Millet is the grain of the steppe. Broomcorn millet grows faster than any other cereal grass. That suits it to herders.[1] The Chinese and Roman writers who describe the steppe peoples as eaters of meat and milk record millet among them again and again. It appears as a gift from China, as a crop of their own and as a drink. Mahmud al-Kashgari’s dictionary of the 1070s gives several Turkic words for it and describes dishes made from it.[2]

The Xiongnu

The Shiji says that the Xiongnu had no walled towns, no fixed dwellings and no work of tilling fields.[3] The same chapter shows grain going north.[3] When the first Han emperor made peace with Bagatur by sending him a princess, the Han undertook to send the Xiongnu silk floss, silk, wine, grain and food in fixed amounts every year.[3] In 162 BC the emperor Wen wrote to the chanyu that the Xiongnu lived in the cold north, where the killing frost came early. For that reason, he wrote, his officials sent the chanyu glutinous millet and malt, 秫糱, with gold and silk every year.[3]

The Han Shu continues the story.[4] In the year after the Han general Li Guangli had surrendered to him, the chanyu Hulugu wrote to the Han court and named his terms for peace.[4] He wanted a Han bride and, every year, ten thousand shi of malt liquor, five thousand hu of millet, 稷米, and ten thousand bolts of silk.[4] Li Guangli was later killed as a sacrifice.[4] Snow and rain fell for months afterwards. The herds died, the people fell sick, and the grain crops did not ripen.[4] The Xiongnu therefore had fields of their own.

Huyandi came to the throne in 85 BC. Under this chanyu, his counsellor Wei Lü proposed to dig wells, build walls and put up towers to store grain. He proposed to hold them with men of Qin.[4] Men of Qin were Chinese. Several hundred wells were dug and several thousand timbers cut.[4] Then it was objected that the Xiongnu could not hold walls and would only be leaving their grain to the Han. Wei Lü gave the plan up.[4] After Huhanye Chanyu had come to the Han court in 51 BC, the Han sent his people grain and dried rations from the frontier, thirty-four thousand hu in all.[4] When Huhanye later reported that his people were in want, the emperor Yuan had twenty thousand hu of grain carried to him from the commanderies of Yunzhong and Wuyuan.[4]

Excavation shows grain at Xiongnu settlements. At the fortified settlement of Ivolga in Buryatia, the finds included millet, barley and wheat.[5] Some scholars count the Chinese notices on the Xiongnu and the Göktürks together. They find wheat and millet among both from early times, as a native practice and not only as a gift from settled neighbours.[6] The same scholars count the Xiongnu among the Turkic peoples whose grain growing was old and native, and they extend the same practice to the Shiwei and the Sushen in Manchuria and northern Mongolia.[6]

The Wuhuan and the Xianbei

An early history of the Wei, which Pei Songzhi quotes in his commentary on the Sanguozhi, describes how the Wuhuan of the eastern steppe farmed.[7] They knew the seasons by the breeding of birds and beasts. For ploughing and sowing they took the call of the cuckoo as their sign.[7] Their land suited millet, 青穄, and a plant called dongqiang. The dongqiang looked like fleabane, had seeds like those of the mallow and ripened in the tenth month.[7] For grain they always looked to China.[7] The Hou Han Shu also has the millet and the dongqiang. It likens the seeds of the dongqiang to millet.[8] Under Tanshihuai the Xianbei grew so numerous that farming, herding and hunting no longer fed them.[9]

The Huns

The Roman writers deny the Huns any agriculture.[10] Ammianus Marcellinus says that no one among them ever ploughed a field or touched a plough handle.[11] When Priscus travelled through Attila’s realm with the Roman embassy of 449, the villages supplied the envoys with millet instead of wheat.[12] Their servants received millet as well, and a drink made from barley, kamos.[12]

The Sarmatians, whom the Huns conquered north of the Black Sea, grew millet.[13] The remains of soft food found in their pots were as a rule millet porridge.[1] Pliny and Aelian name millet as the food of the Sarmatians.[1] In war and migration the Huns are said to have lived on their herds. Once they ruled a peasant population, they lived on their subjects. Only the poorest of them may have grown grain of their own.[14]

The Gaoche and the Rouran

The Wei Shu says of the Gaoche, whom the later histories call the Tiele, that they had no grain.[15] After the campaign of 429 the Wei resettled the eastern Gaoche south of the desert.[15] After some years there they gradually came to eat grain.[15]

The Rouran received grain from the Wei in quantity when Anagui returned to the steppe.[15] In the first month of 521 the emperor gave him, among weapons, silks, tents and herds, a hundred shi of new dried grain, parched wheat meal, and two hundred thousand shi of millet, 粟, to be handed over at the garrison.[15] In the tenth month of the same year the ministers wrote that Anagui was only beginning and had no stores. They proposed to give him two thousand hu of hemp seed and dried grain from Shuozhou, carried by government camels.[15] In the twelfth month of 522 Anagui asked for millet for sowing. An edict gave him ten thousand shi.[15] In 523 his people suffered a great famine. He raided across the frontier.[15] The request shows that Anagui meant his people to sow millet.

The Göktürks

In 698 Kapgan Khan, ruler of the restored khaganate, asked the Tang court for the surrendered households of six prefectures, for the land of the Chanyu Protectorate, and for farming tools and seed.[16] The empress first refused.[16] Kapgan detained her envoy. Her court, afraid of his army, gave him several thousand tents of the surrendered households together with more than forty thousand shi of seed and three thousand farming tools.[16] The Jiu Tang Shu adds that Kapgan grew steadily stronger from this.[16] The text does not say which grain the seed was.[16] The Xin Tang Shu names it. In its account Kapgan asked for a hundred thousand hu of millet seed, 粟, three thousand farming tools and tens of thousands of jin of iron. In the end the court gave him millet, tools and several thousand tents of households.[17]

The Kirghiz

The Kirghiz of the Yenisei grew grain themselves.[18] The Xin Tang Shu lists their crops as grain, 禾, millet, 粟, wheat, barley and naked barley, 青稞. They ground these on mills into flour and gruel.[18] They sowed millet, 穄, in the third month and reaped it in the ninth. They cooked it as food and brewed liquor from it.[18] They had no fruit and no vegetables.[18] The tribes lived on meat and fermented mare’s milk. Only their ruler set out cakes.[18] The Persian geography Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam of 982 says that some of the Karluk were farmers. It adds that at Kulan, a small district of theirs on the border of the Muslim world, agriculture was practised.[19]

Millet in Kashgari’s dictionary

Mahmud al-Kashgari’s dictionary of the Turkic languages gives ügür as the word for millet among the Turks. It adds that the Oguz did not know it.[20] Qonaq is coarse millet.[21] A proverb with it says that an ear of millet is better the fewer seeds it has, because few seeds are firm and large, while many are thin and small.[21] It is said of one who prefers small company, so that he may attain his desire and his authority.[21] Tariγ is the generic word for cereal crops. Most of the Turks use it for wheat, and the Oguz use it for millet. Kashgari calls the Oguz usage wrong.[22]

Kashgari also describes dishes made from millet.[23] For qāγut the millet is boiled, dried and ground, then mixed with butter and sugar. It is one of the foods given to women after childbirth.[24] For küršäk millet kernels are boiled in water or milk and eaten with butter.[25]

From the Han gifts to the Xiongnu to Kashgari’s dishes, millet stands beside meat and milk in every period for which there are sources. The steppe peoples grew it in their own fields and received it from their settled neighbours. In hard years they asked for it.

In the Kutadgu Bilig, written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, millet is the food of the poor and of the ascetic. The book sets sugar and sweets against barley and millet, arpa üyür. Its ascetic says that millet bran, kavuk yür, tastes sweeter to him than sugar.[26]

References

  1. ^ a b c Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 176
  2. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 100, 294, 309, 356
  3. ^ a b c d Shiji, juan 110
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Han Shu, juan 94
  5. ^ Houle 2011, p. 138
  6. ^ a b Ögel 2000, p. 159
  7. ^ a b c d Sanguozhi, juan 30
  8. ^ Hou Han Shu, juan 90
  9. ^ Hou Han Shu, juan 90; Sanguozhi, juan 30
  10. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 174
  11. ^ Ammianus Marcellinus; Rolfe 1939, xxxi.2.10, p. 385
  12. ^ a b Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 83
  13. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 174, 176
  14. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 177
  15. ^ a b c d e f g h Wei Shu, juan 103
  16. ^ a b c d e Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  17. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  18. ^ a b c d e Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  19. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1937, p. 97
  20. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 100
  21. ^ a b c Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 294
  22. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 287
  23. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 309, 356
  24. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 309
  25. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 356
  26. ^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 3612–3614, 4768–4769

Sources

Literature

  • Jean-Luc Houle; Lee G. Broderick, Settlement Patterns and Domestic Economy of the Xiongnu in Khanui Valley, Mongolia (2011)
  • John C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, with an English Translation, vol. III: Books XXVII–XXXI (1939)
  • Karl Müller (ed.), Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, Bd. IV (darin: Menandri Protectoris fragmenta, griechisch mit lateinischer Übersetzung) (1851)
  • Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
  • V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold (1937)
  • Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş II: Türklerde ziraat kültürü (2000)

Related

What links here9

Persons
Hulugu Chanyu
Battles & Events
Embassy of Maximinus to Attila · Rise of Anagui Khan
Peoples
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Institutions and Titles
The Economy of the Steppe Empires · Xiongnu Agriculture
Foods
Kamos · Millet Beer · Steppe Diet

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Millet.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/foods/millet/

Last revised: 8 November 2026