Yer-Su Spirits

Iduk Yer-Sub is the sacred Earth-and-Water. It names the land and its waters together, as a single thing, and names it as a power.^[1] It stands in the Kül Tegin inscription in the same sentence as the Tengri of the Göktürks, and it speaks in the same breath.^[2]^[3]^[4]

The sacred sense

The sentence is the turning point of the inscription’s account of the fifty years under the Tang. China meant to kill the Göktürk people and leave them without seed.^[2] Then the Göktürk Heaven above and the sacred Earth-and-Water of the Göktürks said: let the Göktürk people not perish, let them be a people again. Heaven then took İltiriš Khan and his katun and raised them up.^[2] Earth-and-Water is one of two subjects of the verb. The ethnonym is attached to it as it is attached to Heaven.^[2]

Whether that makes it a second deity is the open question. It never acts alone. It is never invoked by itself. It receives no rite that any source describes. In the Kül Tegin inscription it speaks once, beside Heaven, about the survival of the people whose land it is.^[2] In the Tonyukuk inscription it acts a second time, and again not alone. Heaven, Umay and the sacred Earth-and-Water together helped the Göktürks, as it seems, when the march against the enemy had been hard, teŋri umay ıduk yer sub basa berti erinč (line 38).^[5]^[6]^[7] An older interpretation has the three powers overwhelm the enemy, who had not heeded the warning. The inscription of Bilge Khan gives a third place. The Nine Oguz had betrayed the khan who fed them. Then, the line says, Heaven above, the sacred Earth-and-Water and the kut of the khan’s uncle did not approve, as it seems. The Nine Oguz left their land and water and went to China.^[8] Tekin’s rendering makes the three withhold their approval of the betrayal. A second interpretation turns the line against the uncle. In it, Heaven and the Earth-and-Water did not consent to his rule, and the Nine Oguz left their land and water for that reason.^[9] The narrower interpretation is the likelier one. In it, Earth-and-Water is the land under a sacred aspect, and therefore something a people can be deprived of. Some scholars take the sacred Earth-and-Water for a single goddess and not for the spirits of the land in the plural, and see an ambiguity in the plural of the German translation.^[10] Another study holds it to be a deity of the people more than of the realm, because it acts only with Tengri and never without him.^[11]

The word iduk

Iduk is the adjective. It is not reserved for the Earth-and-Water.^[2] Ötüken carries it too: ıduk ötüken yış, the sacred Ötüken forest, in the passage where the people are told that they went away from it and came to grief.^[2] So does a spring. The Karluk were fought at tamag ıduk baş, the sacred head of Tamag, and there the word is part of a place name.^[2]

A word that attaches to a forest, a spring and the land at large is a word about places rather than about gods. It marks a place as set apart and as belonging to a power. The Göktürk corpus uses it of the ground under the state rather than of the sky over it. Several interpretations of the word are on offer. One derives ıduk from the verb ıd-, to send, and takes the sacred Earth-and-Water as the land that Tengri sent and gave to the Göktürks.^[12] A second translates iduk as “released”, in the way the Mongols set territories free when they make them protected ground. It rejects both an indivisible divinity and a single place, the Ötüken forest with the source of the Tamir.^[11]

The inscriptions say more of Ötüken. When the khan sits in the Ötüken forest, they say, the realm knows no want, and there is no better place than the Ötüken forest. The Uyghurs say that the land of Ötüken is theirs and that they set up their throne in the middle of Ötüken. They also use the phrases ötüken yış başı and ıduk baş.^[13] One study holds that the holiness was first confined to one summit and was carried from there to the whole forest.^[13] The Manichaean Turkic texts from Turfan speak of the kut of the Ötüken of the land. The Mongols later called the earth goddess Etügen. Some scholars therefore ask whether Ötüken was a goddess of the land as well as a mountain.^[14]

Yer sub is a binome. Two complementary words name one thing together, here “country; the earth, the material world” (yer suv in the Uyghur texts). The two keep their own case endings, as the accusative yerig suvug of an Uyghur text shows.^[15] The Mongol pair ǧajar usu is held to carry the same sacred sense that yer sub has in Old Turkic. Bactrian, Khotanese and Mongolian have pairs that mean irrigated land and landed property.^[16] In the Altai of the nineteenth century the pair survived as jer-su, “earth-water”. The Teleuts said that from the oldest times they had worshipped their land-and-water and their sky.^[17] The collector of the Altaian cosmology described jer-su as a spirit company of seventeen khans who have their seats on the snow peaks at the sources of the rivers.^[18] An older view held that the pairing of land and water may be an Iranian phrase, since Persian uses the same two words for a district. It compared the demand for earth and water that Xerxes made of the Greeks.^[17]

In the Old Uyghur Buddhist texts yer suv is a plain word for the world, beside yertinčü. Its spiritual sense is gone.^[19] In the same books Yer Tengri, “Earth God”, went on being written. There it is the earth spirit of the Buddhist religion and not the holy land of the Göktürks, and the eight Yer Tengri belong to the Uyghur age and to Buddhist influence.^[20] In modern Kyrgyz the pair jer-suu means land fit for fields and herds, and jer-suu tayımak means to ask the land and water for help with an offering. Some scholars take this for the sense the pair had under the Göktürks.^[20] Libations to the Earth-and-Water before drinking are described in a modern account as a custom under strict rules. The drink went first to the holy place and then to the figures in the tent. The account names no source, and the travellers it cites nearby are Carpini and Rubruck of the thirteenth century.^[21]

The political sense

Beside the sacred sense the inscriptions use yer sub plainly. There it is political. Twice Bilge Khan justifies a campaign in the same formula. The land and water our forefathers held, he says, should not be left without a master. Therefore, he says, we set the Az and the Kirghiz in order.^[2]^[12] Of the Kirghiz country he says: let the land and water of the Kögmen not be left without a master. We ordered them and came home.^[2]

Idisiz, without an idi, without an owner, is the key word.^[2] Land in this idiom is not empty ground. It is a holding that requires a holder, and conquest is described as the supply of one. The claim is that a country left masterless is in an unnatural state and that the khan corrects it. This is a theological argument doing the work of a strategic one.

The earth-spirit of the Chinese accounts

The Zhou Shu, having described the mid-fifth-month sacrifice to the spirit of heaven, turns immediately to a mountain. Four or five hundred li from the khan’s seat rose a high mountain standing out alone, with neither grass nor tree on it.^[22] The Göktürks called it 勃登凝黎. The Chinese glossed the name as the spirit of the earth, 地神.^[22] The Bei Shi repeats the wording. It is not a second witness.^[23]

Two limits hold here. The Chinese transcription has not been read back to a Turkic phrase that anyone can demonstrate. The equation of that mountain with the Earth-and-Water of the inscriptions is a modern inference rather than a statement of either source. The Chinese text records a named bare mountain regarded as an earth-power, a hundred and fifty years before the inscriptions. The inscriptions record a land-and-water that speaks. Both are about the ground, and neither text mentions the other’s version of it.

References

^ Kül Tegin inscription; Uçar 2020, p. 28
^ a b c d e f g h i j k Kül Tegin inscription
^ Ögel 2000, p. 113, 115
^ Ögel 1995, p. 322–325
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1994, p. 17, 45–46
^ Ögel 2000, p. 120
^ Bilge Khan inscription; Tekin o. J., p. 74–75
^ Ögel 2000, p. 119
^ Barthold 2004, p. 17
^ a b Roux 1994, p. 111
^ a b Ögel 2000, p. 115
^ a b Roux 1994, p. 126
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 217–219
^ Erdal 2004, p. 533; 82–83; Wilkens 2024, p. 533; 82–83
^ Erdal 2004, p. 533
^ a b Holmberg 1927, p. 462
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 7
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 82–83
^ a b Ögel 2000, p. 121
^ Ögel 1978, p. 160, 173
^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99

Sources

Kül Tegin inscription
Tonyukuk inscription
Bilge Khan inscription
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
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)
Hüseyin Uçar, Bir Kültün Özellikleri: Türklerde Su Kültü (2020)
Jens Wilkens (trans. Celalettin Bulut Bostan), Uygur Budizmi ve Manihaizm ile Yerel Dinlerin Etkisi: Dinî Terminoloji Örneği (2024)
Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Zweiter Band (1893 (zweite Ausgabe))
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
V. V. Barthold, Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Dersleri (Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Hakkında Dersler) (2004)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş IV: Türklerde yemek kültürü (1978)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş II: Türklerde ziraat kültürü (2000)
Paul Pelliot, Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale (1929)
Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)
Talât Tekin, Orhon Yazıtları. Kül Tigin, Bilge Kağan, Tunyukuk (o. J.)
Talât Tekin, Tunyukuk Yazıtı (1994)