Manichaeism

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

Manichaeism came to the Göktürk world with the Sogdians. It had been established in Sogdiana at least since the fifth or sixth century, like Nestorian Christianity. It afterwards spread to all the Sogdian émigré communities. Buddhism in general, by contrast, reached only the émigrés.^[1] The ties between Sogdians and Manichaeism were so strong that Manichaeism seemed at times to be the official religion of the hu in China.^[1] A later study finds borrowings from Manichaean Sogdian of the seventh or eighth century in the Sogdian layer of Göktürk Buddhist vocabulary. The Turkic names of the five commandments of the elect follow Iranian models. Four of them are formed from a noun in the instrumental and ärmäk, “to be”, which renders the abstract ending of the Sogdian name. For example, agız arıgın ärmäk, literally “to be with purity of the mouth”, answers Sogdian kūče-zpartyā, “purity of the mouth”.^[2]

Conversion of the Uyghurs

The trilingual inscription of Karabalghasun was composed in the first quarter of the ninth century for an Uyghur khan whose identity is disputed. Its well-preserved Chinese text relates the conversion of the khan to Manichaeism at Luoyang in 762 and 763. A survey of the early twentieth century argues that the Uyghurs did not receive Manichaeism directly from Sogdiana. They probably received it in 762, on the khan’s campaign in China, where he met Sogdians. The Karabalghasun monument and a small Sogdian inscription on the same stone show the link.^[3] Another account argues that the share of the Sogdian traders in keeping Manichaeism alive among the Uyghurs was larger than that of the four priests whom the khan brought from Luoyang, and that a Sogdian text from the Orkhon region shows Sogdian missionaries teaching the Uyghurs.^[4] A third account has the khan come home with four priests, so that the religion became official in the Turkic country until Tun Baga Tarkan removed him in 779.^[5] The same account puts the adoption in 762 as a state religion, says that the priests were Iranians, and adds that a temple was built at Karabalghasun and that the khagan promoted temples in China.^[6] Another source gives the year 763 for the khan’s step.^[7] The conversion was a desperate but fruitful move by communities at bay.^[1] After the revolt of An Lushan the Tang had turned on the hu. The Uyghurs, who had saved the dynasty, were the one military power in northern China it could not refuse. Manichaean Sogdians won from the khan the protection of their coreligionists and compatriots. The Chinese ended their xenophobic policy at once. From then until their power faded in 840 the Uyghurs were the protectors of the hu in China. As soon as they fell, the persecutions resumed. Why the khan agreed, the same literature answers from the history of Sogdian trade. The Uyghurs, masters of the steppe only since 744, needed a model on which to organise a new power. Besides the Chinese model, which was too burdened with subservience, the only one available was the Sogdian. It was anchored at the old Göktürk court and along the whole frontier. The conversion was the first stage of a fusion. In it the Uyghurs took the Sogdians’ religion, their script, much of their vocabulary and their urban pattern.^[8] A Turfan text names nigošaklar, the Manichaean hearers, and sartlar, probably Sogdian merchants who were Manichaeans too, among the Uyghurs of the khan’s time.^[9] The Uyghurs are the first Turkic people known to have taken up, as a people, a religion with a moral code in place of shamanism. For the eighth century and earlier nothing is known of a whole Turkic people accepting Buddhism or Christianity.^[3] A further account says that the religion hardly reached the people. Its asceticism did not suit a life on the move, and it is unlikely to have spread beyond the khagan, his following and a small educated circle. Tang travellers still saw a nomad life at Turfan two centuries later.^[10] Manichaean, Christian and Muslim missionaries among the Turks had to take the Persian word ferişte for “angel”, since the older Turkic religion had no word for it. Manichaeans and Buddhists also took burhan and nom.^[11] The Chinese catechism translated in 731 lists five grades of the Manichaean church: twelve teachers, seventy-two bishops, three hundred and sixty elders, the pure ones and the hearers. The Chinese inscription of Karabalghasun uses the word for the third of them.^[12]

The fusion had its reverses. Between 779 and 789 a party at court took power under Dun Mohe. The party was loyal to Göktürk tradition and hostile to foreign importations.^[13] Dun Mohe killed the khan Mouyu, his kin and confidants, and the Sogdians who had tried to entice him into invading China. As the Jiu Tangshu tells it, that was two thousand people in all.^[13] Thereafter the position of the Sogdians and of Manichaeism recovered. Both were part of the great trade of horses for silk between the Uyghur and Chinese empires until the Kirghiz destroyed the khaganate in 840. The Uyghur article covers the reigns and the sources.

Manichaeans in the west

The Uyghur khan remained the protector of the Manichaeans beyond his own borders. From 807 Manichaeans served as Uyghur envoys and traded at Chang’an.^[14] The Xin Tang Shu records the law of their food. They ate late in the day, drank water, ate strong-tasting vegetables and refused milk.^[15] Ibn al-Nadim reports that about five hundred Manichaeans gathered at Samarkand. The ruler of Khurasan wished to kill them. The king of China, whom Ibn al-Nadim supposes to have been the lord of the Tughuzghuz, sent word that there were more Muslims in his country than people of his faith in Khurasan. He swore to slaughter them and destroy their mosques if one Manichaean was killed. The ruler of Khurasan then left the Manichaeans alone on payment of tribute.^[16] The ninth-century writer Jāḥiẓ says that the Tughuzghuz had been brave before they took up Manichaeism and had often beaten the Karluks with a few men. After it, he says, they began to lose. The remark may refer to the Uyghurs in Mongolia. Another interpretation sees in it the Karluks and Eastern Turkestan and calls the remark exaggerated, since the Uyghur khan still defended his co-religionists in China and at the Samanid court by threat of force.^[17]

The sources for the first and second khaganates contain no Manichaean text and no Göktürk professing the religion. What is recorded is Uyghur and Sogdian.

Manichaean finds at Turfan

The Manichaean remains of the oasis of Turfan come from ruin group K at Qocho.^[18] The first miniature of Manichaean deities, torn in three pieces, was found there in November 1902.^[19] Treasure-seekers tore the wall painting of a high priest in a white robe, with rows of smaller figures beside him, from its wall at the moment the Berlin excavators arrived. The excavators bought it from them.^[20] The excavators read the rows as elect men in the white cap and surplice, elect women in high white caps and lay hearers in everyday dress. The names beside the men are written in late Sogdian script, one of them in red Manichaean letters.^[21]

The priest’s head is circled by a red disc with a yellow crescent. The describer took the disc and crescent for sun and moon and asked whether it showed Mani himself. A second high-priest painting of the same kind faced it on the same wall, which makes that identification doubtful.^[20]

From the passage beside the library room came votive banners of cloth woven of ramie and linen fibre. They are triangular at the top and weighted at the foot, in form and technique like the Buddhist temple banners.^[22] One shows an elect woman in the white robe with a book in her hands. Its name tablet is read bosus täŋrim körki ol, “this is the likeness of the princess Bosus”. Another shows an elect man in the white robe with a young man kneeling beside him, under a seated white-robed figure who raises his hand to teach.^[22] The excavators suppose that such banners were made in large numbers, perhaps by the family of a person who entered the community of the elect. They suppose too that the Manichaean halls were hung with them as Buddhist temples were.^[22]

A leaf of a Manichaean book from the vaulted room shows scribes kneeling at desks on a blue ground, with a Turkic text in late Sogdian script. The style of painting is traced to a late antique school and seen as a source of the later Persian miniature.^[23] At Bezeklik, a Buddhist chamber had overbuilt cave 25. The excavators took the cave for Manichaean because of a drawing of Mount Meru in a rear passage and a small rough replica of a Manichaean picture.^[24]

Runiform script, close to that of the Orkhon texts, was also widely used to record Middle Persian and Parthian texts.^[25] All these fragments are Manichaean in content.^[25]

References

^ a b c de la Vaissière 2005a
^ Özertural 2013, p. 96
^ a b Barthold 2004, p. 47–48
^ İzgi 1989, p. 19–20
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 133
^ Ögel 1984, p. 349–350
^ İzgi 1989, p. 62
^ Özertural 2013, p. 94
^ Özertural 2013, p. 93
^ Ögel 1984, p. 350
^ Barthold 2004, p. 53
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 248–249
^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 308
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Mackerras 1972, p. 109
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 314
^ Barthold 2004, p. 50–52
^ von Le Coq 1913, p. 8–9
^ Grünwedel 1920, i 79
^ a b von Le Coq 1913, p. 9, pl. 1
^ von Le Coq 1913, pl. 1
^ a b c von Le Coq 1913, pl. 3
^ von Le Coq 1913, pl. 5
^ Grünwedel 1920, i 67, 77
^ a b Zieme 2000, p. 377

Sources

Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Zekine Özertural, Mitteliranische Einflüsse auf die manichäisch-türkische Wortbildung (2013)
Albert von Le Coq, Chotscho. Facsimile-Wiedergaben der wichtigeren Funde der ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan (1913)
Albert Grünwedel, Alt-Kutscha. Archäologische und religionsgeschichtliche Forschungen an Tempera-Gemälden aus buddhistischen Höhlen der ersten acht Jahrhunderte nach Christi Geburt (1920)
V. V. Barthold, Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Dersleri (Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Hakkında Dersler) (2004)
Özkan İzgi, Çin Elçisi Wang Yen-te'nin Uygur Seyahatnamesi (1989)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
Paul Pelliot, Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale (1929)
Peter Zieme, Runik Harfli Birkaç Pasaj Üzerine Kimi Yorum Önerileri (2000)