The Göktürk inscriptions call one mountain land sacred, ıduk ötüken yış, the sacred Ötüken forest.[1] They name three places as sacred heads, baş. They mention other forested uplands without any epithet.[2] The Chinese histories add a bare mountain. The Göktürks called it by a name that the Chinese write 勃登凝黎 and gloss as the spirit of the earth.[3] None of these sources describes a rite on a mountain of the khaganates.[4] The detailed picture, in which a mountain is a person, an owner or an ancestor, comes from reports of the Altaians and their neighbours. These reports begin in the eighteenth century.[5]

PLACES OF THE LAND IN THE RUNIFORM TEXTS yışforested upland ıduk ötüken yış altun yışkögmen yışkadırkan yış başhead: summit or source tamag ıduk başıduk başsüngüz başkan ıduk baş yer subland and water ıduk yer sub kögmen yer subyer sub idisiz Red: the epithet ıduk, sacred, stands before one forested upland, three heads and the pair. Modern diagram of the occurrences. Altun, Kögmen and Kadırkan are named as routes and limits.
The words for places of the land in the runiform texts of the Göktürks and the Uyghurs. Modern diagram: the epithet *ıduk* stands before only four of them.

Before the Göktürks

Two mountains stand in the tradition of the Xiongnu. The Shiji and the Han Shu say that the Han general Huo Qubing took the golden figure with which the king of Xiutu sacrificed to Heaven.[6][7] A commentary on the Shiji adds that the Xiongnu place of sacrifice to Heaven had lain at the foot of Mount Ganquan until Qin took the land. Another commentator doubts the account.[8] The commentaries also quote a song that the Xiongnu sang on losing the Qilian and Yanzhi mountains. Lose my Qilian mountain, it says, and my herds will not breed. Lose my Yanzhi mountain, and my women will lose their colour.[8][9] One commentary adds that Qilian is also called Tianshan, the Mountain of Heaven. It describes the range as good pasture, warm in winter and cool in summer.[8] A modern view takes qilian itself as the Xiongnu word for heaven.[9] The song is quoted in commentaries of the Tang and speaks of herds and women. It does not say that the mountains were holy.[8]

The golden figure itself is argued over. Three commentators say what it was. Wei Zhao says that the Xiongnu made golden men as the lords of the sacrifice to Heaven. Cui Hao says that the Hu took the golden figures as their lord at the sacrifice, and that these are the Buddhist golden figures of his own day. The Tang commentary Zhengyi calls the figures the Buddha images of its own day and takes their cult for a surviving practice. It places a shrine of the god Jinglu in Yunyang, at the foot of Mount Ganquan, as the old Xiongnu place of Heaven worship.[8] A modern account adds that an Indian god and a Persian god have been proposed, and that one view takes the figures as a Han-period copy of the twelve metal figures that the First Emperor had cast.[10] The same account takes the sacrifice of the Xiutu king for a lesser copy, in his own land, of the great sacrifice that the chanyu held at Longcheng.[11] A second commentator on the Han Shu takes Jinglu for the name of the Xiutu king himself and not for a sword.[12]

The Wuhuan and the Xianbei took their names from mountains. The Hou Han Shu says that the remnants of the Donghu, when Modu destroyed their state, kept to Mount Wuhuan and were named after it, and that the Xianbei, another branch of the Donghu, lived by Mount Xianbei and took the name from it.[13][14] The name Qilian may belong to two ranges, the Qilian of Gansu and the Tianshan near Barkol, and that both are so called in the Han campaigns.[15]

Ötüken

Ötüken is the one forested upland that the inscriptions call sacred. The Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan monuments name it as the place from which the realm is held.[1] When the khan sits in the Ötüken forest, they say, the realm knows no want, and there is no better place. The Uyghur inscriptions say that the land of Ötüken is theirs and that the khan set up his throne in the middle of Ötüken.[16] The holiness may first have been confined to one summit and carried from there to the whole forest.[16] The Zhou Shu has the khan always at the mountain it writes Dujin, with his tent open to the east. The Xin Tang Shu writes the mountain of the Xueyantuo Yudujun.[17] Modern accounts identify both with Ötüken. They say that every steppe power from the Xiongnu to the Uyghurs kept its seat in that country, in the Orkhon valley and the Khangai.

The Xin Tang Shu closes its account of the Xueyantuo with a story set at Mount Yudujun. Before the Xueyantuo were destroyed, it says, a beggar was asked into a tent for a meal. The wife of the house saw him with the head of a wolf, but her husband did not notice, and the guest had already eaten. She told the tribesmen, and they chased him together as far as Mount Yudujun. There they saw two men, who said: we are spirits, and the Xueyantuo will perish. The pursuers took fright, turned back and lost sight of the two men. In the end the Xueyantuo were beaten at the foot of that mountain.[18] The story puts spirits on a mountain that modern accounts identify as Ötüken. It puts them there as speakers who announce the end of a people.

The name outlived the khaganates. Kashgari lists it as an entry. The Kutadgu Bilig cites the counsel of the beg of Ötüken.[19] A Buddhist record of the Mongol period says of an Uyghur ruler of Qocho that he deigned to establish the land and water of the Ötüken people beside his own.[20] A Manichaean text calls a West Uyghur khan ıdok kut, sacred fortune, at his accession. The idea that rule is granted at Ötüken is held to apply there still.[20] Scholars have called the name Mongolic and have called it Turkic. The second view has more weight.[21] In Mongol belief the earth god and Mother Earth are separate beings. Scholars have taken this to show that Ötüken, once a sacred centre of the Turks, later became an earth goddess among the Mongols.[21] Another view asks whether Ötüken was at once a mountain and a goddess of the earth. A Manichaean Turkic text speaks of the kut of the Ötüken of the land, and the Mongols called the earth goddess Atugan or Itugan.[22]

The bare mountain

The Zhou Shu sets the mountain after the khan’s two sacrifices. Four or five hundred li from Dujin a high mountain stood out alone, with neither grass nor tree on it. The Göktürks called it 勃登凝黎, which the Chinese gloss as the spirit of the earth, 地神.[3] The Bei Shi and the Tongdian place the mountain five hundred li west of Dujin and write the name with variant characters.[23] The mountain has been put four or five hundred li west of Ötüken, in the western or northern Khangai.[24] The sentence records no rite at the mountain.[3]

The name has been interpreted in four ways. One interpretation takes the first syllable for böd, throne, and reads böd teŋri, with a doubt about the link between earth and throne. A second takes it for but teŋri, the Buddha, after a translation that mistook the Chinese gloss for the spirit of heaven. A third takes budun inli, the spirit that protects the people. Turkish scholarship has continued this interpretation as the seat of a god who guards the whole homeland. A fourth reads putengiri.[25] Scholars have also suggested that the last three syllables render a folk form of teŋri. If so, the Göktürks used the word Tengri for the spirit of the earth as well.[26] The bare slopes have been explained by fires lit on mountain tops at the rites for Heaven. The fires may have set the forest alight.[27]

Whether the mountain belongs with the Earth-and-Water of the inscriptions is open, because neither text mentions the other’s earth power. The Chinese saw a mountain and glossed it as earth. The stones name the land and water as a power beside Heaven. The two may be one cult seen from two sides.

The sacred heads

The Kül Tegin and Bilge Khan inscriptions place a battle against the Karluk at tamag ıduk baş, and a battle of the year 701 at ıduk baş.[28] Modern scholars date the Karluk fight to 714.[29] The word baş is head, and scholars differ: a summit, a source, or either. Several scholars put Tamag at or near the sources of the Tamir. One puts it west of the Altai in Dzungaria.[30] A Turkish study lists tamag ıduk, ıduk baş and Ötüken together as names of mountain, forest or water that the stones call sacred.[31] The Tariat inscription of the Uyghur khan Bayanchur has the words again. In 748, at the burial ground of the ancestors, he was named khan. In the Turkish edition he had his camp set up west of the holy summit of Süngüz Başkan.[32]

The same edition takes Süngüz and Başkan for two peoples of a Chinese account of 662. It infers that they fled to Ötüken and gave the place their names. It notes that the two other editors of the inscription read the name in other forms and senses.[33] It remains open whether ıduk baş is a kind of place or one name. A head that is a source belongs with the waters. The spring interpretation therefore puts these places among the objects of the water cult.

Forested uplands and the Golden Mountain

Four forested uplands recur in the inscriptions, and only one of them is called sacred. The Kül Tegin stone has Ötüken. It also has the Kögmen, which the Göktürks crossed through snow as deep as a spear to fall on the Kirghiz, and the Kadırkan forest, the eastern limit of the founders’ conquests.[1] The Tonyukuk inscription has the Altun forest, which the army crossed where there was no road.[34] In the Tariat inscription the Uyghur khan Bayanchur gives the limits of his grazing land. The Altun forest lies in the south, the Kögmen in the west and the Kadırkan forest in the east.[35] The Altun forest is identified as the Altai. These names are routes and limits. The epithet ıduk stands before Ötüken alone.[2]

Theophylact names a mountain that he says is ceded by custom. It lies to the east. The Göktürks call it the Golden Mountain, partly for the fruits that grow on it and partly because it is rich in flocks and baggage animals. They cede it to the most powerful khagan.[36] Menander has the embassy of 569 find İstemi on a mountain that the Göktürks call Ektag, the Golden Mountain.[37] Theophylact ties supreme rank to a mountain, as the inscriptions tie rule to Ötüken. Menander puts İstemi’s residence on one.

Mountains of rule and origin

The Chinese accounts name many more mountains. They name them as places where a court, an army or a line stood. The Tiele raised a khan of their own at Tanhan Mountain in 605.[38] Shegui Khan set the court of the western Göktürks on Sanmi Mountain.[39] In 630 Ilig Khan made his last stand on the Iron Mountain.[40] None of the sources calls any of these holy.[41]

Two mountains belong to the origin stories of the Zhou Shu. In the first story the wolf fled with the child to the mountain north of Gaochang, where there was a cave. In the cave were level ground and rich grass, several hundred li around, with mountains on all four sides.[3] The wolf bore ten sons there. From them came ten clans, of which the Ashina was one.[3] In the second story the eldest son of Yizhi Nishidu lived on Mount Jiansi Chuzheshi, where the people of Abangbu suffered in the cold. He brought out fire and warmed them, and they raised him as their lord.[3] In both stories the line of the Göktürk khans begins on a mountain. On one view the cave of the ancestors is the cave of the first story.

Mountains and Kut

Three positions address whether a mountain gave Kut. One account makes Ötüken the one place from which Kut flowed. Whoever held Ötüken held the fortune that made a ruler, and every ambitious ruler was drawn to take it.[42] It rests on the gloss of the epithet as kutlu, blessed with Kut. The transcription of the stone, however, reads ıduk.[1] A second position ties the grant of royal Kut to the place without a mountain ceremony. It rejects the claim that Tengri handed Kut to the ruler through shamanic rites on sacred mountains.[20] A third holds that the inscriptions say Kut of the ruler and never of the place. The place is ıduk and not kutlu.[1]

A later tradition joins mountain and fortune in a name. In the Uyghur legend as the Persian historian Juvayni gives it, the Uyghurs had holy mountains that brought them happiness and plenty. The mountain was called kuttag. The Uyghurs were ruined after the Chinese carried it away.[43] A tomb inscription of the Uyghur rulers of Gaochang, written long after the event, has the Tang envoys break up the mountain of good fortune near Karakorum with fire and acid. After that the animals cried out, the prince died within a fortnight, and the people moved to Turfan.[44] In the same legend two trees stood between the Tola and the Selenga. A light fell on a mound between them, and five boys were born in huts that stood on it, the youngest of whom became khan.[45][46] A Chinese version has a tree with a swelling, out of which five children came after nine months and nine days.[47] The same story is told of Erdene Ula, the mountain of happiness, beside the ruins of Karabalghasun. The Mongols tell that the Chinese carried off their mountain of happiness and a woman shaman brought it back by prayer.[43]

Later reports from the Altai

A Chinese history records a rite on a hillside long after the khaganates. In 927 the emperor Mingzong of the Later Tang, a man of Shatuo Turkic descent, went to the Baisima slope in Henan and sacrificed to a Turkic god according to the custom of the north. The text does not say which god.[48] The Shatuo came from the western khaganate. The sources therefore show a rite of the steppe kept on a hill in China, not a rite of the Orkhon.

The reports of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries make the mountain a person. For the Altaians the range, the rivers and the lakes are beings that speak, hear, marry and have children. A listener cannot always tell whether a man speaks of the mountain or of a person who bears its name.[43] The shaman addresses the Altai itself and not its owner.[49] Each clan has its own sacred mountain, and the Altai range stands in the hymns of all of them.[43] The Shor and the Beltir offer to Heaven on a high summit, in a rite they call tengere tayıg.[50] The Persian geographer Gardizi is said to have recorded that the old Turks held the mountains to be the seat of the god.[50] A hymn calls the mountain Abakan the pure töz of the singer, whose seven forefathers bowed down before it. Töz is the word for root and origin and for the ancestor figures.[51] The owners of mountains among the Karagass and the Yakuts belong to the layer of animism.

Some tribes call a mountain their ancestor. A story recorded among the Sagai tells how the women of one clan call a mountain father-in-law and cover their heads when it comes into view. Another clan says of a second mountain that it is the one from which they descend.[52] A scholar of the Altai found the claim of descent from a mountain in a single report and judged a general conclusion misleading. The Turkish account sets the many folk tales against him.[53] In the headwaters of the Orkhon a peak still bears the name Othontengri, which the Turkish account takes for a memory of the old cult of the place.[43]

The Secret History of the Mongols, in the Turkish account, has the young Temüjin escape the Merkit on the mountain Burkhan Khaldun and vow to honour it every morning. An Altaian tale has a mountain cover itself with forest to hide the Altaians from the Mongols, after which it became sacred.[53] These are tales of the Mongol age and of the Altai of the nineteenth century. They show how a mountain that saved a people became a holy mountain.

Interpretations of the cult

Four interpretations have been put forward. One treats the mountain as a part of the land. The Göktürks may have held the land as an extension of the earth and as a home of gods and spirits that served Tengri.[21] A second ties the mountain to the cult of Heaven. The summits are the places nearest the sky where the god is held to live, and sacrifices to Heaven are made on peaks.[54] A third takes the mountain as the axis of the world, the cosmic mountain whose summit reaches the sky. This is a modern interpretation, and the inscriptions do not say it.[55] A fourth reads Ötüken in the stones as a political centre, the place from which a khan holds the four quarters. It says nothing of a rite.[1]

The first and fourth interpretations fit the stones as they stand. The second and third interpretations read into the stones an idea that the later reports and the cosmologies supply.

Names

Yış is a forested upland. Baş is a head, in the sense of a summit or a source. The epithet ıduk marks a place set apart, and Kashgari glosses it as blessed.[56] Ötüken is the name of the forest and the country. It stands as ötüken yış and ötüken yer.[1] The Chinese write the mountain of the khan Dujin in the Zhou Shu, and Yudujun in the Xin Tang Shu.[17] Altun yış, the golden forest, is identified as the Altai. The Göktürk name of the bare mountain is interpreted in four ways, as above. The Chinese gloss of it, 地神, the spirit of the earth, is firm.[3] Töz, the Altaian word for root and for the ancestor figure, and dağ kültü, the Turkish term, are words of the literature and not of any source of the khaganates.[57]

Reliability of the sources

The sources give the Göktürks and the Uyghurs one sacred forest, three sacred heads and one bare mountain that the Chinese call the spirit of the earth. It also names a number of mountains where rulers sat and fought.[58] It describes no rite on any of them. The one story of spirits on a mountain comes from a Chinese history compiled in the eleventh century. The mountain as a person, an owner and an ancestor comes from the Altai of the last three centuries.[18] How far those later reports reach back is the question of the historiography of Tengrism. The stones themselves give a forest that is sacred, heads that are sacred and a bare mountain that the Chinese call the spirit of the earth.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Kül Tegin inscription
  2. ^ a b Kül Tegin inscription; Tariat inscription
  3. ^ a b c d e f g Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  4. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  5. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954; Harva 1938
  6. ^ Shiji, juan 110; Han Shu, juan 94
  7. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 8–12
  8. ^ a b c d e Shiji, juan 110
  9. ^ a b Laufer 1919, p. 326
  10. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 31–44
  11. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 29–30
  12. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 38, 52–53
  13. ^ Hou Han Shu, juan 90
  14. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 178, 182
  15. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 448–451
  16. ^ a b Roux 1994, p. 126
  17. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  18. ^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  19. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; Kutadgu Bilig
  20. ^ a b c Wilkens 2024, p. 79
  21. ^ a b c Erkoç 2024, p. 189
  22. ^ Pelliot 1929, p. 217–219
  23. ^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99; Tongdian, juan 197
  24. ^ Roux 1994, p. 112, 125
  25. ^ Erkoç 2024, p. 184; 5; İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 184; 5
  26. ^ Erkoç 2024, p. 184–185
  27. ^ Erkoç 2024, p. 184
  28. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Bilge Khan inscription; Erkoç 2024, p. 187
  29. ^ Erkoç 2024, p. 187
  30. ^ Erkoç 2024, p. 187–188
  31. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 48
  32. ^ Tariat inscription; Saadettin 1995, p. 73
  33. ^ Saadettin 1995, p. 81
  34. ^ Tonyukuk inscription
  35. ^ Tariat inscription; Saadettin 1995, p. 74
  36. ^ Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, p. 191
  37. ^ Menander Protector
  38. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  39. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  40. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  41. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  42. ^ Yavuz 2025
  43. ^ a b c d e İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 50
  44. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 80–82
  45. ^ Roux 1994, p. 163–164
  46. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 73–77
  47. ^ Roux 1994, p. 164
  48. ^ Erkoç 2024, p. 188
  49. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 51
  50. ^ a b İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 49
  51. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 42,44
  52. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 52–53
  53. ^ a b İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 52
  54. ^ Şen 2018, p. 55; 48–49; İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 55; 48–49
  55. ^ Şen 2018, p. 63
  56. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 107
  57. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 42
  58. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Tariat inscription

Sources

Literature

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  • Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)
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  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi I (2015)
  • Paul Pelliot, Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale (1929)

Related

What links here3

Persons
Huo Qubing
Religions
Iye · Water Cult

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Sacred Mountains.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/religions/sacred-mountains/

Last revised: 8 November 2026