and the twenty years of war that follow in the Tang histories say otherwise

Ilig Khan's Dance at the Weiyang Palace (633)

• The year of the feast: the twelfth month of the seventh Zhenguan year in the Zizhi tongjian, the eighth year in the annals of Gaozu in the Jiu Tang Shu

Ishbara's Hunt (587)

• To whom the tails and tongues were offered: the sentence of the Sui Shu names no recipient

Istemi's campaign against Persia, 569

• Whether the march took place in 569 or in 570
• Whether it was a raid for plunder or the opening of a war
• Whether the invasion of Media that Menander dates to about 570 is this campaign

Jinyang campaign, 563–564

• Whether the allied army besieged the city or blockaded the country around it: the Zhou Shu says only that the assault failed

Kabar Revolt

• Dates
• When the revolt took place, between about 780 and 881
• Whether it had to do with the Khazar court taking up Judaism, or was a political revolt of the usual kind inside a nomad state
• Who the Kabars were, in religion and in ethnic origin

Kapgan's Request for Farm Tools and Iron (698)

• Whether iron was among the goods handed over: the Xin Tang Shu names it only in the request
• The quantity of seed: 100,000 hu in the request of the Xin Tang Shu, more than 40,000 shi in the delivery of the Jiu Tang Shu

Killing of Heshana Khan (619)

• Who demanded Heshana's death: Shibi in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian; the western khan Shegui in the Xin Tang Shu; the northern Göktürks in the Zizhi tongjian

Kirghiz and Tibetan troops at Hedong (890)minimal

• Whether the Kirghiz and Tibetan troops fought for a Kirghiz ruler or as mercenaries

Kirghiz campaign against the Shiwei (848)

• The month: spring in the Jiu Tang Shu, March 848 on one reckoning that sets it within days of the events of the summer of 847
• Whose force it was: the Kirghiz, in the Xin Tang Shu, or the troops of the various barbarian peoples, in the Jiu Tang Shu
• Whether the attack followed a change of khan among the Kirghiz

Kirghiz embassies of the Xiantong era (860–873)minimal

• Whether the envoy of 866 bears a Turkic rank in the Chinese form of his name
• Whether the general Yizhi-lianji came in 866, as the Tang huiyao is reported to have it, or in 867, as the Zizhi tongjian has it

Kirghiz Embassies to the Tang (842–848)

• The year of the letter that answers the third envoy: the summer of 843 or of 844
• Whether the first two envoys made two missions or one, and so whether the second letter of Li Deyu is a draft of the first
• How far Kirghiz authority reached beyond the Yenisei after 840
• Whether the khan invested in 847 was the ruler who destroyed the Uyghur khaganate

Kirghiz embassy of 648

• Dates
• The year: 647 in the Tongdian, 648 in the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian
• The guard in which the chief was given his rank: the Left Guard in the Xin Tang Shu, the Right Guard in the Zizhi tongjian
• Whether the Kirghiz had paid tribute to the Tang before: 643 in a later geography, none in the Tang histories

Li Chengqian's Göktürk Camp

• When the camp stood: the Xin Tang Shu gives no year, and the remark about Simo places it after 639 if the Simo is Ashina Simo

Maniakh's embassy to Constantinople, 568

• What language and script Istemi's letter was written in: Old Turkic according to some scholars, Sogdian according to others
• The date of arrival: the beginning of Justin II's fourth year, from November 568, by Menander; the summer of 568 in another account
• Whether the Turkish embassy in Theophanes of Byzantium, which asked Justin not to receive the Avars, is Maniakh's

Meeting of Heraclius and Ziebel (627)

• Dates
• The year: 626, 627 or 628
• Whether Ziebel, Jebu Xak'an, was Tong Yabgu or a general of his
• Whether the Göktürk leader kissed the emperor's neck, as Theophanes has it, or his shoulder, as another account has it

Mission of Constantine to the Khazars (860–861)

• What the mission shows about the religion of the Khazar court: Jewish already, or still open to all three faiths
• How far the life of Constantine reports the debate as it happened

Mobei campaign, 119 BC

• The foot soldiers and carriers behind the cavalry: several hundred thousand in the Shiji and the Han Shu, thirty to fifty thousand in one modern count
• The Han dead: several tens of thousands in the Shiji and the annals of Wudi, a number counted in ten-thousands in the Han Shu chapter on the Xiongnu
• The distance of Huo Qubing's march out of Dai: more than 2,000 li in the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu and in the Han Shu, more than 1,000 li in the Shiji chapter on Huo Qubing
• The loss of Huo Qubing's army: two in ten in the Han Shu, three in ten in the Shiji
• Where the marches went: the sources name Mount Langjuxu, Guyan, the Hanhai, Mount Tianyan and Zhao Xin's city without saying where they lay; some modern scholars identify the Hanhai of Huo Qubing's march with Lake Baikal

Mukan's Destruction of Dengshuzi (553–555)minimal

• Whether Dengshuzi, whom Mukan destroyed, and Dengzhu, whom the Qi sent north in 553, were one man

Murder of Bahram Chobin

• Where Bahram died: at Suyab, at the court of a khan beyond the Oxus, or at Balkh
• How he died: poisoned by a Persian agent, stabbed by a Göktürk hired by the khatun, or put to death by the people of Balkh

Murder of Tong Yabgu (630)

• Dates
• The year: 627, 628 or 630
• Who killed him: his paternal uncle in the Chinese histories; one modern account also reports the view that it was his own son
• Whether the Jebu Xak'an of the Armenian history and the lord of the Turks in Nikephoros are Tong Yabgu
• Who advised Gaozu to grant the marriage: Feng Deyi in the Jiu Tang Shu, the Tongdian and the Xin Tang Shu, Pei Ju in the Zizhi tongjian

Music of Empress Ashina (568)

• Which music came with the empress: Kang and Kucha in Sui Shu 14, Kang alone in Sui Shu 15, Kucha, Shule, Anguo and Kang in the Jiu Tang Shu
• Whether the music reached the Zhou office of music in 568 or only after the abolition of 571, after which the Sui Shu tells it

Night Attack on Dingxiang (630)

• Where the attack fell: on the town of Dingxiang, whose outer wall the Tang entered, or on Ilig himself

Peace of Anatolius

• Dates
• The date: 443, after a war of 441 to 443, by one dating; the autumn of 447, after the great invasion of that year, by another
• How many agreements Anatolius made: three, in 443, 448 and 450, by one count; by another, the peace of 447 and the settlement of 450
• The ransom for escaped captives: 12 solidi in the Latin of the edition; 10 in one English account

Plunder of Luoyang and the Silk Payment (757)minimal

• Who ended the plunder and with what: the Prince of Guangping with brocade and treasure in the Jiu Tang Shu, the elders of the city with 10,000 bolts of silk in the Xin Tang Shu

Proclamation of Bumin Khan (552)

• The meaning of the element Illig: either 'ruler of the lands' or 'the khan who has a realm'
• Which wife became katun: the Chinese histories say only 'his wife'; one account names the Wei princess Changle

Raid on Yanmen (621)

• Who held the envoys first: the Göktürks in the Chinese histories, the Tang in one modern account
• Whether the Göktürks were beaten at Yanmen or took the commandery and won five battles
• When the envoys were released: soon after the attack in the Jiu Tang Shu, in the following year in the Xin Tang Shu and the Zizhi tongjian

Rescue of Princess Taihe (840–843)

• Who escorted her from the Kirghiz camp: ten officers with the rank of tarkhan, ten dagan, or a general named Du-lü-shi Alp
• Where Ögä's camp lay: eighty li from the Youzhou frontier in the Jiu Tang Shu, at Zhenwu in the Xin Tang Shu
• Who found the princess: Shi Xiong's troops in the two Tang histories, Cai Xi in his own account

Revolt of the Tiele (627)

• The year: 627 in the Göktürk chapters, 626 in the Cefu yuangui
• Who the Yukuk Shad was: Ilig's nephew, his brother or his son
• What became of the Yukuk Shad: put to flight in the Chinese histories, killed in one modern account
• Which people rose: the Xueyantuo, the Uyghurs and the Bayirku in the Chinese histories, the Tatabï in one modern account

Revolt of Turum

• Dates
• The date: 581–582, about 582, or about 598
• Whether the revolt was a revolt of the Ogurs, connected with the flight of Ogur tribes to the Avars
• Who the three allied khans were

Rise of Anagui Khan

• Year of accession: 520 in the Wei Shu; some scholars give 516, passing over the year of four rulers
• The reconquest of the west: Chounu's, in 516, in the Wei Shu; some scholars make it Anagui's, after 520

Siege of Baideng

• Why Bagatur opened the ring: the gift to his consort, the failure of two allied Han commanders to appear, or a decision that a captured emperor was worth less than a paying one

Siege of Bosporos, 576

• The year: 576 in Menander's context and for some scholars; the attack in 576 and the fall of the city about 579 for others
• Whether the fall of the city ended the alliance in open war, as Menander says, or left it standing with the Crimea in Göktürk hands, as some scholars argue
• Whether the Göktürks went on to besiege Cherson

Siege of Naissus

• Dates
• The year: 441 in the chronicle of Marcellinus; 442 according to some scholars; 443 according to others; whether the account of Priscus refers to 442 or 447 cannot be decided
• How the city fell: to Attila's siege engines after a brave defence according to some scholars; after a battle outside the walls according to others
• Whether the Huns built a bridge to reach the city, as Priscus says: probably a guess of the historian, according to some scholars

Siege of Tiflis (627–629)

• The dates of the two sieges
• Who took the city: the army of the north alone in a second siege, as the Armenian account has it, or Heraclius, with the citadel taken by Jibghu, as the Georgian chronicle tells it
• Whether the Göktürk commander was Tong Yabgu

Smbat Bagratuni's war with the khan

• Dates
• The date: 606–607, 597–598, or 614–615
• Which khan sent the army: the yabgu of the west, Shegui, in one account; the great khan, king of the north, in Sebeos

Subjugation of the Alans and Onogurs (before 576)

• When the conquest fell: after 572, when the Alan king still fought for Rome, or in the years since the return of Zemarchos in 571
• Whether Turxanthos named the Alans with the Unigurs, that is the Onogurs, or with the Utigurs: the editions of Menander differ

Submission of Ishbara (585)

• Whether Ishbara captured Apa in 585: the Sui Shu and the Bei Shi say so; the Tongdian and the Zizhi tongjian say only that he attacked or defeated him, and the Sui Shu has Bagha take Apa alive in 587

Submission of Yiwu (630)

• Whose subject Yiwu had been: the Göktürks of Ilig in the chapter on the eastern Göktürks, the western Göktürks in the chapters on Gaochang

Sui Variety Shows for Yami Khan (606–610)

• When Yami came to court at the Eastern Capital: in the second year of Daye (606) in the Sui Shu and the Jiu Tang Shu, in the first month of the third year (607) in the Zizhi tongjian, in the year after the visit to Yulin in the Sui Shu's account of his reign
• Who the great show of 610 was for: the Sui Shu names Qimin, that is Yami, among the rulers who came in person, although he was dead by 609 on the usual reckoning; the Zizhi tongjian names the chiefs of the foreign peoples

Taizong's Speech on the Signs of Ruin (628)

• Whether the four signs record events among the Göktürks or the arguments of a court preparing for war

Tang investiture of the Kirghiz (847)

• Whom the investiture reached: the khan who had destroyed the Uyghur khaganate, or his successor
• Why Xuanzong changed his mind: the Xin Tang Shu gives no reason, and a Tibetan-led attack on the frontier in the month before is one conjecture

Taspar's Appointment of the Lesser Khans (572)

• Whether the Buli Khan was a son of Rudan Khan, as the Sui Shu, the Tongdian and the Zizhi tongjian have it, or Rudan Khan himself, as the Bei Shi has it

The Archery Match at the Wu'an Hall (599)

• Which khan kept Zhangsun Sheng in 580: Shetu, the later Ishbara, as the biography has it, or Taspar
• The arrows given to Zhangsun Sheng: 'for six hou' in the Sui Shu, six arrows in the Cefu Yuangui
• What the deer was that his shots went into
• The year of the match: the nineteenth year of Kaihuang (599) by the order of the Sui Shu, the tenth (590) in the Cefu Yuangui

The Attack on Yami Khan (599)

• Yami's flight: in the Sui Shu he fled straight to the Sui; in the Zizhi tongjian he thought of going over to Tardush, and the envoy Zhangsun Sheng turned him with false beacon fires

The battle of the Talas, 751

• Whether the battle or the An Lushan rebellion ended Tang power in the west
• Whether paper-making reached the Islamic world through prisoners taken here

The capture of Samarkand, 712minimal

• The sum paid at once: two million dirhams in Ibn A'tham al-Kufi, ten million in the Persian Tabari of Bal'ami, probably a confusion of two and ten

The coup of 716

• Whether Tonyukuk took part in the killing or was spared as Bilge's father-in-law

The Court Debate of 630

• How many households settled in Chang'an: several thousand in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Xin Tang Shu, nearly ten thousand in the Tongdian and the Zizhi tongjian
• How many surrendered: nearly 100,000 in Wei Zheng's speech, more than 100,000 in the Xin Tang Shu

The embassies to Ctesiphon, 568

• Whether the deaths of the second embassy were murder or, as the Persian account had it, the climate
• Where the embassies were received: Menander names no place; at Ctesiphon on one view

The embassy of Zemarchos, 569

• Where Ektag lay: in the Altai, in the Tian Shan, or elsewhere
• When the embassy set out: August 569 by Menander's reckoning, in the seventh year of Justin II by John of Ephesus, August 568 by one modern reckoning
• Where Istemi confronted the Persian envoy: at Talas on the march, as Menander has it, or at his own court, as John of Ephesus has it
• Whether the enormous lake of the return journey was the Aral or the Caspian

The fall of Ordu-Balık, 840

• What part the defector at the Uyghur court played
• Why the Kirghiz did not settle on the Orkhon: their attachment to the Yenisei, or the ruin of the valley by drought and a hard winter

The Flight of the Ashina (439)

• The route and the arrival in the Altai: one reconstruction has the Ashina reach Gaochang about 439 and the southern Altai about 460
• Whether the catastrophe of the wolf legend is the Wei campaign of 439

The Gaoche Herds of 429

• Whether the more than one million of the first count are horses alone or horses and captives together

The Göktürk Campaign of 622

• Whether Ilig led the force at Xincheng himself or sent it
• The size of the army of the eighth month: 50,000 horse or 150,000
• Why Ilig withdrew: on hearing that Li Shimin was coming, or on the persuasion of Zheng Yuanshu

The Göktürk Campaign of 625

• Where Zhang Jin was beaten: at Taiyuan in the Jiu Tang Shu, at Taigu or Dagu in the Zizhi tongjian and the Xin Tang Shu

The Göktürk–Byzantine alliance

• Whether the alliance ended in open war after Bosporos in 576, as Menander says, or was renewed by Tardush and Valentinos, as some scholars hold
• When the alliance broke: after Bosporos in 576, or about thirty years before 627
• Who Heraclius's Göktürk ally was: Tong Yabgu himself, a Khazar leader under Göktürk rule, or the holder of the title Yabgu Khagan

The Göktürk–Wei alliance

• Whether the handover of the Rouran at the Qingmen gate belongs to 553, after the horses of that year, or to 555, the year the Bei Shi gives the Rouran flight

The Göktürk–Zhou alliance

• Whether the Göktürks took part in the second campaign of 564: the Zhou Shu has them come at the appointed time and withdraw, one modern account has them stay away

The Göktürks before Cherson (579)

• Whether the Göktürks besieged Chersonesos, or whether the emperor's report of them at Cherson was a pretext
• Whether the Göktürks held the Crimea from 576 until 598

The Han–Xiongnu heqin treaties

• Whether heqin was tribute paid by the Han or a gift given by a superior, and whether the two courts ever read the same document the same way
• When the frontier markets began: under Emperor Jing in the usual account, under Emperor Wen at the Xiongnu's demand in a second

The khan's letter to Maurice

• Dates
• The date: soon after 582, at the start of Maurice's reign, or 598
• Who wrote the letter: Tardush has been proposed; the khan is not named
• Whether the Abdeli are the Hephthalites, as Theophylact says, or the Tiele
• Whether the Ogur and the river Til are the Ogurs and the Volga, the Uyghurs and the Tola, or the Oguz and the Tarim
• Who the Kolch were

The Marriage of Princess Qianjin (580)

• Which khan the escort of 580 served: the khan of Zhangsun Sheng's biography is named Shetu, which a modern translation takes for an error for Taspar

The Qi Court in Exile (577–580)

• When Gao Baoning's appeal and Shaoyi's proclamation fell: in the twelfth month of 577 by the Zizhi tongjian, in the summer of 578 by one account
• Who received seventy horses from Taspar: the Qi envoy Hexi Yong'an by the Zizhi tongjian, Gao Baoning by one account
• Where Shaoyi was seized: on Taspar's southern border by the Zizhi tongjian, in the forest of Ötüken by one account

The Qi March to Shuozhou (553)minimal

• Whether the Göktürks asked to submit at Shuozhou, as the Qi annals say; no Göktürk or Zhou source confirms it

The Qingmen Executions (555)

• Whether the ruler handed over was Dengshuzi: the Zhou Shu names him, the Rouran chapter of the Bei Shi speaks only of the ruler of the Rouran

The Raid on Youzhou (578)

• How the raid was joined with Gao Shaoyi's cause: the Chinese histories set Shaoyi's march on Fanyang after Emperor Wu's death; one account has him attack Jicheng while the Zhou struck back at the Göktürks

The Rouran Marriage Refusal (546)

• The year: 546 in the Tongdian and in the order of the Zhou Shu; the sixth month of 551 in the Zizhi tongjian; 544 in one modern account, 550 or 551 in another
• The purpose of the request: a place in the Rouran succession, or an imitation of the marriage policy of the Rouran themselves
• Who asked: Bumin in the Zizhi tongjian and the Tongdian; the subject is unstated in the Zhou Shu, and one translation gives the request to the Tiele

The Siege of Jiuquan (578)minimal

• Whether the attack on Jiuquan that the Sui edict of 583 ascribes to Tardush is the siege of 578

The siege of Yanmen, 615

• What made Shibi break off the siege; the Sui Shu names only the arrival of the relief armies

The Standoff at Binzhou (624)

• The name of the slope where the khan drew up: Wulong in two different writings
• Whether the Göktürks withdrew because of the prince's words or because the rain had slackened their bows

The Succession of 587

• The title Bagha took: Yehu Khan in the Sui Shu, Mohe Khan in the Zizhi tongjian
• How Ishbara died: a month after the burning of his tent by the Sui Shu; of an illness of a month by one account
• Who followed Ishbara: Bagha by the Chinese histories; Tulan directly by one account

The Sui Campaign of 599

• Whether Tardush fought the Sui: the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian record his defeat by Yang Su; one account has him suffer heavy losses on the march east without once fighting the Sui emperor
• Whom the Sui fought: Tardush by the Sui Shu, Tulan by the Tongdian

The Sui Court in Exile at Dingxiang (620)

• Yang Zhengdao's descent: son of Yangdi's son Jian, prince of Qi, in the Jiu Tang Shu; a posthumous son of the Sui founder Yang Jian according to some scholars
• Chula's death: of illness in the Jiu Tang Shu; after the princess gave him the five-mineral powder in the Xin Tang Shu; by poison from the Tang envoy Zheng Yuanshu, as his people suspected, in the Zizhi tongjian

The Ten Steeds of 647

• The size of the Kurykan force: 4,500 men in the Tongdian, 5,000 in the Xin Tang Shu

The Uyghur Demand for the Prince's Dance (762)

• Who gave the prince a sable robe at his departure, in the minister Li Pi's account of 787: the khan's mother, or the khan himself, as one translation reads the words

The Wei bridge, 626

• What the Tang paid, and whether a formal treaty was sworn

The Woye and Luoyang Campaign (564)

• What the Göktürks did in the campaign: the Zhou Shu has them come at the appointed time and withdraw after Yuwen Hu's defeat, and records no fighting of theirs

Tiele Revolt (605)

• The number of chiefs Heshana had killed: several hundred in the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian, about a hundred in one account
• The lesser khan: Yedie, chief of the Xueyantuo, in the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian; Yishibo with the title Yedie Khan in the Xin Tang Shu and in one account

Treaty of Margus

• Dates
• The date: 435 in one reckoning; after November 438 in a second; 433 in the dating of the edition
• Whether Bleda and Attila took part in the meeting in person: so in the usual account, though some scholars think Hun envoys negotiated in their name
• Whether the eastern government paid the tribute agreed at Margus: probably not, some scholars argue, which explains the arrears of 6,000 pounds demanded in the next peace

Uyghur victory over the Kirghiz (758)

• When the Kirghiz ruler received the title Bilga Ton Irkin: after 758, as the Xin Tang Shu places the defeat, or at another time
• How far the Kirghiz were subjected: they lost the khan's title and their independence, and kept their own rule

Xiongnu split of 48

• Whether the drought and the locusts were the cause of the split or the occasion of it
• Whether the order of brothers was the standing law of the royal house or Huhanye's instruction for his own sons, which lapsed with the last of them

Xuanzang's visit to Tong Yabgu

• Dates
• The year of the meeting: 629, early 630, or 627–628
• Whether the Yabgu Khan of the biography is Tong Yabgu

Yang Su's Northern Campaign (601–602)

• The year of the raid and the pursuit: 601 in the Sui Shu's chapter on the Göktürks; 602 in the Zizhi tongjian and the biography of Zhangsun Sheng; some scholars place it between the end of 600 and 602

Yangdi's Visit to Yami Khan (607)

• The silk given at the feast: 200,000 pieces in the Sui Shu, 20,000,000 in the Zizhi tongjian
• Where the Goguryeo envoy was found: in Yami's camp in 607 in the Sui Shu and the Zizhi tongjian; at Ötüken, in the tent of Tulan Khan, on one view

Afu Riverminimal

• Which water the Afu is: the lake Uvs Nuur or the Abakan

Aksu

• Whether the seat of Gumo stood at Aksu itself or at Yangishahr, ten kilometres to the south

Altai

• Whether the Zhou Shu's derivation of the name Türk from a helmet-shaped mountain is an etymology or a Chinese story
• Where exactly on the southern slope the Ashina smithies are to be placed

Amga Korganminimal

• Whether the Göktürk word yut in the winter at Amga means famine or the loss of livestock
• The year of the winter at Amga: 715 by one account, 717 by another
• Where the fortress stood

Anbei Protectorateminimal

• When the Yanran protectorate became the Hanhai protectorate: the second month of 663 in the Tang Huiyao, the first years of Linde (664 to 665) in the Xin Tang Shu
• Whether Yanran, Hanhai and Anbei were one office under three names: one modern note says so, and the memorial of 845 gives Anbei its own seats at Tiande and Ganzhou

Anxi Protectorate

• When the seat first moved to Kucha: after the conquest of 648 in the Jiu Tang Shu, or in 658 in a modern note on the Xin Tang Shu
• Which towns made up the Four Garrisons: Kucha, Khotan, Shule and Suiye in the Jiu Tang Shu, Kucha, Khotan, Shule and Yanqi in a modern note and from 719

Aquileia

• How completely the city was destroyed: some hold that it was razed and never rebuilt, so that a century later hardly a trace could be seen; others that it was so destroyed that its historic site became hard to determine; a third group that it was plundered but soon rebuilt, counting Jordanes's words an exaggeration
• Who built the siege engines: subject peoples skilled in siegecraft, or Roman deserters or prisoners
• Where the story of the storks comes from: either a tale of the kind Priscus told when he lacked real information, or a variant of a Chinese story about Lü Guang at Kucha, brought west by the Huns
• When the city fell: at the end of August or early in September, if the departure of the storks is taken literally; some scholars doubt that the story permits such a dating

Arguminimal

• Whether Rubruck's Organum is Argu or, as Paul Pelliot proposed, Ürgänč, the old capital of Khorezm

Badghisminimal

• The date of Smbat Bagratuni's eastern campaign, in which Badghis was plundered: 597–598 or 614–615

Baidao Plain

• Whether 白道川 names a valley or a river: the valley of Baidao in one translation, the Baidao river in another

Balanjarminimal

• Where the city lay: the early notices place it in the North Caucasus and its location remains unclear
• Whether the Baranjar of the Volga Bulgars came from the Balanjar of the Caucasus, and whether they left it as refugees

Bay Balïq

• Whether Bay Balïq was a seat of the khan or a minor town: the inscription names it without saying, and some scholars hold that it was never a capital

Beihaiminimal

• Whether the Northern Sea is Lake Baikal

Beiting

• Whether the Beiting of the western khan's court and the Beiting of the Tang protectorate name the same ground
• Whether Duodan of the Ten Surnames, whom Ashina Xian killed, is a chief or a tribe

Berel

• Whether the frozen state of the great mounds is the result of the builders' design or of the porous stone cover
• Which people the mounds of the Pazyryk period belong to, a Saka people or a proto-Turkic one
• Whether the graves of the Göktürk period continue the burial custom of the Pazyryk mounds
• How the graves of the first millennium AD are to be grouped in periods

Beshbalik

• Whether the Beiting of the western khaganate's court and the Beiting protectorate seat name the same place

Bodeng Ningliminimal

• The distance and direction from Ötüken: four or five hundred li without a direction in the Zhou Shu, five hundred li to the west in the Bei Shi and the Tongdian
• Whether the mountain belongs to the same conception as the sacred Earth-and-Water of the inscriptions

Bosporos

• The year in which the city fell: 576 in Menander's context and for some scholars, about 579 for others
• How the Göktürk force reached the city: across the strait, perhaps frozen, or round the Sea of Azov by land

Bukhara

• Whether the decisive battle of the Hephthalite war was fought at Bukhara, according to some scholars, or at Nasaf, as Aydogdy Kurbanov reconstructs it from the Persian epic
• Whether the Zandaniji silks were woven in the Bukhara oasis or are Chinese work on Iranian models
• Whether the city led its oasis in the sixth century, or shared the oasis with rival towns that kept their own lords until shortly before the Arab conquest

Cave of the ancestors

• Where the cave lay: the Zhou Shu gives neither place nor direction
• Whether the cave of the annual sacrifice is the cave of the wolf legend
• Whether the four or five hundred li belong to the earth-spirit mountain, as the Zhou Shu has it, or to the cave

Cherson

• Whether the Göktürks besieged Cherson after the fall of Bosporos, or whether the emperor's report of them there in 579 was a pretext
• Where the Cherson of Jordanes lay: at Chersonesus according to some, perhaps at Eupatoria according to others

Chuzhe Riverminimal

• Whether the Chuzhe is the Yenisei as a whole or its middle course

Derbent

• Whether Tabari's Sul, whose gate Khosrow fortified and Sinjibu approached, is the Caspian Gates at Derbent or the eastern frontier at Gurgan: Nöldeke holds the two confused in the text and the khagan's objective to have been Khurasan
• Whether the army before Derbent in 627 was Khazar, as Theophanes and the Armenian source call it, or Göktürks under Börü Shad, as one other study and Peter B. Golden read it

Dujin Garrisonminimal

• Whether 度斤 is the 都斤 of the Zhou Shu, the mountain of the khan's seat that is read as Ötüken

Dunhuang

• When Dunhuang was set up: 111 BC in the annals of Wudi, split off from Jiuquan later in the chapter on the Western Regions, 88 BC in the geographical treatise of the Han Shu

Dzungaria

• Whether the battles of 546 and 552 were fought in Dzungaria: one account has both there; the Zhou Shu names no place for 546 and puts the Rouran defeat of 552 north of Huaihuang
• Whether the pass Herodotus describes in book four is the Dzungarian Gate: argued in the literature, doubted because Herodotus wrote from hearsay

Egiin Gol

• Whether the large riverside sites of the valley were farming villages or summer camps of herders

Ektag

• Whether Ektag is a range in the Tian Shan or the Altai
• Whether the Greek name renders a Turkic word for gold or for white

Eyang Ridgeminimal

• The site: south of the old fort of Dingxiang, north-west of Pinglu county, by one view; north of Shahukou, twenty li north of Youyu county, by a second

Ferghana

• Whether the Dayuan of the Shiji is Ferghana, as most commentators hold, or Sogdiana

Gaochang

• Whether the Ashina passed through Gaochang on their way to the Altai: the Sui Shu sets the cave of the wolf north-west of Gaochang; the five hundred families' flight from Gansu to Gaochang rests on a single interpretation
• The year of Xuanzang's visit to Tong Yabgu with the king of Gaochang's letters: 629 or 630

Gate of Sul

• Whether the gate of Sul lay in Gurgan, at the south-eastern corner of the Caspian, or at the Caucasus passes near Derbent

Gol Mod

• Whether the cemetery belongs to the Xiongnu of the Chinese histories
• Whether the man of Tomb 1 was a chanyu
• Whether the skeleton on the outer coffin of Tomb 189 is the tomb owner or a looter
• Whether the damage to the satellite tombs of Tomb 189 was looting or retaliation

Gouzhu Passminimal

• Whether the Gouzhu mountain is the same as the Xing ridge of 563, as one identification holds

Gurgan

• Whether Khosrow I's works at Sul, built with stone from Gurgan, stood in Gurgan or at the Caucasus
• The meeting of Istemi and Khosrow I at Gurgan in 560, which one modern account reports
• When Smbat Bagratuni became marzpan of Vrkan: 599 or 600 according to some scholars, 595 according to others

Heng'an

• The year of Han Hong's defeat: 601 in the Sui Shu; the Zizhi tongjian enters a defeat of Han Hong at Heng'an both under 599 and under the first month of 601

Herat

• Whether the battle of 588 or 589 was fought at Herat, as one view has it, beyond Herat and Badhghis, as Tabari has it, or at the Hyrcanian rock in April 588, as a second has it
• Who led the Göktürk army: Šāba, son of Tardush, in one view from the Perso-Arabic tradition; Bagha, as a lesser khan, in a second; a third doubts that Tabari's Šāba was a Göktürk in the strict sense

Huaihuang

• The month of the battle: the first month of the Chinese year by the Zhou Shu, 11 February to 10 March 552; March in one modern reckoning

Huo

• Where Huo lay: at Kunduz according to some, at Ghori on the road from Kunduz to Kabul according to others
• Whether Huo was the capital of the Hephthalite kings, the Badiyan of the Chinese reports
• Whether the capital stood on the southern or on the eastern bank of the river, on which the two translations of the Life differ
• Whether the ruler of Tokharistan whom Xuanzang met at Huo on his return was a nephew of the Yabgu Khan, as the translations of the Life have it, or his grandson, the tegin who had seized the rank of shad

Ikarminimal

• The date of Turum's revolt: about 582, or the years before 598
• Where the Ikar lay: left open by some, identified with the river Guma in Central Asia by others

Iron Mountain

• The site: north of the Yin mountains, by the commentary on the Zizhi tongjian; in the Maoming'an banner, by a second view; the Altai, by a third

Issyk-Kul

• The pass by which Xuanzang crossed the mountains to the lake: the Muzart or the Bedel
• Whether the road from the mountains to Suyab ran along the northern or the southern shore of the lake

Itil

• Where the city lay: a site at Samosdelka, about 30 kilometres south-west of Astrakhan, and a settlement at Semibugry in the Volga delta have been proposed, and neither is confirmed
• Whether Atil, Etil, Khamlikh and Qutlugh name one capital, parts of one capital or several cities
• Whether the Rus destroyed the city in 965 or in 968 to 969

Ivolgaminimal

• How the site was used through the year: the excavator reads it as a settlement lived in year round for generations, while the survey of Egiin Gol reads the large Xiongnu sites there as summer settlements

Jade Gate

• When the line of posts reached the Jade Gate: given as 108 BC; elsewhere the wall was begun about 110 BC, the name is attested from 105 BC and the posts as far as the Salt Marsh date from about 95 BC
• Where the Gate stood: about 120 km west of Dunhuang, where the wall turns south-west, on the determination of 1910; at a station of the wall a little west of 94 degrees east from 94 BC, and at two other stations later, on the determination of 1913; at the fort T. xiv, Xiaofangpan, from 96 BC at the latest and for as long as the western wall was guarded, on Aurel Stein's determination, which leaves open where the Gate stood before

Jian Riverminimal

• Whether the Jian is the Ulug-Khem, the upper course of the Yenisei, or the Kem, the Yenisei itself

Jingyangminimal

• The month: the seventh month of 626 in the Jiu Tang Shu, the Tongdian and the Xin Tang Shu; the eighth, after Taizong's accession, in the Zizhi tongjian

Jiuquan

• Whether the attack on Jiuquan that the Sui edict of 583 ascribes to Tardush is the siege of 578
• When the four commanderies of Hexi were set up: Wuwei and Jiuquan in 121 BC and Zhangye and Dunhuang in 111 BC in the annals of Wudi, Jiuquan first and the others split off later in the chapter on the Western Regions, other years again in the geographical treatise of the Han Shu and in the Zizhi tongjian

Karashahr

• The size of the capital: two li square in the Wei, Zhou and Sui histories, six or seven li round for Xuanzang, thirty li round in the Xin Tang Shu

Kemijkatminimal

• Where the town lay: in the Minusinsk region, or on the Kem in Tuva
• Whether K.M.JKATH is a corrupt form of the Midizhi of the Tang histories

Kesh

• Which side of the river Dumo the town stood on: south of it in the Sui Shu and the Xin Tang Shu, north of it in the Tang Huiyao

Khorasan

• Whether the khagan Sinjibu's march aimed at Khorasan, as some scholars hold, or at the Caucasus

Khöshöö Tsaidam

• Whether the great monuments mark graves or are memorial halls with the graves elsewhere
• Whether the monument was wrecked in 745 or in 840
• Whether the Kül Tegin complex is Chinese work or built on a Turkic plan

Kögmen

• Where the Kögmen lay: the Tannu-Ola or the main ridge of the Sayan
• The reading of the name in line 20 of the east face of the Kül Tegin inscription: Kögmän or Kökmän

Kucha

• Where exactly the Three-Mi mountain of Shegui Khan's court lay

Kujie Valleyminimal

• The year: 601 in the Sui Shu; the Zizhi tongjian enters the raid that preceded the fight under 602

Lingzhou

• The army sent against Kapgan in 693: ten generals in the Jiu Tang Shu, eighteen in the Xin Tang Shu
• The dead at Mingsha: more than six thousand in the Jiu Tang Shu, nearly ten thousand in the Xin Tang Shu

Loulan

Margus

• What the bishop of Margus robbed: the royal treasury and hidden treasures in the Latin of the edition; the royal tombs in a reading of the Greek
• When Margus fell: 441, or 442, which is also the dating of the edition
• Whether the Hun kings had their residence on the far bank opposite Margus from the time of Uldin until the 440s: some say so, others hold that Uldin led only a fraction of the Huns
• Whether Jordanes's Margoplanum is Margus or Horrea Margi

Minusinsk Basinminimal

• Whether the Kirghiz lived in the Minusinsk basin from the time of the Xiongnu, or came there from the eastern Tian Shan or from north-western Mongolia

Mount Dajinminimal

• The road by which the Sui army went out: Shuozhou in the Sui Shu, the Mayi road in the Zizhi tongjian, the Dingxiang road in the biography of Pei Ju

Mount Jiansi Chuzheshiminimal

• The first character of the name: 踐 in the Zhou Shu, 跋 in the Bei Shi
• Whether the mountain is the Qingshan of the Kirghiz notice in the Xin Tang Shu, taken for the Western Sayan

Mount Mulaiminimal

• The name: Mount Mulai in the Zhou Shu and the Zizhi tongjian, Mount Lai in the Bei Shi

Mumocheng

• The date of the first walls: the Tianjian era, 502 to 519, in the Liang Shu; 516, as some think, after Chounu's victory over the Gaoche; the capital with its double wall belongs to Anagui's last years
• Its site: not identified

Naissus

• When Naissus fell: in 441 in the chronicle of Marcellinus; in 442, after the fall of Margus, or in 443, after the fall of Ratiaria
• How it fell: after a brave defence, to Attila's siege engines and the missiles of a countless host; without great effort, to rams and siege engines; or, in a view that doubts Priscus's account of the siege, after an encounter outside the walls
• Whether the frontier was moved to Naissus: by a peace of 448, as some scholars hold; in Priscus it stands as a demand in Attila's letter

Noin Ula

• The date of the princely graves: the beginning of the first century BC, the turn of the era, or the first century AD
• Whether the graves belong to the Xiongnu of the Chinese histories
• Whether the princes buried there ruled Mongol or Tungus tribes, or belonged to a confederation with Turkic and Mongol chiefs
• Whether a silver plaque from the graves shows an early form of the Uyghur tale of origin

Ordos

• The place of Issik's victory of 553: Mount Mulai north of Woye in the Zhou Shu, on the Ordos edge; some scholars place the battle on the Ordos

Ordu-Balık

• Whether the Turkic name Ordu-Balık is attested for this site or applied to it by modern usage
• How much of the town was permanently inhabited and how much was a seasonal camp
• Whether the town of Togu named in the Göktürk inscriptions was a built town, which would leave Ordu-Balık not the first

Ötüken

• Whether the epithet in E23 is ıduq, sacred, or kutlu, blessed with Kut
• The exact location within the Khangai and Orkhon country
• Whether Ötüken was a goddess of the land as well as a mountain

Partaw

• The year in which the northern army reached Partaw: 627 in one reckoning, 628 by the Armenian count of Khosrow's years
• Whether Jebu Xak'an, the ruler of the northern army, is Tong Yabgu

Pingliang

• The sense of 雜胡: barbarians of mixed race, or barbarians of diverse and unidentified origin
• How mixed hu of Pingliang came to flee at the fall of the Northern Liang: through the Helian of the Xia, from within the Liang state, or after a Wei raid on Pingliang itself

Pliskaminimal

• How the marks on the stones, bricks and the bronze rosette are to be read, and whether they are writing

Samandarminimal

• Where the city lay: the early notices place it in the North Caucasus, and its location remains unclear
• Whether Samandar and Balanjar arose from tribal groupings, as the early notices may suggest

Samarkand

• Whether the Xiongnu who took Sute in the Wei Shu are the Kidarites in Sogdiana or the Huns north of the Black Sea

Sarkel

• The year of the building: 838 in most accounts, about 833 in one, 839 in another
• Whether the town taken by Sviatoslav in 965 and called Belaya Vezha in the Rus chronicle is Sarkel
• What Sarkel meant as a name, and whether the form Sarkil is right

Shanyu Protectorateminimal

• When the name Shanyu was first given: at the founding in 650 in one account, or only in 664 in the Xin Tang Shu
• How many prefectures the protectorate held at its founding: fourteen in the Jiu Tang Shu and the Tongdian, twenty-four in the Xin Tang Shu
• Whether the memorial of 845 dates the early commands correctly: it places them in the fourth and fifth years of Wude

Shiveet Ulaan

• Whether the complex belongs wholly to the Göktürk period, since its western part resembles the Uyghur monument of Shine-Us
• Whom the complex commemorates: one publication names the funeral of Ilterish Khan, the others name no ruler

Sogdiana

• Whether the Xiongnu who took Sute in the Wei Shu are the Kidarites in Sogdiana or the Huns north of the Black Sea
• Whether the Hun period was a disaster for Sogdiana, as commonly held, or a time of rapid development, as Étienne de la Vaissière argues

Suyab

• The date of Xuanzang's visit: 629, or the beginning of 630 in Édouard Chavannes
• When Suyab became the western seat: some place it under Tardush after 576; the Chinese chapters put Shegui's court north of Kucha and Tong Yabgu's at the Thousand Springs west of Suyab

Syr Daryaminimal

• Whether the Pearl River of the inscriptions is the Syr Darya

Talas

• Whether the battle of 751 or the An Lushan rebellion ended Tang power in the west

Tamatarkhaminimal

• Whether the place that Theophanes calls Tomis, on the strait of Kerch, is Taman and Tamatarkha
• Whom the Rus chronicle means by the Khazars at Tmutarakan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
• Whether the Rus attack in the Schechter Letter fell on Tamatarkha or on the province of the Sewerians, as the translation of Schechter has it
• Whether the Schechter Letter, in which the Khazar commander Pesach beats the Rus prince Helgu, is reliable, and when its events fall

Taren Riverminimal

• Whether the Taren is the Tamir
• Whether 他人水 names a river at all, or means 'other people', as the French translation of 1864 read it

Tarim Basin

• How far Hephthalite rule reached into the Tarim before the Göktürks: indirect and of uncertain extent, according to some
• The Kizil mural of armoured riders at Kucha: the Göktürk conquest of 552, according to some; the distribution of the relics of the Buddha, according to others
• Where Wulei, the seat of the first Han Protector-General, lay: at Chadir, or at Bugur

Tiflis

• Whether the city fell to the northern army alone in a second siege, as the Armenian account has it, to the Göktürks after the battle of Nineveh, or to Heraclius himself before it, as the Georgian chronicle tells it

Togu Balıkminimal

• Whether togu means east, and whether the town was a built town of the Nine Oguz
• Where the town stood

Tuz Köl of the Karluksminimal

• Which lake the Ḥudūd means: Issyk-Köl, Boro-dabasun, Shor Köl or another
• How much of the notice rests on older material

Viminacium

• When the city fell: 441 in two datings; the edition of Priscus dates the fragment to 442
• When the merchant of Viminacium fought for his master: either against the Romans in 442 or 443 and against the Akatziri in 445, or against the Romans in 443 and 447 and against the Akatziri in 448

Volga

• When the Huns crossed the Volga: in 395, or about 370
• Whether the river Til of Theophylact is the Volga, the Tola or the Tarim

Wuleiminimal

• Where Wulei stood: at Chadir according to some, or at Bugur, fifty kilometres to the west, according to others

Wuweiminimal

• When Wuwei was set up: 121 BC in the annals of Wudi, a later division of Jiuquan in the chapter on the Western Regions, 101 BC in the geographical treatise of the Han Shu, later than 115 BC in the Zizhi tongjian

Xihai

• Which water the name denotes: the Caspian, the Aral Sea, the lakes of the Edzin Gol delta, or a sea thought to lie beside Fulin

Xing Ridgeminimal

• Whether the Xing ridge is the Gouzhu mountain under another name, as one identification holds

Zhao Xin City

• Zhao Xin's origin: a petty king of the Hu in the Shiji chapter on the Xiongnu and in the Han Shu, a chancellor of the Xiongnu in the lists of the marquises
• Where the town stood: the sources give only that it lay beyond the desert and a little over 200 li past the field of the night battle

Abusiminimal

• Whether the chief Abusi of Kapgan's war and the tribe of the same name are one line

Akatziri

• Whether they were Huns, as some argue because Priscus calls them Huns, or a people of their own
• Where they lived: on the lower Bug and Dniester, or near the eastern shore of the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov, according to different scholars; south of the Aesti in Jordanes
• When Attila subdued them: about 445 according to two datings; 448 according to a third
• Whether they were a people of the steppe or of the forest belt
• The name: forest people, the Khazars or the White Khazars have been proposed; all remain conjectures
• Whether they marched with the Saragurs against Persia: so in the Latin of the edition; some regard this as a mistranslation

Alans

• Whether Attila fought a second campaign against the Alans beyond the Loire: so in Jordanes; mentioned by no other author and generally disbelieved

Alchon Huns

• Dates
• How the Bactrian word alxono is to be read, and whether it names a people, a tribe, a dynasty, a title or a person
• Whether the Huna of the Indian texts are the Alchons or the Hephthalites, and whether the Alchons were a branch of the Hephthalites
• The order and the dates of the kings: the classification runs Khingila, Toramana, Mihirakula in turn from about 430 to 542, while a copper scroll of 492 or 493 names Khingila, Toramana, Javukha and Mehama side by side
• Whether the Huna defeated by Skandagupta were Hephthalites or Kidarites
• Whether the king Gollas of Cosmas Indicopleustes is Mihirakula or the king whom Song Yun met in 520
• When the Alchons and the Nezaks fought for Kapisa and Kabul, and who held the Kabul mint

Amilzuriminimal

• Whether the Alpidzuri and Alcildzuri of Jordanes are one people, the Amilzuri of Priscus
• Whether the name proves Turkic-speaking nomads north of the Black Sea before the Huns came

Angisciriminimal

• The name: older work takes it as the grassland Sciri, Germanic; others find Turkic, Angisgiri, more likely

Avars

• Whether the khagans and the ruling nobility of the European Avars came from the Rouran who fled west, or the Avars were a group of other origin that took the name
• Whether Apar in the Kül Tegin inscription names the Avars: the usual interpretation; Persia according to some
• What language the early Avars spoke
• Whether the runiform signs on Avar finds and on the Nagyszentmiklós vessels are Orkhon and Yenisei script, a late Avar script or property marks, and whether they are earlier or later than the objects
• Whether the end of the state in the 790s and 800s was the end of the Avars: so in the short account; Avars are recorded in Pannonia and Dalmatia in the ninth and tenth centuries

Az

• Their ethnic and linguistic affiliation: Turkic, Ketic, or related to the Iranian As
• Whether az in a given passage of the inscriptions names the people or means 'few'
• Whether the Chinese word aco, the title of the Kirghiz ruler, renders the name Az

Basmïl

• Their ethnic and linguistic affiliation, which Peter B. Golden calls uncertain
• Whether the Ozmïš of 742 was their chieftain, as Golden has it, or the Göktürk Left Shad against whom they rose, as the Jiu Tang Shu has it

Bittuguresminimal

• Whether they were an Oguric people: probably not, on one view, since the Ogurs came to Europe only about 463 and lived farther east

Boisciminimal

• Whether they were Celts: the little Boii, according to some scholars

Boma

• Why the Tongdian and the Xin Tangshu give the name Bila to the Boma, and the Tongdian gives it to the Basmïl
• Whether the Boma were a distant neighbour of the Kirghiz or a people that shaped them

Buguminimal

• Whether the nine tribes of the confederation were a fixed list or a changing one

Bulgarsminimal

• How far the Bulgar union stood under Göktürk overlordship before 630
• Whether the runiform inscriptions of the Danube, the Volga, the Don and the North Caucasus are Bulgar

Chik

• Where exactly they lived: south of the Sayan on the headwaters of the Yenisei, or between the Yenisei and the Sayan
• Whether the Chik, with the Az, belong among the dependants that the Kirghiz called Kyshtym

Cimmeriansminimal

• Whether Cimmerian is an ethnonym or an appellative for a mounted band of Iranian-speaking nomads
• Their ethnic identity, which the sources do not settle

Dingling

• Whether Tiele derives from Dingling, and whether one people stands behind both names
• Whether the Dingling spoke a Turkic language; the sources give no word of their speech
• Where they lived: the sources place them north of the Xiongnu and give no boundary

Donghu

• Whether Donghu is an ethnonym or a Chinese label for the peoples east of the Xiongnu
• The descent of the Xianbei, the Wuhuan and the Rouran from them, which later Chinese histories assert and the Shiji does not
• Whether they spoke a Proto-Mongolic language

Dubo

• Whether the Dubo of the first Xin Tangshu notice and the Wooden-Horse Tujue of the second are the same three groups
• Whether they were Turkic, Samoyedic or of mixed descent
• Where the small sea lay, and so where they lived

Edizminimal

• Whether the Ediz belonged to the confederation from its foundation or joined later; it has been argued that the division into nine had become political rather than ethnic

Eurasian Nomads

• Where and why pastoral nomadism began: growing herds, farmers pushing herders into the steppe, or several causes at once, among them a dry climate and the rise of settled states
• What set off the rise of steppe empires: the wealth of a united China, long-distance trade, or both
• Whether the idea of a heavenly mandate came to the steppe rulers from China or belonged to a shared Inner Asian tradition
• Whether the Huns descend from the Xiongnu

Furi

• Whether the Furi, the Quri and the Kurykan are one name and one people
• Where the wild forest people of Gardīzī and Marvazī lived: east of the Kirghiz or on the road toward the Toghuzghuz

Göktürks

• Whether the name kept any ethnic content after 744, or survived only as a word for steppe nomads and a language family
• Whether the runiform spelling of the name is to be read Türük, or Türk

Gothsminimal

• Whether the Greuthungi and Tervingi of Ammianus are the same groups as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths of the Gothic tradition

Gulun Wuguminimal

• The form of the name and the Turkic original behind it

Heichezi

• Whether the Black Carts were a Shiwei people, and whether the Shiwei with whom Ögä sheltered were the Black Carts
• Whether the Black Carts or an Uyghur minister killed Ögä, and where

Hephthalites

• The date of the destruction of their realm: the literature runs from 557 to 567; one estimate sets it about 560
• Their language, and whether the ruling core was Iranian, Altaic or mixed
• Whether Ebodalo is their self-designation
• Whether the Rouran were their overlords
• Where the Hephthalite king's city Badiyan lay: at Badghis, at Huo, or in Badakhshan
• Whether the Sogdian name element čamūk is a Hephthalite word
• Whether the king in the yurt on the north wall of the Shi Jun sarcophagus is a Hephthalite ruler

History of the Turkic peoples

• Where and when pastoral nomadism arose on the steppe
• What language the ruling stratum of the Xiongnu spoke
• Whether the Huns of Europe continue the Xiongnu
• Whether the Ashina came out of the Xiongnu, as the Zhou Shu asserts
• Where the ruling house of the Khazars came from
• How far the power of the Yenisei Kirghiz reached after 840
• How far the weather of the steppe explains the fall of the khaganates
• How far the cosmos recorded in the Altai and in Siberia since the eighteenth century reaches back to the Göktürks

Hun (Tiele tribe)minimal

• The name is unrelated to the Huns of Europe; the coincidence in English spelling is an accident of transcription

Huns

• Whether the Huns of Europe continue the Xiongnu of Inner Asia, and in what sense
• What language the core of the Huns spoke
• Where the Huns came from before the 370s: the Altai, Kangju on the Syr Darya or the basin of the Kuban, depending on the theory
• Why Ammianus describes scarred cheeks: to stop the beard growing, as he says; or, as some scholars hold, mourning wounds that he misunderstood
• Whether prominent Huns cremated their dead: some say so, while others hold that the fire reached only the grave goods, and burnt bone is found in one grave only
• Whether the cast bronze cauldrons derive from the Scythian and Sarmatian cauldrons: not at all, or only in part in the handle knobs, depending on the theory

Itimariminimal

• The origin of the name: unknown; older proposals derive it from Itil, the Volga, with an Iranian ending, or equate it with a people of a Syriac list

Jieminimal

• What the Jie spoke; the Jin Shu couplet has been identified as Turkic, as Yeniseian and as Iranian
• Whether they were Xiongnu in any sense beyond the Chinese classification

Kabars

• When the Kabars left the khaganate: dates from about 780 to 881 have been proposed
• Why they left: a religious quarrel over the Khazar conversion to Judaism, a quarrel inside the dual kingship, a revolt of mercenaries or a split of the kind that happens in any steppe union
• Whether the Kabars were Muslims, Karaites, pagans or Jews

Kangju

• Its extent, and its relation to the Sogdian city-states that later occupied the same country
• Whether the Kangju embassies of 29 and 11 BC were conducted by Sogdian merchants, as has been argued

Khalajminimal

• Where the Khalaj came from: remnants of the Hephthalites, Turkic settlers of early Islamic Afghanistan, or an offshoot of the Argu
• Whether their language is a branch of Turkic of its own or an Oghuz speech

Khitan

• Whether the Khitan of the Wei Shu and the Kıtañ of the inscriptions are one people under one name over three centuries
• How far the Kumo Xi and the Khitan are to be told apart before the sixth century

Kidarites

• Whether the Xiongnu who took Sute in the Wei Shu are the Kidarites in Sogdiana or the Huns north of the Black Sea
• Whether the Kidarites belong at the end of the fourth century or, as all the written sources agree, around 420 to 440
• Who drove Kidara west in the entry on the Little Yuezhi: the Xiongnu in the transmitted Wei Shu, the Rouran in the Tongdian and the Taiping huanyu ji

Kimekminimal

• The origin of the name and of the union: Tatar, Proto-Mongolian, or neither

Kipchakminimal

• Where the Kipchak stood in relation to the Kimek, and when the name comes into use

Kotzagerminimal

• Dates
• Whether the Kotzager are the Kutrigurs
• The date of their flight to the Avars: 582 or 598, depending on the dating

Kurykan

• Whether the Gulikan of the Chinese histories and the Kurıkan of the inscriptions are one people
• Where they lived: north of the desert and south of Lake Baikal, or north of Lake Baikal to the Arctic Ocean
• Whether the Quri of the Muslim geographers are the same people
• Whether the Kurykan were absorbed by the Kirghiz state, as one interpretation of the Chinese notice and of an Uibat epitaph has it

Kutrigurs

• Whether the Kotzageroi of Theophylact, who fled from the Göktürks to the Avars, are the Kutrigurs
• Whether the Altziagiri of Jordanes are the Kutrigurs
• Whether the Kutrigurs were Bulgars, or one of the ten tribes of an Onogur federation

Kyshtym

• Whether the K.SAYM of the Ḥudūd and the Kishtim are one name, and where the people lived
• Whether the name designates one people or the dependants of the Kirghiz in general
• Whether the Chik and the Az were Kyshtym

Nezak Shahs

• Dates
• How the Pahlavi legend is read, and whether it is a name, a title or a dynastic name
• When the series begins: about 460, or about 630
• Whether the Nezak kings were Huns, local rulers of Kapisa, Kabul and Zabul, or a Western Turkic dynasty
• Where the two mints lay, at Ghazni and at Kabul
• Whether the Nezak kings of the coins have anything to do with Nezak Tarkhan of Badghis
• Whether the king of Cao with his crown, in the Sui Shu, is a king of Kapisa
• When the Alchons and the Nezaks fought for Kapisa and Kabul

Nushibiminimal

• Where the line between Nushibi and Duolu ran on the ground

Oghuzminimal

• Whether the Oghuz of the eleventh century descend from the Toquz Oghuz of the khaganates, and in what sense

Ogurs

• Whether Menander's Ugurs on Zemarchos' road home are the Ogurs or, by an old emendation, the Utigurs
• Whether the Ogor subdued by the khagan in Theophylact's letter are the Ogurs on the Volga or the Uyghurs

On Oq

• Whether the Chinese Duolu renders Üç Tuğlu or another name
• Whether the On Oq are the Tardush group of the Tölis
• Whether the Ten Arrows are the western Göktürks under another name or a new formation: some hold that the ten tribes took power from the yabgus and khans; Peter B. Golden sees a confederation that fully manifested itself under Shaboluo Dielishi in 634 to 639

Onogurs

• Whether Turxanthos named the Onogurs or the Utigurs among the peoples subdued by 576; the editions of Menander read the passage differently
• Whether the Onogurs spoke an Oguric form of Turkic or were an Ugric people with a Turkic name
• How the Onogurs and the Bulgars came together: the Onogurs joining a Bulgar union, or an Onogur federation of ten tribes that took in Bulgars, Utigurs and Kutrigurs
• Whether the Enqu of the Sui Shu and the Honagur of the Armenian history are the Onogurs

Pechenegsminimal

• Where the Pechenegs came from; a tribe Peiju in the Sui Shu is taken to be their name
• Their speech: Common Turkic, most probably of the Kipchak kind, or a mixture with Tokharian, Eastern Iranian and Bulgaric elements

Rouran

• Language and origin: Donghu and Xianbei by the Wei Shu, para-Mongolic by the usual classification; Turkic elements in the confederation argued, and some scholars hold that the Tuoba, the Xianbei and the Rouran ruling house had Turkic components
• Whether the nobility of the Rouran who fled west in 552 became the rulers of the Avars of Europe
• Whether the Khüis Tolgoi inscription in Brahmi script belongs to the Rouran, and whether its language is Mongolic
• Ögel's proposal of a Turkic börü, wolf, behind the Chinese name

Sabirs

• Their origin: western Siberia, the Turfan region, the Ili and Jungaria, or both sides of the Urals; and whether they spoke Common Turkic, an Oguric language or an Ugric one
• Whether Grod, the Hunnic king of Bosporos baptised in 528, was a Sabir or an Utigur
• Whether the Khazars rose from a Sabir union reorganised under Göktürk rule

Saka

• The etymology of the name; the derivation 'nomad' from Iranian sak- is one proposal among several and has been rejected
• Which modern region answers to each of the four Saka groups of the Achaemenid inscriptions
• Whether the Turkic peoples of South Siberia took equestrian pastoral nomadism from the Saka with pointed caps

Saragursminimal

• Where they came from: from the western Tiele on one view; the movement that drove them began north or north-east of the Altai, or no farther than the Aral Sea, in a second

Sarmatians

• When Scythian hegemony ended: early in the fourth century BC, or in the third to second
• Whether the Sauromatians of Herodotus are the same people as the later Sarmatians

Scythians

• Whether the whole confederation spoke Iranian or only its ruling elite
• The route by which they entered the western steppe; they may have come from the east by way of western Siberia

Shiwei

• Whether the Otuz Tatar and Toquz Tatar of the inscriptions are the Shiwei and the southern Shiwei
• Whether the Mengwu of the Shiwei are the Mongols
• Whether the Xianbei and the Shiwei bear one name in two dialect forms
• Whether the Black Carts were a Shiwei people

Sijieminimal

• Its place in the order of the nine, which the sources do not fix

Sogdians

• Whether the Xiongnu who took Sute in the Wei Shu are the Kidarites in Sogdiana or the Huns north of the Black Sea
• Whether the Sogdian settlements of Semirech'e were trading stations on a Silk Road or agricultural estates founded by nobles, as Étienne de la Vaissière argues
• Whether the Zandanījī silks were woven in Sogdiana or are Chinese copies of Iranian models
• Whether An Lushan really worked as a market interpreter, or the biography gives him the occupation the Chinese thought typical of a Sogdian
• Whether Yu Hong, buried at Taiyuan in 592, was a Sogdian

Sorosgiminimal

• Who they were: the Saragurs, in an older guess; perhaps, according to some scholars, a distortion of the name of the Ogurs

Tarniachminimal

• Dates
• The date of their flight to the Avars: 582 by one dating, 598 by a second

Tashtyk Culture

• Whether the carriers of the culture were the ancestors of the Kirghiz, a mixed people of Jiankun and Dingling, or tribes that the Kirghiz later subjected
• The end of the culture: the fifth century in one account, the seventh in another
• Whether the plaster mask custom arose in southern Siberia or came from outside

Tatars

• Whether the Tatars were Mongolic or Turkic
• Whether the Thirty Tatars descend from the following of the Rouran khan Datan
• Whether the Thirty and the Nine Tatars are the Shiwei and the southern Shiwei
• Whether the Kirghiz fought the Tatars in 842

The Great Empires of the Steppe

• What language the ruling stratum of the Xiongnu spoke
• Whether the Huns of Europe continue the Xiongnu
• Where the capital of the Hephthalites lay, and when their realm fell
• When the western wing of the Göktürk state became a polity of its own
• Where the ruling house of the Khazars came from
• How far the power of the Yenisei Kirghiz reached after 840

Tiele

• What Turkic name lies behind the Chinese transcriptions
• The number of the Tiele who submitted to Bumin in 546: households or persons
• The end of the decade of freedom: Anagui's victory in Dzungaria, as some accounts have it; Chounu's of 516 according to the Wei Shu

Tongraminimal

• Its place in the order of the nine, which the sources do not fix

Toquz Oghuz

• Which nine peoples the name counted, and whether the count was ever fixed
• Whether the Nine Surnames of the Tang chapters and the Nine Oguz of the inscriptions name the same body
• Whether the Uyghurs were one of the nine or the ruling tribe above them

Tounsouresminimal

• Whether the name is Turkic, *Tungur

Tuobaminimal

• How far the early genealogy of the house in the first chapter of the Wei Shu is invented
• Whether the Tabgach of the Orkhon inscriptions is this name

Türgesh

• Whether Sulu is the Abū Muzāḥim of the Muslim sources; some scholars hold it probable

Turkic Tribes in Europe

• Which of these peoples spoke Turkic: the Oguric languages are one branch, the Sabirs are classed as Turkic, Oguric or Ugric, and the language of the early Avars is argued
• Whether the Onogurs formed a federation that took in the Bulgars, the Utigurs and the Kutrigurs, or joined a Bulgar union later
• Whether Turxanthos named the Utigurs or the Onogurs among the peoples subdued by 576
• Whether the khagans and the ruling nobility of the Avars of Europe came from the Rouran who fled west after 552, or the Avars were a mixed steppe group that took the name

Ultzinzuresminimal

• Whether they took their name from Ultzindur, the kinsman of Attila's sons

Utigurs

• Whether Turxanthos named the Utigurs or the Onogurs among the peoples subdued by 576
• Whether Grod, the Hunnic king of Bosporos baptised in 528, was an Utigur
• Whether the Utigurs were Bulgars, and whether their country is the later Great Bulgaria

Uyghurs

• Whether the Gaoche of the Rouran period are the ancestors of the Uyghurs of 744

Wuhuan

• Their language, and their descent with the Xianbei from the Donghu
• Whether the name Wuhuan is an early Chinese writing of Avar
• The year of Cao Cao's victory over Tadun: AD 206 by the Sanguozhi, 207 in other reckonings

Wusun

• What the Wusun spoke; no word of their language is recorded beyond names and titles
• Whether the Ashina wolf legend descends from the Wusun one, or both from a common steppe pattern
• Whether the Saka and Yuezhi elements the Han Shu names make the Wusun a mixed formation from the start

Xianbei

• What the Xianbei spoke: Mongolic, para-Mongolic, or a mixture with Turkic elements
• Whether the Xiongnu who took the Xianbei name in the second century became Xianbei in any sense beyond the name
• Whether the Tuoba are to be called Turko-Mongol

Yueban

• Whether the Wei Shu's derivation from the northern Xiongnu is a genealogy or an administrative label
• Whether the Yueban and the Hephthalites were one people: the Wei Shu keeps them in two separate entries
• Where the Yueban country lay: north of Kucha, as the Wei Shu says in one clause, or north-west of the Wusun, as it says in another

Yuezhi

• Their language and their identity with the Tocharians of the Tarim
• Whether the Kushan house descended from them
• Where the Qilian of the Han texts lay: the range south of the Gansu corridor, or the eastern Tianshan
• Whether they left the Dunhuang country for the Ili under Laoshang or already in Bagatur's western campaign of 177 to 176 BC
• When they left the Ili: in Laoshang's reign, between 174 and 161 BC, or in the years of Zhang Qian's captivity, between 133 and 129 BC
• Who killed the Wusun king Nandoumi: the Xiongnu, as the Shiji has it, or the Great Yuezhi, as the Han Shu has it
• Whether Gaofu was ever one of the five xihou: the Han Shu counts it, the Hou Han Shu denies it

Zabenderminimal

• Dates
• Whether the Zabender took part in the flight of the Tarniach and Kotzager to the Avars

Areminimal

• What the word Are is: a Turkic title, a Samoyedic word, a tribal name or a Chinese form of another title
• Whether the Kirghiz ruling house descended from Li Ling

Ashide

• Whether Tonyukuk was an Ashide: the attribution rests on his identification with Ashide Yuanzhen, which the Tang history's account of Yuanzhen's death makes difficult

Ashina

• Dates
• The origin of the name: a Khotanese-Saka word for blue, an Old Persian word for dark-coloured, Turkic verbs, or unexplained
• Descent from the Xiongnu: a claim of the Chinese histories, not a finding
• Whether the link with the Juqu house of Pingliang is more than a rumour, and where the first home of the Ashina lay: the Altai, the Kem basin or the middle Tian Shan
• Whether the wolf legend was the Ashina's own or borrowed from their Wusun neighbours in Gansu
• Whether the line continues in the Khazar ruling house, and with it to 969: Peter B. Golden holds it strongly suggested, Minorsky doubted the one text that names it

Duanminimal

• Whether Duan is a house name or a Chinese surname taken by its chiefs

Fufuluominimal

• Whether the Gaoche kings after Afuzhiluo, from Mi'etu on, belonged to the Fufuluo: the sources give the clan name only for Afuzhiluo and, in the annals of 541, for Qubin

Luandi

• Whether 攣鞮 and 虛連題 render the same name, and which is nearer the Xiongnu form
• Whether the clan name can be read in any known language; some scholars call it very un-Altaic and makes it an argument against a Turkic elite
• Whether the order of brothers was the law of the house or Huhanye's instruction for his own sons alone
• Whether the house died out at the end of the Han or continued under the surname Liu
• Whether the Tuge, the strongest tribe of the Xiongnu in the third and fourth centuries, stand behind the name of the Turks, as some scholars hold

Murong

• Whether Murong is a clan name, a title, or a Chinese rendering of something else
• How far the Yan states were Xianbei polities and how far Chinese dynasties with a Xianbei house at the head

Qifuminimal

• Whether the Qifu were Xianbei in origin or a mixed formation of the Gansu corridor

Tufaminimal

• Whether Tufa and Tuoba are one name, which is generally held but rests on the reconstruction

Yaglakarminimal

• Why the succession passed from the Yaglakar to the Ediz in 795

Yujiulü

• The genealogy before Shelun: five generations from Mugulü in the Wei Shu, whose dates strain the arithmetic
• Dengzhu's place in the house: Anagui's uncle in the Zhou Shu, his son according to some scholars

Yuwenminimal

• Whether the Northern Zhou house descended from the Yuwen or took the name

Acominimal

• Whether aco is a Turkic title, a Samoyedic word, the name of the Az tribe or only the name of the ruler
• Whether the Kirghiz ruler bore aco instead of khan after 758 or beside it after about 820

Apa Tarkanminimal

• What apa adds to tarkan: a command, a seniority, or a wing

Army of the Steppe Empires

• Whether the counts of archers in the Chinese histories are counts or estimates
• Whether the Turks of the Strategikon are the western Göktürks

Atabeg

• Whether Nizam al-Mulk received the title from Alp Arslan after Manzikert or from Malikshah later

Avar Craftsmen

• How far the objects called Avar were made by Avar craftsmen and how far by Byzantine or itinerant ones
• What status the smith held in steppe society

Baga

Baidie Cotton

• Whether baidie is cotton from its first use in the Liang Shu, or a cloth of another fibre to which the name later passed

Beg

• Whether beg is a native Turkic word, a loan from Chinese 伯 bo, or a loan from Iranian baga
• Whether the absence of the title among the Iranians after the sixth century tells against the Iranian derivation
• Whether the beg of the inscriptions is an office in the khaganate or the head of a tribe who is owed a place in it

Bloomery Furnaces of the South Altai

• The dates of the furnaces and the specific features of iron production in the different periods
• Whether the south-eastern cluster belongs to the Göktürks alone or to earlier and later users as well

Bone and Horn Working

• Whether the bone points that Ammianus gives to the Hunnic arrows were common or an exception

Border Markets

• Whether the Göktürks of the 540s came to the frontier to buy silk or to sell it
• The year of the request for markets under Tulan Khan: 588 by the Cefu Yuangui, which enters the tribute of horses under the eighth year of Kaihuang and has the request follow soon after; 594 by one translation of the Sui Shu, which sets the embassy of Rudan Tegin in 593

Bride-Price in Livestock

• The size of the Uyghur bride-price of 788: 2,000 horses in the Jiu Tang Shu, 3,000 in the Tang Huiyao

Bronze Mirrors of the Steppe

• Whether a mirror with an odd decoration is an imitation cast beyond the frontier or a simplified Chinese piece

Buyruk

• Whether the Chinese Meilu transcribes buyruk
• Whether buyruk was one office or a collective name for the men who carried out a khan's orders

Camels

• Whether the camels of the Xiongnu lists were one-humped or two-humped, which the Chinese words do not say

Captives and the Unfree

• What legal status the people called kul and küŋ in the Orkhon inscriptions held: slaves, bondsmen or subjects of a conqueror
• How far Xiongnu and Göktürk crafts and farming rested on captives and deserters
• Whether the Xiongnu office translated Commandant of Slaves had to do with slaves at all

Chanyu

• What Chengli and Gutu render; the equation of Chengli with Tengri is a proposal
• Whether the order of brothers was the rule of the office or Huhanye's instruction for his own sons alone
• Whether the Southern chanyuate ended in 216 or kept its title without land until 304

Chepetukh

• Dates
• Whether Chembukh and Chepetukh render the Göktürk title yabgu
• The date of the campaign on the Oxus: 597–598 or 614–615
• Whether the notice on the Pass of Chor describes the invasion of 627

Chinese Bans on the Export of Iron

• Whether the bans aimed at weapons alone or at foreign trade in general

Chinese Craftsmen at the Orkhon Monuments

• Whether *tuygun* in the Kül Tegin inscription is a name, a title or the name of the people from whom the carvers were drawn
• How far the sculpture of the monuments is Chinese work and how far Turkic

Chinese Weaponsmiths among the Xianbeiminimal

• How many refugees and how long they worked for the Xianbei

Chur

• Whether chur outranked irkin, or the two were parallel ranks in the two wings of the western khaganate

Çigşiminimal

• When the title entered Turkic
• Whether the Tang emperors gave it to Turkic chiefs

Coinage of the Huna Peoplesminimal

• Which coins belong to which people, and in what order: one classification sets Kidarites, Alchons, Nezaks and Hephthalites in four waves, and a copper scroll inscription contradicts parts of it
• Whether the copper coins of Shor-tepe belong to a Hephthalite governor of Nakhsheb, and whether coins in the Bukhara region name Gatfar or Kavad

Composite bow

• Where and when the reflex form was developed; the archaeology gives a range and not a point

Craftsmen in the Steppe Empires

• How far the nomads of the steppe could meet their own needs in crafts without craftsmen from the settled lands

Daguanminimal

• Whether daguan is a second Chinese spelling of tarkhan

Daluobianminimal

• Whether 角 in the gloss means a horn or a wine cup of that name

Deer stonesminimal

• What the carved figures on the upper part of the stone represent: a face, a mask, or a sun

Diplomacy of the Steppe Empires

• Whether the exchange of gifts, brides and titles between steppe rulers and Chinese courts was tribute, subsidy or trade by other means
• How far the words of kinship in letters (brother, father, son, subject) described the real balance of power between the courts
• Whether the Persian queen mother Kayen was a daughter of Istemi, and when the marriage was made

Envoys and Embassies

• What language and script Istemi's letter of 568 was written in: Old Turkic according to some, Sogdian according to others
• Whether the Persian court poisoned the Göktürk envoys of 568 or whether they died of the climate: the one account that survives is Menander's
• Whether the Göktürks kept a standing office for foreign affairs or chose envoys as each occasion required

Farming among the Volga Bulgars

• What the grain called jāwars was: millet in the French edition, with a note that it may be sorghum

Farming and Taxes in Gaochang

• The number of towns of Gaochang: sixteen in the Zhou Shu, eighteen in the Sui Shu, twenty-one in the Tang histories, and forty-six garrison towns in the Liang Shu

Feltminimal

• Nothing of substance; the practice is continuous and well recorded

Funi Rehanminimal

• Whether funi alone or funi rehan is the word for wine: the transmitted sentence gives the second, a translation reads the first

Furs and Musk among the Turkic Peoples

• Whether the gold, silver, silk, horses, sables and squirrels of the Bilge Khan inscription are booty, or in part the trade that the Chinese emperor allowed in 727
• Which notices of the Ḥudūd and of Marvazī rest on older material

Geli Daguanminimal

• Whether daguan is a spelling of tarkhan

Göktürk Dress and Hair

• Whether the Zhou Shu's beifa means hair worn loose or hair plaited
• Whether the ten feet of silk at Tong Yabgu's court measured the band round his head or his hair

Göktürk Ironworking

• How the Ashina came by the craft: some scholars suggest that they subdued an Altaian population that already specialised in it
• Whether the trade in iron paid for the war against the Rouran

Göktürk Weapons

• What the belt ornament futu was: a dagger in one rendering, ornaments worked in hollow and relief in another
• Whether the Sui Shu's horn bows were bows of horn or bows decorated with horn

Gold and Silver in the Orkhon Inscriptions

• Whether the gift at Kül Tegin's funeral was ten thousand bolts of silk with gold and silver, or an immeasurable quantity of gold and silver treasures
• Whether kergeksiz means 'past all counting' or 'beyond need'

Gold of the Xiongnu Court

• What the xupi or xibi was: a belt of the Xianbei type or the hook of a barbarian leather belt

Han Bestowals on the Chanyu

• Whether the gifts were the favour of a superior to a subject or the price of peace with a power that the Han could not coerce

Heqin

• Whether heqin was tribute paid by the Han or a gift given by a superior, and whether the two courts ever read the same document the same way
• Whether the deliveries strengthened the Xiongnu state or bound it to a Chinese economy it could not replace

Horse harness

• When the stirrup came into use on the steppe, and by which route

Horses in Göktürk Law

• Whether the theft of a horse's tether or the theft of a horse is the capital crime, which the Zhou Shu and the Sui Shu word differently

Hunnic Cauldrons

• Whether the cauldrons of the lower Volga, the Urals and the Kama region are Hunnic or only akin to Hunnic ones
• Whether the cauldrons served in sacrifice or only for cooking

Hunnic Diademsminimal

• Whether every diadem listed under the Huns was made for Hunnic owners and whether the Kerch and Tiligul pieces come from the graves that the dealers named

Idiminimal

• Whether idi is the word the Chinese write 阿熱, in the form aco or ace

Ilteber

• Whether Chinese 頡利發 xielifa renders the Turkic title ilteber
• Whether the Armenian forms and the title of the Bulgar ruler in Ibn Faḍlān belong to the same word as Old Turkic eltäbär

Inalminimal

• Whether the title inal is the word the Chinese write 阿熱, or a different and lower title

Irkin

• Whether irkin was the lowest of the great offices or one of several parallel chiefly ranks

Ishbara (Title)

• The origin of the word: a borrowing of Sanskrit īśvara, 'prince, lord', by one derivation, against the Tongdian's gloss 'brave'

Katun

• Whether the title is Turkic or taken over from a Sogdian or earlier steppe usage

Khan (Khagan)

• The origin of the word: unknown; a Xianbei or Rouran coinage by the usual view, a derivation from an 'old Hunnic' form by a second
• Whether khan and khagan were distinct ranks in the sixth century, or one title under two spellings
• The meaning of the element Illig in Bumin's title

Khazar Customs and Tribute

• Whether the Khazars struck coins of their own
• Whether the tenth that the Rus paid on their cargoes was general or fell on all merchants

Khazar Dual Kingship

• Where the dual kingship came from: the rule of the Göktürk steppe, the Khazar conversion to Judaism or a later development
• Who installed whom: al-Istakhri has the king appoint the khagan, Ibn Hawqal has the khagan confirm the king
• What the titles Kundur Khagan and Jawshighr meant

Khazar Mail and the Armourers of the Caucasusminimal

• Whether the mail of the king's guard was made in the Caucasus

Kirghiz Iron and Gold

• Whether the third metal is tin or lead: the Chinese character is the ordinary word for tin, and one English rendering gives lead
• What the iron that came with the rain was

Kül Tegin's Horses

• Whether Alp Šalčı is the name of a white horse or of a man
• Whether azman is the name of a horse, a word for a gelding or an adjective
• The colour of the third horse of the first battle: chestnut in the reading used here

Külüg Churminimal

• How the first element 屈律 is to be read

Kunçuyminimal

• Whether kunçuy in the Yenisei epitaphs means wife or is a man's address to his wife as princess
• Whether kunçuy ranked below the katun as a later wife or a sister of the khan

Kurganminimal

• Whether a shared burial form across three thousand years implies any continuity of people or belief

Kut

• Whether Gutu in the Xiongnu title is Kut or, as the Han Shu glosses it, 'son'
• Whether Kut inheres in Ötüken as well as in the ruler: the inscription calls the forest ıduq, sacred, and the view that makes it a source of Kut is a modern one

Lesser Khanminimal

• Whether the Lesser Khan was a fixed office or a rank granted case by case

Levirate

• The meaning of the closing clause 唯尊者不得下淫
• Whether the marriage included conjugal relations

Livestock in the Hudud al-Alam

• How far the notices of the Hudud and of Marvazi rest on one older source and are therefore one witness

Livestock Losses in the Annals

• Whether the shares of dead people and animals that the annals give were counted or estimated
• Whether the yut of the Bilge Khan inscription was a famine or a die-off of livestock

Livestock Raids

• Whether the herd that Bilge Khan took to feed his people in the thirty-fourth year was taken from the Oghuz

Logadesminimal

• Whether the logades were an order of the realm with defined functions, which some see as the hinge of its whole administration, or simply the prominent men

Loose-rein prefectures

• Whether the system was designed as absorption or as containment

Oghuz Herds in Ibn Fadlan's Account

• How much of the Oghuz account is Ibn Fadlan's own observation

Ordos bronzesminimal

• How far the animal style is a single tradition and how far a set of local ones that trade connected

Ordu

• How far the ordu was a fixed place in any period before the Uyghurs built Ordu-Balık
• Whether Turkic ordu goes back to the Chinese 甌脫 outuo of the Xiongnu period
• Whether 牙 in yazhang is the commander's banner or a Chinese spelling of an Old Turkic word

Post and Communication

• The language of the letter that Istemi sent to Justin II: Old Turkic, or Sogdian
• Whether a line of the Jabogan stone concerns a post; the stone is undated

Raw Materials and Trade among the Turkic Peoples

• Whether the Göktürks mined or quarried anything themselves: no source of their age describes it
• Whether the northern army of the Caucasus campaign, whose officials went to the metalworkers of Albania, was Göktürk

Roof Tiles of the Uyghur Khaganate

• Whether the wadang of the Khöshöö Tsaidam complexes are related to those of the Uyghur sites

Sabao

• What the office was at the start: a head of caravans, a religious officer, or a civil magistrate of the foreign community
• Whether the titles that epitaphs give to ancestors were held or were added later

Salt among the Turkic Peoples

• Which lake the Ḥudūd means by Tuz Köl
• Whether the Göktürks took salt from the deposits and lakes around the Altai, which no source of their age reports

Saŋunminimal

• Whether the Tang emperors gave the title to Turkic chiefs, or the chiefs took it themselves

Seasonal Pastures

• Whether the stages of the moves were fixed from year to year or changed with the grass

Shad

• Whether the title is Iranian in origin or Turkic
• Whether a shad always commanded a wing, or sometimes only a people
• Whether the shadship was a hereditary grade, as the Chinese lists say, or an office that was not handed from father to son

Sheep

• Whether the sheep of the Chinese lists include goats, which the Chinese word yang can cover

Sifaminimal

• Whether 俟發 is a shortened or faulty form of 俟利發, silifa

Silk in the Steppe

• Whether the Göktürks of the 540s came to the frontier to buy silk or to sell it
• Whether the Sogdian golden age of 550 to 750 rested on the windfall of Chinese silk or on a trade that already existed

Skull Cup

• What the cup meant: the victor taking the dead man's power into himself, or a steppe custom handed down from the Scythians

Tally Sticks and the Golden Arrow

• Whether the arrowhead was of gold or simply of metal
• Whether the arrow was sealed under wax with the notched wood or used to stamp the seal

Tamgaminimal

• How far the variation between related marks encodes an actual genealogy

Tarkhan

• Whether the title is Turkic in origin, or Iranian, or older than both

Tegin

Terkenminimal

• Whether the title belonged to women alone or to rulers of either sex
• Whether terken goes back to teŋriken, and whether the word is Rouran in origin

The Economy of the Steppe Empires

• Whether the Göktürks mined or quarried anything themselves: no source of their age describes it

The Göktürk Oath

• Whose rite the white horse of 626 was

The twelve-year animal cycle

• Whether the cycle reached the Turkic peoples from China or is older than that contact
• Whether the animal year and the Julian year cover the same twelve months
• How the cycle stands against the Zhou Shu's statement that the Göktürks had no calendar

The Twenty-Eight Ranks

• How the Tongdian's ten early grades relate to the twenty-eight grades of the Zhou Shu

Tölis and Tardush

• Which half of the realm each name denotes
• Whether the Chinese titles 突利 and 達頭 render Tölis and Tarduš
• Whether the Tölis are the Tiele of the Chinese sources

Tongpu Duwei

• How much the Xiongnu took from the oasis states in grain, labour and goods: the Han Shu says only that the office levied taxes and drew wealth from them

Töre

• Whether törü, Tengri and Göktürk share a root
• Cremation or inhumation as the normal rite: the Chinese account and the excavated graves disagree

Towns and Villages of the Turks in the Hudud al-ʿĀlam

• Which of the settlements the geographer describes still stood in 982: he calls some places desolate or abandoned and lists others as they once were

Toy

• Whether the word toy itself is attested for the Göktürk period or is a later Turkic term applied back to it
• The location of the ancestral cave where the annual assembly met

Trade Routes of the Steppe

• Which lake Zemarchos reached on his way home, the Aral or the Caspian
• Which pass Xuanzang crossed to reach the Great Clear Lake, the Muzart or the Bedel
• How far a li of Xuanzang reached: his sums vary between about 270 and 470 metres to the li and do not fix a place

Tribute Missions and Bestowals

• Whether the exchange was tribute paid to China or payment made by China to the steppe
• How far the Chinese words for the exchange described the facts

Tudun

• Whether the title is Turkic, Iranian or taken over from an earlier steppe administration

Tuğ

• Whether the Göktürk standard descends from a Saka and Xiongnu tradition or from the banners of the Chinese armies
• How many tails a khan's standard carried, and whether the number was fixed

Türgesh and Karluk Coinage

• Whether the Vakhshtuva coins are Karluk issues of the mid-eighth century, as one typology has it, or earlier issues attributed to a Lord Farn-Khutava
• Whether the coins of Arslan Irkin and Arslan Küli Irkin belong to the eighth century or, as one dating has it for the latter, to the second half of the tenth
• Whether Taraz was an independent mint or received its coins from other centres of the valley

Tutuk

• Whether the word is read tutuk or totok
• Whether the word is a loan from Chinese 都督 or a Turkic formation from tut-

Uyghur Farming

• How large a share of the food of the Uyghurs came from their own fields: the report of 757 lists grain for the army, and the account of 821 speaks of farmland on a stretch of the road, yet the herds remained the base of the economy

Uyghur Horse-Silk Trade

• Whether the trade was a payment forced on the Tang or an exchange from which both sides drew a gain
• How the payments of the 820s add up: the Jiu Tang Shu gives 200,000 bolts for 827 and 230,000 for 829, the Xin Tang Shu 500,000 for the first years of the emperor Wenzong

Wagons of the Steppe Peoples

• Whether the Chinese name Gaoche, high carts, describes the wagons or renders a Turkic word for wheel or hoop
• Whether the Huns lived in their wagons or used them to move tents and goods

Warfare of the Steppe Empires

• Whether the northern army of the Albanian chronicle, called Khazar there, is the Göktürk army of the Caucasus campaign
• Whether the Turks of the Strategikon are the western Göktürks

Women among the Turkic Peoples

• Where the word katun comes from: Sogdian, a Xianbei form, or a Turkic formation
• Whether the Zhuanqu Yanzhi who set up Huyandi in 85 BC and the Zhuanqu Yanzhi set aside in 68 BC are one woman; the Han Shu uses the title for both
• Which of Suluk's wives sent horses to the Tang garrison at Anxi, and what the governor meant by calling her an Ashina woman

Worthy Kings of the Left and Right

• Why the left stood higher: a ranking taken over from China, or the east-west division of the steppe
• Whether the Left Tuqi King of the Shiji and the Left Worthy King of the later lists were one office

Xiongnu Agriculture

• How far the Xiongnu themselves tilled the ground: the Shiji denies it, the Han Shu records Xiongnu crops and granaries, and the excavations are uneven
• Whether grain growing among the Xiongnu was an old native practice or a borrowing from settled neighbours and Chinese captives

Xiongnu Herds

• Whether the Shiji counts a million cattle and sheep or a million sheep in the booty of 127 BC
• What the three rare equids named jueti, taotu and tuoxi were

Xiongnu Ironworking

• Whether iron-making was widespread and seasonal, as the slag of one valley suggests, or the work of a few workshops, as the furnace of one fortress suggests
• How much of the iron came from Han China and how much was smelted in Xiongnu land

Xiongnu Pottery

• How far differences in the share of decorated vessels between camp sites mirror differences of social rank

Yabgu

• Whether the title is Turkic or borrowed, and from which language
• Whether Istemi's yabgu was a subordinate command or a co-rule in all but name

Yi Khanminimal

• Whether the house khans held an office with sacral functions, or the title was only a form of address among great families

Alara

• Whether any folklore record stands behind the water fairy Alara of the popular retellings

Altaian Creation Story

• Whether the dive for earth is made by the first man or by the creator himself
• Whether the Altaian Erlik continues the Ärklig of the Old Uyghur texts
• How much of the story the Altaians owe to Iranian, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian tales

Ancestor Cult

• Whether the cave of the annual sacrifice is the cave of the origin story, and where it lay
• Whether the felt images the Chinese report for the Göktürks are memorials of ancestors, images of gods, or a cult of the common people
• Whether the ancestors were the core of the old religion, one of three pillars, or the founders of a dynastic order
• Whether the images that Bögü Khan ordered burned were images of ancestors

Animism

• Whether the nature cults of the Göktürk sources are animism in Tylor's sense or reverence for the places and things themselves
• Whether the owner-spirits recorded among the Altaians, Tuvans and Yakuts from the eighteenth century go back to the period of the khaganates
• How animism, shamanism and Tengrism stand to one another
• How the name of the mountain 勃登凝黎 is to be read

Arçura

• How the name Arçura is to be analysed: half-man, man plus a class of spirits, or a Tatar derivation from an Arabic word
• Whether the Arçura and the Tatar Şüräle are one figure under two names
• Whether the forest spirit of the Volga is a continuation of a Turkic or Mongol class of spirits, and whether it has any place in the belief of the Göktürks

Asena the She-Wolf (Gök Börü)

• Whether the wolf descent is a Göktürk claim or a Chinese literary convention applied to them
• Whether the golden wolf's head marks descent, rank, or both

Ay Ata

• Whether the testimonies of different peoples and periods describe one deity or several

Buddhism among the Göktürks

• Whether the Bugut inscription is Buddhist in content
• Whether Taspar's conversion left anything behind after his death
• How far the Sogdian communities of the khaganate carried Buddhism into it independently of the court

Burial and the balbal

• Whether the balbals represent slain enemies, loyal followers, gifts, or ancestors
• Whether the balbal set up for İltiriš Khan in the Kül Tegin inscription is the first stone of a line or the enemy ruler Baz Khan
• Whether the body was burnt, as the Chinese accounts say, or buried with the horse, as excavation finds
• Whether the wooden marker of the Sui Shu and the stone of the Zhou Shu describe one rite or two
• Whether the painted house of the Sui Shu belongs to the rite of the Göktürks before 581 or to what Chinese observers learned later

Church of the Eastminimal

Dochiaminimal

• Which Turkic word the Greek form renders

Erklig

• Whether an Old Turkic lord of the dead existed before the Buddhist and Manichaean texts that name one
• Whether the Altaian Erlik continues that figure or a later one

Fire Worship

• Where the Göktürk reverence for fire came from: from Zoroastrian Persia, or from older fire cults independent of Iran

Gaoche Thunder Rite

• What 喜致震霆 says: that thunder often struck among the Gaoche, or that they were fond of thunder
• Whether the opening words are sound, or a textual corruption and the whole rite an exorcism of the evil omen
• How the willow twigs were set up: round about, in the Wei Shu's 回竪之, or bent, in the Tongdian's 曲竪之

Göktürk Face-Cutting

• Whether the mourning wounds of the Huns in Jordanes and those of the Göktürks are one tradition or two customs of the same kind

Horse Sacrifice

• Whether the rite recorded in the Altai of the nineteenth century continues a rite of the Göktürks
• Whether the journey through the heavens belonged to the horse sacrifice from the start
• Whose rite the white horse of an oath was, the steppe's or the Chinese

Islam

• When the rulers of the Turkic steppe first accepted the religion

Iye

• Whether the owner-spirits recorded from the nineteenth century go back to the period of the khaganates
• Whether the Turkic iye comes from Old Turkic idi, as the grammar of Old Turkic has it, or from another root
• Whether the owners are good, evil or both: servants of Erlik who fell to earth, protectors in the Turkish literature, or a class of their own
• Whether the owners form a rank under a great owner of the land or each stand alone in their district
• How the phrase idi oksuz of the Kül Tegin inscription is to be read

Kam (Turkic Shaman)

• Whether the wuxi of the Chinese accounts are the same office as the later qam
• Whether the Göktürk specialist held political rank, as he did among neighbouring peoples

Kün Tengri

• Whether the god of the sun and of the moon in the titles of the Uyghur khagans comes from Manichaeism, from an older Central Asian belief or from the steppe tradition of the Xiongnu
• Which reigns of the Uyghur khaganate bore the sun in the title

Manichaean Diet of the Uyghurs

• What the lost character in the Karabalghasun phrase named: a meal of some kind, or, in one translation, rice in place of meat
• What 湩酪, the milk the Manichaeans refused, means in the Xin Tang Shu: milk and butter, fermented milk, or kumys

Manichaeism

• Which Uyghur khan commissioned the Karabalghasun inscription
• The date and the depth of the Uyghur conversion, which the Chinese and the inscription present differently

Omens and Divination

• Where Chula Khan's divination belongs in time: before his stay at Bingzhou in 620, or a year later as the New Book of Tang places it

Peri

• Whether purhan as a name for the shaman comes from Persian perihon or from Buddhist burhan
• Whether the jinni addressed in the Divan formula for sick infants is a peri

Purification by Fire

• Whether Zemarchos passed through one fire, as Menander says, or between two flames
• Whether the later fire rites of the Bashkirs, Kazakhs and Anatolian Turks continue the Göktürk rite

Raising on the Felt

• Whether 隨日 means that the turns followed the course of the sun or that all nine were made in one day

Riding Round the Dead

• Whether the riders at Attila's funeral circled the body while singing, as Jordanes has it, or ran horse races, as some suppose
• Whether the Kirghiz went three times round the dead, as the Xin Tang Shu says, or wailed three times, as the Tongdian has it

Sacred Mountains

• Whether a sacred head, ıduk baş, is a summit or a source of water, and whether the heads of Tamag and of 701 are one place
• How the Göktürk name of the bare mountain is to be read, and whether it belongs with the sacred Earth-and-Water of the inscriptions
• Whether Kut flowed from Ötüken, was granted at Ötüken, or is said in the inscriptions of the ruler alone
• Whether the mountain was worshipped as a being or honoured for the spirits that dwell in it

Sacrifice and the year

• Which river the Zhou Shu means by 他人水
• Whether the mid-fifth-month rite and the cave rite are two occasions or two accounts of one
• How the Zhou Shu's denial of a calendar stands against the year names in the inscriptions

Scapulimancy

• Whether the scraped bones in Jordanes were shoulder blades held in fire, or bones read as they were
• Whether the reading of shoulder blades recorded among Kirghiz, Mongols and Altaians continues a practice of the steppe empires of the sixth to the eighth century

Shamanism

• Whether shamanism is a religion, one part of a religion, or a set of acts performed when they are needed
• Whether the sky cult of the state and shamanic practice were separate in the khaganates
• Whether the shamanism recorded since the eighteenth century continues the practice of the steppe empires
• Whether the wu of the Chinese accounts hold the same office as the later kam
• How far rock carvings and graves of the Bronze Age can be interpreted as shamanic

Soul Words

• Whether Kut in the inscriptions is a favour that Heaven grants to a ruler or a life force that any living being can have
• Whether the six souls of the Altaians of the nineteenth century describe a belief of the Göktürk age

Stone Figures

• Whether the figures show the dead man himself, an ancestor, or enemies he had killed
• Whether the cup in the hand marks the dead man's share in the funeral feast or a ritual vessel of another kind
• Whether the figures with a three-horned headdress are noble women, a goddess or a shamaness
• Whether the Xiao Hongnahai figure dates from 599 and shows Niri Khan
• Who struck the heads from the figures at the Orkhon monuments, and when

Stravaminimal

• Whether the word is Hunnic, as Jordanes presents it, Slavic, meaning a funeral feast, or Germanic; some scholars hold that a single word cannot be assigned to any language

Sword of Marsminimal

• Whether the story is a report of a Hunnic cult or a folk tale shaped by Herodotus's account of the Scythian sword-god

Tengri

• Whether Tengri in the inscriptions is a personal deity or the sky itself, and whether the distinction was made
• The reading of öd tengri yasar, which supports three different words
• Whether the Xiongnu Chengli is the same word

Tengrism

• Whether the Göktürks of the sixth century held the beliefs the eighth-century inscriptions attest
• Whether the Han Shu's own gloss of Gutu as 'son' or the Turkic reading as Kut is correct
• Whether material recorded among Altaian and Siberian peoples in the modern period can be projected back onto the Göktürk period
• Proposed etymological links between Tengri and Sumerian dingir or Indo-European Dyeus
• Whether törü, Tengri and Göktürk share a root

The three worlds

• Whether a lower world existed in Göktürk belief and simply had no occasion to be written
• Whether the tiers counted in the modern material are seven, nine or another number

Turkic Mythology

• Whether the tiered cosmos and the world tree of the later Turkic material can be carried back to the Göktürks
• Whether the Huns of Attila spoke a Turkic language

Ülgen and Kayra Khan

• Whether Kayra Khan is a god of his own, the father of Ülgen, or an epithet of the great spirits
• Whether the Orkhon inscriptions know Ülgen
• Whether Ülgen continues an old Turkic god or took shape under Iranian, Buddhist and Mongolic influence

Ulukayın (Turkic World Tree)

• Whether the great tree of the Zhou Shu legend is a world tree or simply a landmark
• Whether the Altaian world tree can be read back into the Göktürk period

Umay

• Whether a comparison in one inscription and an invocation in another establish a cult, or only a figure known to the audience
• Whether the material recorded among Altaian and Siberian peoples continues the same figure

Water Cult

• Whether the Göktürks revered water itself or the spirits and owners said to live in it
• Whether the Earth-and-Water of the inscriptions is a sacred power or only the homeland
• Where the river of the fifth-month sacrifice lay, and whether it was a river, a lake or a spring
• Whether a sacred head, ıduk baş, is a summit or a source of water
• Whether the avoidance of washing among the Oghuz was reverence, protection of the water, or a report coloured by the observer

Yada Stone

• Whether the weather-working of Nishidu and of the Yueban sorcerers is the later art of the yada stone
• Whether the stone of the Turks of the tenth and eleventh centuries and the stone of the Altaian yadachi are one belief

Yer-Su Spirits

• Whether Yer-Sub is a second deity beside Tengri or the land under a sacred aspect
• Whether the earth-spirit mountain of the Zhou Shu belongs to the same conception
• What ıduk marks: consecration, inviolability, or ownership by a power

Yol Tengri

• Whether yol in the name means the road or the fortune met on it
• Whether the figure is a distinct deity or an aspect of Tengri
• Whether the omen book's divine vocabulary is Göktürk or Uyghur-period

Chinese transcriptions of Turkic

• How far a Chinese spelling lets the Turkic sound be recovered, and which system of Middle Chinese the reading rests on
• Whether 俟利發 stands for the Turkic title ilteber
• Whether the Han title 翕侯 and the Tang title 葉護 write one Turkic word, yabgu

Oghur Turkic

• Whether Oghur is a branch of Turkic or a language beside Turkic that is closely related to it
• Which peoples of the steppe spoke it: the Huns, the Khazars, the Avars, the Sabirs
• When and where the Hungarians took their Oghur loanwords

Oghuz and Kipchak speech in Kashgari

• Whether the dividing line of the dialects lies between the Oghuz with the Kipchak and the Chigil, as the translators read it
• How far Kashgari's account of the western dialects rests on first-hand knowledge

Old Turkic

• Whether the language of the Yenisei inscriptions is a dialect of the Orkhon language or a separate variety
• Whether the change of d to y marks a dialect or a later stage of the language
• Whether Old Turkic is the ancestor of the modern languages or one branch beside their ancestor
• Whether the language had primary long vowels as a distinctive class, or whether the spellings that suggest them are orthographic
• Whether the dative-directive and the locative-ablative are one case each or two; the texts use one ending for both jobs
• What the Zhou Shu means by saying the sixth-century Göktürks had writing resembling that of the Hu

Old Uyghur

• Whether the differences between Old Uyghur texts are differences of dialect or of stage
• Whether the manuscripts in Brahmi script represent a dialect of their own
• How Buddhism reached the Uyghurs and which language carried it
• Whether the runiform inscriptions of the Uyghur steppe empire belong to Old Uyghur or to Orkhon Turkic

The Hunnic language

• What language the core of the Huns spoke, for which scholars give six answers: an early form of Oghuric Turkic; Turkic, to judge by the tribal names; Altaic, between Turkic and Mongolic; not to be classified on the evidence; Turkic for part of the leadership only, with other names neither Turkic nor Altaic; or an early form of Arin, a Yeniseian language, and the language of the Xiongnu too
• Whether the Germanic names of Attila's house are Germanic names or Hunnic names in Gothic dress
• Whether strava, medos and kamos are Hunnic words at all

The Khalaj language

• Whether Khalaj is a branch of Turkic of its own or an Oghuz variety
• Whether Khalaj descends from the speech of the Argu
• Whether Old Turkic also had an initial h

The Khazar language

• Whether the Khazars spoke an Oghur or a Common Turkic language
• Whether Istakhri's remark that the Khazar language was like that of the Bulgars refers to an Oghur speech
• Whether the runiform marks of the Khazar lands are letters and what language they write

The Old Turkic script

• Whether the letters derive from an Aramaic alphabet carried east by Sogdian scribes, from the tamgas, or from both
• Whether the script was already in use under the First Göktürk Khaganate
• Whether the script arose in Mongolia or in the south of Siberia
• What the Zhou Shu means by writing that resembles that of the Hu

The Sogdian language

• Whether Maniakh's letter of 568 was Sogdian or Turkic written in Sogdian letters
• When the Sogdian alphabet was first fitted to Turkic sounds
• What the Zhou Shu means by writing that resembles that of the Hu

The Turkic languages

• Whether Khalaj is a branch of its own or an isolated Oghuz variety
• Where Kyrgyz belongs: with Kipchak, with the Siberian group, or between them
• Whether the Turkic family is related to Mongolic and Tungusic by descent or by contact
• Which of the recorded steppe peoples spoke Turkic at all: Xiongnu, Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, Khazars

Ayran

• The derivation of the word: from the verb ayır- 'to separate', from Mongolian ayiraγ, from a language of the Huns, or from ürüŋ 'white'
• Whether the soured milk the Sui Shu has the Göktürks drink every day was ayran, kumys, or both

Bread

• Whether the army in whose camp the Albanian visitors were given fried bread was Göktürk or Khazar

Grape Wine in Central Asia

• Whether the Chinese word for the grape, 蒲陶, reproduces a word of Ferghana from an Iranian source or descends from Greek botrys
• What the sweet wine served at Istemi's camp in 569 was: kumys, beer, mead and rice wine have all been proposed

Kamosminimal

• Whether the word kamos is Turkic, from the word for kumys, or an older word of Pannonia
• Whether medos was a Germanic or an Illyrian word

Kumys

• Whether the 酪 that the Han princess among the Wusun calls her drink was fermented mare's milk
• What the sweet wine served at Istemi's camp in 569 was: kumys, beer, mead and rice wine have all been proposed

Millet

• How far the herding peoples grew grain themselves: the Shiji and the Roman writers deny agriculture to the Xiongnu and the Huns, while the Han Shu records Xiongnu crops and excavation finds grain in Xiongnu and Sarmatian settlements

Millet Beer

• What the sweet drink was that the Göktürks served the Roman envoys in 569: kumys, beer or ale, mead and rice wine have all been proposed

Steppe Diet

• How much food the hunt supplied: the Chinese histories make hunting a livelihood of the Xiongnu, while the bones from Xiongnu settlements show little game

Tutmaç

• The origin of the name: Kashgari's tutma āč, 'do not leave hungry', or a stem with a suffix

Culture of the Turkic Peoples

• Whether the customs the Zhou Shu and the Sui Shu call like those of the Xiongnu are the same customs continued
• What the Göktürk men's game chupu and the women's ball game were
• What the balbal stones represent
• Where the letters of the Old Turkic script come from

Er At

• Whether er at in line E31 of the Kül Tegin inscription is a man's name, a military rank or a military force
• Whether the verb of that line is boltı, 'became', or buldı, 'found, got'
• Whether such a name was conferred at an age or won by a deed
• Whether the hunts of Kül İç Čor's boyhood are deeds by which such a name was earned

Funeral Games of the Caucasian Huns

• Whether the gallops at the graves were horse races, as some have taken them, or part of the mourning

Göktürk Games

• Whether chupu was a game of knucklebones, of dice, or of throwing
• Whether in 599 Yami lost the gifts to Dusuliu, as the Sui Shu can be read, or won them from him, as one rendering has it

Horse and Camel Races at the Xiongnu Sacrifices

• Whether the line on the sacrifices in the Hou Han Shu reads three yearly sacrifices, 三歲祠, or three dragon sacrifices, 三龍祠
• Whether 走馬 means a race, a display of running horses or riding in circles

Hunting among the Göktürks

• Whether kiyik in line 8 of the Tonyukuk inscription means deer or wild game in general
• Whether the man of the twelfth omen of the Irk Bitig fell to the ground or practised shamanic tricks