Erklig

Erklig is the lord of the dead in the popular account of Old Turkic religion. That account has the order of the evidence the wrong way round. The word is first an adjective. The figure is first a translation. The familiar ruler of an underworld is last of the three and the youngest.

The word

Ärklig is formed on ärk, power or authority. It means possessed of power, authoritative, in command.^[1] It is an ordinary word of the older language. It is applied to men and to conditions before it is applied to anything divine. In the Old Uyghur texts it is a plain adjective, “mighty”, said of a divine teacher, of the strongest of the stars and of a minister and counsellor.^[2] A divine name built on it is therefore a title before it is a name: the Powerful One, the One Who Has Authority.

That matters for the interpretation of any single occurrence. A text that says ärklig has not necessarily named a god. In each case the question is whether the word is doing the work of an adjective or of a name.

Absence from the Göktürk corpus

No runiform inscription of the Göktürk khaganates names a lord of the dead.^[3] The Kül Tegin inscription speaks at length of death. It mentions a brother dead at forty-seven, a father who flew away and a khan who grieved until his seeing eyes did not see.^[3] It names no power that receives the dead and no place they go to.^[3] Instead it gives Heaven apportioning the span, and a set of honorific verbs in which the dead go upward.^[3] It has been noted that the verb “to fly away” stands only for persons of the highest rank, the khan and Kül Tegin. Except in Kül Tegin’s case, the speaker is always the son or the younger brother. The same analysis takes the line “You have flown away; with Heaven you will be as among the living” to show that a ruler’s immortality lies with Heaven.^[4]

The Irk Bitig of the ninth century is the text in which an Old Turkic underworld figure is usually sought. It does not contain one.^[5] The word ärklig stands there twice, both times as an adjective. In one omen a hunter who has fallen says that in heaven is a mighty god. In another omen a mighty word goes out where the army is.^[5] Judged by the text itself, the book supports the interpretation taken here. The word is a qualifier before it is anything else, and no ruler of the dead stands behind it.^[5]

A Yenisei epitaph, E28, has been understood to speak of ärklig as a power that parted the dead from their brothers: “We were four brothers; the god of the Underworld separated us”. Editors differ on the first words of the line. The Yenisei stones are also not monuments of the Göktürk khaganates.^[6] The line, counted as Altın Köl I, has been called almost certain evidence of Erlik as a god of death. That would carry the figure back by about a thousand years.^[7] The same author takes “my name is Umay Beg” in another line as a man’s name.^[8]

The Buddhist and Manichaean figure

Ärklig Qan as the ruler of the dead belongs to the Old Uyghur religious literature. There he stands for the Indian Yama, judge of the dead, in texts translated for Buddhist and Manichaean communities of the Tarim oases.^[9] The figure arrives there with the doctrine that needs him. That doctrine has a judgement after death, a hell in which it is carried out, and an officer who presides. In the Old Uyghur Suvarṇaprabhāsa, ärklig xan opens a letter and reads what is written in it. The title is rendered “the ruler of the Underworld”.^[10]

This is the decisive point for the chronology. A lord of the dead is at home in a religion with a hell. The Göktürk material has neither. The afterlife vocabulary usually given as Old Turkic, such as uçmak for the paradise the soul flies to and tamu for the place of purification, belongs to the same later stratum. It also belongs to the Islamic-period lexicon that grew out of it.

In the Manichaean texts the same title belongs to the Just Judge, who sits in heaven and not in hell. This has been taken as a sign that the name was a local god’s before either religion came.^[11] One Old Uyghur text, a translation from Chinese, calls the planet Venus ärklig. The rising of the morning star has been offered as the origin of a lord of the dead. The name has that use in this one text alone.^[12] Another author says that Venus is called erklik, “the strong”, in Old Turkic, as the warrior who kills the stars at daybreak. The same author holds that this figure later became Erlik Khan, the lord of the dead. This author names an inscription from Olkhon for the Venus name and gives no line.^[7]

Erlik in the modern ethnography

Erlik as lord of the underworld is the dark counterpart of a creator and the father of disease and of the spirits that take men. This figure is drawn from the ethnography of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the Altai and Siberia, recorded from the eighteenth century onward.^[13]^[14]^[15]^[16] The figure was consolidated in the twentieth-century compendia on which most popular accounts depend.^[17] He appears there beside Ülgen, Kayra and the tiered heavens. None of these is in the inscriptions or in the Chinese accounts of the Göktürks.^[18]^[19]

In the Altaian creation story as Radloff recorded it, the creator sends a being down into the water for earth. In some versions this being is Erlik. He keeps part of the earth in his mouth and spits it out as mountains and bogs.^[20] In that account the creator names the being Erlik in anger and banishes him from the realm of light. Erlik, with the creator’s leave, builds himself a heaven. The creator sends the hero Mandyshire, whose lance shatters it. The creator then banishes Erlik to the deepest layer of the earth.^[21] Shamans from the Chulyshman invoked him in verse as a rich lord with shining hair and a black face. His cup is a man’s breast, and his sword is of green iron. He has silver thrones at the door of his iron-roofed yurt and nine saddled bulls.^[22]^[23] Among the Lebed Tatars the dark powers go back to Kara Khan, the Black Khan. He fell away from the father and preferred the dark dwellings under the earth to the bright dwellings of the gods. His son is called Arlik, and Arlik’s sons are Ulap and Kölök.^[24]

Two different questions remain open. The first is whether the Altaian Erlik continues the Ärklig Qan of the Uyghur texts. The second is whether the Uyghur figure continues something older that the inscriptions had no occasion to write down. The sources answer neither. What can be said is the order in which the evidence appears: an adjective in the old language, a translated judge of the dead in the Uyghur period and a lord of the underworld in the modern record.

References

^ Vámbéry 1879, p. 243
^ Erdal 2004, p. 284,413,414
^ a b c d Kül Tegin inscription
^ Roux 1994, p. 214
^ a b c Tekin 1993
^ Erdal 2004, p. 160; 87; Wilkens 2024, p. 160; 87
^ a b Roux 1994, p. 104
^ Roux 1994, p. 113
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 86–87
^ Erdal 2004, p. 201
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 87
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 87–88; 80; Demirlikan 2022, p. 87–88; 80
^ Demirlikan 2022, p. 76–77, 80–81
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 3–5,10–12
^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 30–31
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 316,487
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 316,374–380,411,487
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 3–6
^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 30
^ Demirlikan 2022, p. 77
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 4–5
^ Radloff 1884, p. 341–342
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 10
^ Radloff 1884, p. 362

Sources

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Talat Tekin, Irk Bitig: The Book of Omens (1993)
Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Jens Wilkens (trans. Celalettin Bulut Bostan), Uygur Budizmi ve Manihaizm ile Yerel Dinlerin Etkisi: Dinî Terminoloji Örneği (2024)
Yasemin Usta Demirlikan, Türk Mitolojisinin Yer Altı Kötücüsü „Erlik Han“ (2022)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Erster Band (1884)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Zweiter Band (1893 (zweite Ausgabe))
Vasilii Ivanovich Verbitskii, Алтайские инородцы (Altai Foreigners) (1893)
Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
Ármin Vámbéry, Die primitive Cultur des turko-tatarischen Volkes, auf Grund sprachlicher Forschungen erörtert (1879)
Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)