Ordu

The ordu is the ruler’s camp. In a realm without a capital, it is the capital. The khan, his household, his guard, his treasury and the tents of those who must be near him moved together between pastures. Where the ordu is, the government is.

The word had a long career. It stands in the name of Ordu-Balık, the city the Uyghurs built on the Orkhon, which is a camp that stopped moving. In that name, balık is the Old Uyghur word for a walled town. The Uyghur translators of Chinese Buddhist texts used it for the Chinese cheng, and balıklanmak meant to raise a fort or a wall.^[1] By way of the Mongols, the word also reached the European languages as horde. There it lost the sense of a court and kept only the sense of a crowd. Old Uyghur texts in Brahmi script write their vowels out. They have ordo, “army camp”, with o in the second syllable. The u of the Turkish ordu is held to correspond to that o, which stands for a lowered u.^[2] The Kazakh form is held to be a loan that came back from Mongolian. A Kazakh study of the Old Turkic words that live on in Kazakh leaves ordu out for that reason.^[3]

The word is already on the Kül Tegin stone. There the Oguz fell on the ordug, the royal camp, in which the khan’s mother, his stepmothers, his sisters and his daughters-in-law lay, and Kül Tegin did not give it up.^[4] One account treats this as the core sense of the word in the Second Khaganate: the camp in which the khan’s family lives.^[5] The Irk Bitig has the word twice. In omen 28, a khan who has taken the throne builds a royal camp. In omen 34, a khan who has routed the enemy comes back toward his camp with his soldiers, rejoicing.^[6]

The Kutadgu Bilig was written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070. In it, the ordu is where the king resides, and a stranger travels by stages until he reaches it.^[7] Two of the book’s sages bear the titles khan and beg of the uç ordu, the Three Camps. The book does not explain the term.^[8]

One proposal finds the Turkic ordu, “camp”, in a Chinese place name of the seventh century, Huolu. Huolu was the seat of the Tang command in the country of the Hephthalites, decreed in 661.^[9] The article on the loose-rein prefectures sets the command out. The proposal rests on the sound of the name alone.

A second proposal finds the word in the Chinese 甌脫, outuo. The Shiji uses it for the border posts that the Xiongnu and the Donghu each kept at the edge of a thousand li of empty land.^[10] The commentators explain outuo as a garrison on the border, and as an earth house from which a watch was kept.^[10] Some scholars regard this Chinese word as an early form of ordu.^[11]^[12] This proposal rests on the sound alone as well. Another account holds that the word has named the seat of the ruler since Xiongnu times, but it gives no evidence for the Xiongnu period.^[13]

The Chinese histories write the khan’s camp as 牙帳, yazhang, “tooth tent”. The Zhou Shu says that the tent of the khan opened to the east, in honour of the place where the sun rises.^[14] The Sui Shu says that a wolf-head standard stood at the gate of the camp, to show that the Göktürks did not forget their origin.^[15] In the Xin Tang Shu, the khan founds his court at Mount Dujin, with a golden wolf-head standard at the gate.^[16] The first character means “tooth”, and two explanations of its use are given. One takes it as the commander’s banner, 牙旗, so that the yazhang is the tent of the standard.^[17] The other takes it as a Chinese spelling of an Old Turkic word, with no connection to teeth.^[18] The Xin Tang Shu uses the same word for the camp of the Kirghiz khan Are. His camp stood on Green Mountain, with a palisade in place of a wall and felt joined into a tent, which was called midizhi. The other chiefs lived in small tents.^[19] One account counts the tent among the insignia of a khan, together with the throne, the standard, the drum, a tuft of wild-ox hair on the cap and the bow.^[20]

The camp could be moved at short notice. In the winter of 720, a Tang commander proposed to surprise the camp of Bilge Khan on the Jiluo river the following autumn.^[21] Tonyukuk advised the khan to wait until the army was close and then to move the camp three days north. The Tang troops would run out of food and leave on their own.^[21] Tonyukuk also advised against building a walled town as the seat of the khan. In the Xin Tang Shu he says that the Göktürks can resist the Tang only by following water and grass and by hunting, and that one defeat inside a town would put them in the enemy’s hands.^[16] The Zhou Shu agrees in its description of the Göktürks, who had walled towns but did not live in them and always dwelt in domed tents, following water and grass.^[14]

References

^ Ögel 2000, p. 175, 201
^ Erdal 2004, p. 89
^ Elmira 2013, p. 243
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ Ögel 2000, p. 5, 42
^ Irk Bitig; Tekin 1993, p. 16–17
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 487
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 1594, 3815
^ Markwart 1938, p. 48
^ a b Shiji, juan 110
^ Ögel 2000, p. 1–3
^ Ögel 2015, p. 162
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 281
^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Ögel 2000, p. 25–28
^ Ögel 2000, p. 259
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 268–269
^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194

Sources

Kutadgu Bilig
Kül Tegin inscription
Irk Bitig
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215, 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
Shiji, juan 110

Literature

Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Josef Markwart, Wehrot und Arang. Untersuchungen zur mythischen und geschichtlichen Landeskunde von Ostiran (1938)
Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş I: Türklerde köy ve şehir hayatı (2000)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş VII: Türklerde ordu, ordugah ve otağ (2000)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi I (2015)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
Talat Tekin, Irk Bitig: The Book of Omens (1993)
Kaljanova, Elmira, Eski Türk Yazıtları ve Kazakçadaki Ortak Kelimeler (2013)