The twelve-year animal cycle

The Göktürks dated by a run of twelve years. Each year was named for an animal, and the run repeated without an era and without a count of cycles.^[1] It is the only dating system the runiform corpus uses, and it is the reason the events on the monuments can be placed at all.

The attestation

The Kül Tegin inscription closes with two dates in the cycle.^[1] Kül Tegin flew away on the seventeenth day of the Year of the Sheep. The grave building, the carving and the inscribed stone were finished on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month of the Year of the Monkey.^[1] Back-reckoning puts the two in 731 and 732. The pair of consecutive years makes the anchor firm, since a single animal year would fit one in every twelve.

The cycle is used in the same way across the runiform monuments of the Second Khaganate and of the Uyghur period. Dates that rest on it therefore rest on a reckoning the Göktürks used, and not on one applied to them afterwards.

Older editions found a date in the cycle in the first line of the second stone of the Talas valley, a monkey year and a number. A recent study of the signs rejects the reading.^[2]

The twelve names

The eleventh-century dictionary of Mahmud al-Kashgari gives the full list of the twelve, with the Turkic name of each animal, under the entry for the tiger. It also gives an account of how the reckoning was introduced.^[3] In the order of the cycle they are the rat, the ox, the tiger, the hare, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the sheep, the monkey, the hen, the dog and the pig.^[3]

The twelve years of the cycle in their order, beginning with the rat. The sheep and the monkey carry a mark because the Kül Tegin inscription dates itself by them, in 731 and 732; every other year of the cycle is reckoned back from that pair. Schematic.

In two cases the dictionary has a different word, not merely a different spelling. For the sheep it has qoy where the inscription has koñ. It gives the dragon under a borrowed word.^[3] What Kashgari attests is eleventh-century usage, four to five centuries after the khaganates. The inscriptions themselves attest only the years they happen to name. Some of the names live on in Kazakh. The monkey, biçin, is meşin there, the ninth year of the cycle, and the dog, ıt, is iyt.^[4]

The year and its beginning

The Turkic year began in spring. As a result, an animal year and a Julian year do not cover the same twelve months. A date converted from the cycle inherits that imprecision. A conversion therefore gives the Julian year in which the greater part of the animal year fell, and not an exact equivalence.

The cycle has no era. It names the year within a run of twelve and never says which run. A date in it is therefore fixed only by something outside it: an event cross-referenced in a Chinese annal, or a sequence of years on the same stone. The monuments supply the second and the Chinese histories the first. The two agree.

Origin

The same twelve-year run, with the same animals in the same order, is the common property of a wide region. China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia and the Turkic-speaking world all use it, and the Chinese attestation is much the oldest. Whether the Turkic peoples took it from China, or whether both drew on something older in Inner Asia, is argued. The question has been argued on linguistic grounds. The animal names are Turkic words, not loans, which shows translation at least and possibly more. The Göktürks may have owed the reckoning not to China but to the Rouran, whom they replaced as masters of the steppe and from whom they took over much besides.^[5] A second possibility is the Iranian world. A Buddhist astronomical text translated in 759 and 764 says that in the lands of the West the years are counted by the twelve animals, and these lands have been identified with Sogdiana.^[6] A third possibility is that the cycle came from India by way of the Chinese.^[7] A fourth sees in it an old Turkic reckoning that the Xiongnu, the Tuoba and the Bulgars already used.^[8]

Against an old Turkic origin stands the Zhou Shu, which says of the Göktürks of the sixth century that they did not know the calendar and marked only by the greening of the grass.^[9] A letter of the khan Ishbara to the Sui emperor is dated by a single sign: the year chen, the tenth day of the ninth month.^[10] The year chen is the dragon year of the animal cycle, 584, and dating by one sign is not usual in Chinese.^[11] The khan may therefore have known and used the cycle before the Chinese calendar was given to the Göktürks in 586.^[12]^[13] Turkic Atlas sets out the letter under the embassy. A hundred and fifty years separate that statement from the Orkhon monuments, which is room enough for a reckoning to be adopted. In addition, a Chinese observer describing a people who counted by the pasture may simply not have recognised a twelve-year run as a calendar. Turkic Atlas treats the rest of that question under the ritual year.

The Kutadgu Bilig of 1069–1070 does not name the animal years. Its preface lists the twelve signs of the zodiac by Turkic names. It begins with kozı, the Ram, as the star of spring, and ud, the Bull.^[14] They are the signs of the zodiac, not the years of the cycle.

Back-reckoning

Each year of the khaganates can be named by its animal. The two years the inscriptions date themselves are attested. All the others are calculated from those two. The calculation is a back-reckoning and not a record.

References

^ a b c Kül Tegin inscription
^ Alimov 2017, p. 132–133
^ a b c Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
^ Elmira 2013, p. 229–230
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 209
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 204–205
^ Barthold 2004, p. 31
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 344–345
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 208–209
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui)
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 207–209
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 138–141

Sources

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Paul Pelliot, Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale (1929)
V. V. Barthold, Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Dersleri (Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Hakkında Dersler) (2004)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)
Rysbek Alimov, Talas Yazıtları: İşaret Kadrosuyla İlgili Bazı Düzeltmeler (2. Talas Yazıtı Örneğinde) (2017)
Kaljanova, Elmira, Eski Türk Yazıtları ve Kazakçadaki Ortak Kelimeler (2013)