Ötüken

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

Ötüken is the place from which the steppe was ruled. The Göktürk inscriptions of the eighth century call it sacred. They say that there is no better place than the Ötüken forest. They tell the Göktürk people that the realm will have no trouble and will last for ever, so long as the khan sits there and the caravans go out.^[1] It was not a city. The word yış means a forested upland. Ötüken was a wooded mountain country in the heart of what is now central Mongolia, in the region of the Orkhon valley and the Khangai. The Xiongnu, the Rouran, the Göktürks and the Uyghurs each in turn kept the seat of their power there. Bumin entered it in the spring of 552 and took the title of khan there. Every claim to rule the eastern steppe for the next three centuries was a claim to Ötüken.

Location

The inscriptions never describe the place. They assume it. Modern scholarship puts it in the Khangai mountains west and south of the Orkhon, most likely in the present province of Kharkhorin in central Mongolia, at the upper Orkhon. The river itself, one of the longest in the region, runs north through a valley of waterfalls and volcanic plateaus. Its name is understood as Turkic or, “middle”, with a Mongolian second element. The Göktürk monuments of the eighth century stand in this valley, and so did the Uyghur capital that succeeded them.

The sixth-century Chinese material knows the place by another name. The Zhou Shu’s account of the Göktürks gives the khan’s habitual seat as a mountain it writes 都斤, Dujin: 可汗恆處於都斤山，牙帳東開，蓋敬日之所出也. The passage reads: the khan always dwells at Mount Dujin, and his tent opens to the east, out of reverence for the quarter where the sun rises.^[2] That mountain is Ötüken. The identification is the standard one in the literature. The earliest text to write the name Ötüken in its Turkic form is the Göktürks’ own, two centuries later.

The first character of 於都斤 may be part of the name, so that the mountain of the Zhou Shu is Yudujin, and 都斤 is a clipped form that first appears in the Sui Shu.^[3] The Tang histories write the same name as 鬱督軍, and Uyghur times write it as 烏德鞬.^[3] Vilhelm Thomsen took Ötüken for a proper name, because the Göktürks use it only for their homeland and for the seat of the khan. He read Dujin and 烏德鞬 as forms of the same word.^[4] The meaning of the name is dark. Radloff rendered it “the beloved mountain forest”, and Thomsen asked whether it belongs with a Turkic word for “sharp”.^[4]

The Chinese call the khan’s camp 牙帳, yazhang. The Xin Tang Shu places the court at Dujin, with a golden wolf-head standard at the gate of the tent.^[5] The first character means “tooth”. One account sees in it the commander’s banner, so that the yazhang is the tent of the standard.^[6] Under the ordu, Turkic Atlas sets out the interpretations.

Before the Göktürks

Ötüken was old when Bumin came to it. The Xiongnu and the Xianbei had had their headquarters in the Orkhon country. The Rouran used it as their real seat of power while their khan kept a walled capital elsewhere. Bumin did not take that capital, Mumocheng, which had double walls, a guard and a Chinese adviser. He went to Ötüken. The choice looks like a deliberate return to the traditions of the steppe. The Rouran khan had kept a walled town in the Chinese manner, and that was the thing the steppe most distrusted.

It was not a tactical choice. The Altai, the Ashina’s own country a thousand kilometres to the west, offered fertile valleys ringed by mountains. The Orkhon offered no such wall. What it offered was reach. From the Orkhon a khan could put an army on the frontiers of China, Korea and the Khitan within weeks. The Khingan range to the east and the Yellow River to the south screened the seat itself from any invading army. It also offered what the Altai did not: the place itself, and what the steppe believed about it.

In the inscriptions

The Kül Tegin inscription speaks of Ötüken four times. Each time it speaks in the same voice, as the condition of rule.

If the Türk khan sits in the Ötüken forest, there is no trouble in the realm.^[1]

Kül Tegin inscription

There was nothing at all better than the Ötüken forest. The place from which to hold the realm was the Ötüken forest.^[1]

Kül Tegin inscription

If you stay in the Ötüken country and send out caravans and trains, you will have no trouble whatever. If you stay in the Ötüken forest, you will live holding the realm for ever.^[1]

Kül Tegin inscription

The third passage may be a plan for a managed economy, in which the Göktürks keep their foreign trade to caravans sent out from Ötüken.^[7]

The fourth passage, on the east face, addresses “the people of the sacred Ötüken forest” who left it, went east and went west. Their blood ran like water and their bones lay like mountains in the places they went.^[1] The Bilge Khan inscription contains the same passages, since the historical sections of the two monuments are nearly identical.^[8]

Read together, the passages make a political argument, not a description. The Göktürk state was lost when its people left Ötüken and put themselves near the Chinese. It was restored when they came back. Ötüken is the centre from which a khan holds the four quarters. A khan who is not there is not holding anything. The inscriptions also set it apart in another way. The epithet in E23 is ıduq, “sacred, holy”, the word the same text applies to the Earth-and-Water. Ötüken is sacred ground in the sense that the land and waters of the Göktürks are sacred.^[1] In Mongolian the word ötüken is reported to mean the earth goddess.^[9] The Manichaean Turkic texts of Turfan speak of the qut of the el ötükän, the Ötükän of the land, and the Mongols later called the goddess of the earth Atugan.^[10] It is therefore asked whether Ötüken was a goddess of the land as well as a mountain.^[10] The sanctity may have belonged first to a single summit and passed from there to the whole forest.^[11]

Ötüken and Kut

The epithet has been glossed as kutlu, “blessed, possessed of Kut”. On that gloss rests an account in which Ötüken was the one place on earth from which Kut flowed in abundance. Whoever held Ötüken held the fortune that made a ruler. Whoever had that fortune was drawn to take Ötüken. The forest became the prize of every ambitious ruler of the steppe.^[12] The transcription does not read kutlu there, and the difference matters. It is the difference between Ötüken being sacred ground and Ötüken being a source of royal fortune. In the inscriptions Kut is said of the ruler, not of the place. Turkic Atlas sets this out under Kut. Under the inscription, Turkic Atlas follows the same reading of the text.

A larger claim makes Ötüken the axis mundi of the old Turkic and probably the old Mongol world. In this claim, Ötüken is the place where sky, earth and underworld were joined and from which the four quarters were divided. That too is a modern interpretation, and a sound one. The inscriptions do not say it, and nothing in them mentions a world-tree. What the inscriptions do say is simpler. A ruler who did not hold Ötüken did not hold the realm, and every ruler of the steppe from the Rouran to the Uyghurs acted as if that were so.

Under the Göktürks

Bumin entered Ötüken in April 552 and took the title of khan.^[2] From then until 630 the eastern khan’s seat was there. The khaganate’s history can be told as the history of who held it. Ötüken was the place of the assembly. When Taspar died in 581, the nobility gathered in Ötüken to choose his successor. The quarrel that followed was fought over which prince would sit there.^[13] In September 585 the western army marched on it, and Ishbara fled to China before it arrived. In 603 Yami marched into it to take the title, with Chinese troops beside his own. That last march can be seen as the breaking of a taboo. Ötüken was sacred land, and no army had entered it. The sources do not state the taboo.

The name was still in use two centuries after the last khaganate fell. Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī’s dictionary of the 1070s lists it as an entry: ötükän, “name of a place in the deserts of Tatār near Uighur”.^[14] A lexicographer in Baghdad placed it in the eastern steppe by the peoples who then held it. His entry is the latest witness that the word was still current.

The Zhou Shu adds one thing the inscriptions do not. Every year, it reports, the khan led the nobles to sacrifice at the cave of the ancestors. In the middle of the fifth month they gathered at a river the Chinese write 他人水 to sacrifice to the spirit of heaven. Some five hundred li from Dujin stood a bare high mountain called 勃登凝黎, which the Chinese gloss as the spirit of the earth. The direction is westward in the version given by the Bei Shi and the Tongdian.^[2] One modern account has the khan and the yabgu, with all the nobles of the Ashina, meet at the cave in the fifth month, some two hundred and fifty kilometres east of the seat.^[12] The Zhou Shu has none of those details. It names no month and no place for the cave. The five hundred li belong to the mountain of the earth-spirit.^[2] The two Chinese versions differ by one character. The Zhou Shu and the Pien-i-tien write 四, “four”, where the Bei Shi and the Tongdian write 西, “west”. One text gives four or five hundred li without a direction. The other gives five hundred li westward.^[15] No text sends anyone east. The name of the mountain, 勃登凝黎, is understood as a Turkic name. Its second part is täŋri, which means “god” as well as “sky”, and the Chinese gloss “spirit of the earth” shows that it means “god” here. The first part is unexplained.^[16]

Where the cave was is unknown. The inscriptions never mention it. What was done there beyond the sacrifice, the Chinese did not learn. Under the cave of the ancestors, Turkic Atlas sets out the interpretations. The eastern one is the likeliest. The cave was, most likely, a real place. The Chinese also report the wolf legend, which the inscriptions likewise omit, and nobody takes that for a Chinese invention.

Between the khaganates

The fifty years after 630 are the test of what the inscriptions claim. The eastern khaganate was gone, the Ashina were at Chang’an, and the seat stood open. It did not stay open. In 628 the Tang court had given Yinan of the Xueyantuo the title of khan. He pitched his tent-city at the foot of the mountain the Chinese write Yudujin, which is Ötüken, 6,000 li north-west of the capital.^[17] Six great Tiele tribes came in to him there.^[18]

Yinan did not keep the seat. In 630, when Ilig had fallen and the northern frontier stood empty, Yinan moved east to the Tula. He set his seat in the old country of the Xiongnu.^[18] The Xueyantuo khaganate had begun at Ötüken. It governed from elsewhere for the next sixteen years, and the Tang destroyed it in 646.^[19] The inscriptions, carved a century later, do not mention the Xueyantuo at all. They say only that the people left the sacred forest and that their bones lay like mountains in the places they went.^[1] Both accounts assume the same rule, and neither argues it: the seat is held or the realm is not.

Later history

The Second Khaganate restored the seat and carved the inscriptions there. The Uyghurs, who took it in 744, named Ötüken as the centre of their realm in the inscription of their founder and built their capital on the Orkhon.^[11] The Mongols, six centuries after Bumin, built Karakorum in the same valley. The place outlasted every polity that held it. The belief that the steppe was ruled from there outlasted the Göktürks who had first written it down.

The Tariat inscription of Bayanchur Khan names the rivers of his own land: the Selenga of the eight branches, the Orkhon, the Tuγla, the Sebin, the Teledü, the Karağa and the Burgu.^[20] He says that he moves camp along this land and water.^[20] One reading of line 5 has him call the Ötüken region his “inner woodland”.^[21] The key word of that line is read in five ways.^[22] The older inscriptions already speak of the Ötüken forest, ötüken yış.^[23]

The name outlived the khaganates in a title. The Kutadgu Bilig, written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, twice cites the counsel of the ötüken begi, the beg of Ötüken.^[24] The book says nothing of the place itself.^[25]

References

^ a b c d e f g Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b c d Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b Pelliot 1929, p. 212–218
^ a b Thomsen 1993, p. 179
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
^ Ögel 2000, p. 25–28
^ Ögel 2000, p. 365–367
^ Bilge Khan inscription
^ von Gabain 1943, p. 687
^ a b Pelliot 1929, p. 217–219
^ a b Roux 1994, p. 126
^ a b Yavuz 2025
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 215–216
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 473
^ a b Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 474
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 478
^ a b Şen 2008, p. 102–103
^ Şen 2008, p. 104–106
^ Şen 2008, p. 100–101
^ Şen 2008, p. 106
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 1962, 2682
^ Kutadgu Bilig

Sources

Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
Kül Tegin inscription
Bilge Khan inscription
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)
Kutadgu Bilig
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
Annemarie von Gabain, Köktürklerin Tarihine Bir Bakış (1943)
Paul Pelliot, Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale (1929)
Vilhelm Thomsen, Çözülmüş Orhon Yazıtları (mit: Orhon ve Yenisey Yazıtlarının Çözümü: İlk Bildiri) (1993)
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)
Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)
Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)
Serkan Şen, Taryat yazıtının batı yüzünde mGLi ve mGL işaretleriyle yazılan sözcük nasıl okunup anlaşılmalı? (2008)