Umay

Umay is the third named divine power of the Orkhon monuments, after Tengri and the sacred Earth-and-Water. She is the only one of the three that is female.^[1] The Kül Tegin inscription names her once. The Tonyukuk inscription names her a second time, together with Tengri and the sacred Earth-and-Water.^[2]

The attestation

The line stands in the boyhood of Kül Tegin.^[1] His father the khan flew away, and the boy was left behind at seven years old. By the Kut of his mother the katun, who is like Umay, he got a man’s name.^[1] That is the whole of it. The line makes a comparison, not an invocation, and the comparison is paid to a woman.

Three things follow from the grammar. First, the name is used without explanation, so the audience knew it. Second, it is used as a standard of comparison for a queen mother. In this register, that is the highest thing that could be said of a woman. Third, it is coupled with Kut in the same clause. What the mother has, and what the boy receives from her, is therefore fortune of the same kind that the khans receive from Heaven.

The two Orkhon monuments run parallel through their historical section. Where they carry the same wording, they are one witness and not two.

In the Tonyukuk inscription

The second attestation stands in a speech. The Göktürks were on the march against the Türgesh. A messenger reported a hundred thousand men assembled on the Yarısh plain, and the begs wanted to turn back. Tonyukuk answered that the march had been hard, but that his men had hardly felt it, and that Heaven, Umay and the sacred Earth-and-Water had evidently helped them: teŋri umay ıduk yer sub basa berti erinč (line 38).^[3]^[4]^[5] An older reading takes the sentence before it differently. In it, the men who came said that the enemy were brave but did not notice them, and the three powers overwhelmed the enemy. The enemy would then be the object of the verb.^[6] Here Umay is not a standard of comparison. She is one of three powers that help in battle, and she acts together with the other two.^[7] Tonyukuk himself raised the stone, and it does not share its text with the Orkhon monuments. It is therefore an independent witness.

Birth and children

The standard reading makes Umay the power of childbirth and of small children. It rests on the later Turkic material and not on the inscription, which says nothing about her function. The later Turkic lexicon glosses the word itself as the afterbirth, and that sense is the ground of the identification. Some scholars take the name for the placenta and the helper of women in childbirth, and quote the eleventh-century dictionary: when she is worshipped, a child is born.^[8] One name stands for the membrane that comes with a child, and also for the power that brings the child.^[9] A study of the words for women interprets the Umay of the Kül Tegin line as a goddess of fertility and abundance.^[10]

The naming ceremony in the same line belongs with this. Er at bol-, to get a man’s name, is not a figure for growing up. A boy had no adult name until he had earned one, and the moment he had, the name was conferred.^[1] Umay stands at the beginning of that sequence, and the mother’s fortune carries it.

That the name was current and not merely literary is suggested by something small: Umay was a name women bore. Some scholars note a line of the Altın Köl inscription in which the speaker gives his name as Umay Beg, and take it for a man’s name, so that the name could be borne by men as well.^[8]

Before the Göktürks

The Chinese notices of the Xiongnu name no goddess.^[11] A rock drawing at Khavtsgait in southern Mongolia is dated to the fourth century BC to the first century AD and attributed to the Xiongnu. It shows large seated women in tall headdresses before whom smaller men stand.^[11] Some scholars regard the women as a goddess and compare her with the Scythian Tabiti. They see in her an earlier form of Umay, perhaps joined with the Scythian earth goddess Api.^[11] The same scholars explain why the Chinese notices do not name her. The Chinese accounts of the Göktürks do not name Umay either, and the Chinese historians took their information from men.^[11] An early survey names Umay as the only other deity beside Heaven and the Earth-and-Water, and says that the goddess has been kept to this day among the Altaian descendants of those Turks.^[12] A cult scene on a saddle bow from the Kudyrge grave in the Altai has been related to the cult of Umay by Russian scholars.^[13] One survey takes the goddess Umay for a figure of clearly Mongol origin.^[14] The chain joins Scythian art, a Mongolian rock drawing and one line on an eighth-century stone. Each link is a likeness, and no text says that the women of the drawing were one figure with Umay.

In the Uyghur period

In the Old Uyghur Buddhist texts, the word means the placenta or the womb. Umayta tugum, birth in the womb, is one of the four kinds of birth.^[15] The Old Uyghur Suvarṇaprabhāsa renders the Indian goddess of children, Hārītī, in Chinese Guizimu, as umay iyesi, the guardian of the afterbirth.^[16] Scholars argue whether Umay was a goddess in her own right or a protective spirit, an iye. Some scholars deny the Göktürks any goddess at all.^[17]

The later layer

Among Turkic-speaking peoples of the Altai and Siberia recorded from the eighteenth century onward, a birth-spirit under this name and under variants of it is widely attested. It protects infants and mothers and departs when a child is grown.^[18] The material is good evidence for what those peoples believed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reading it back to the eighth is a reconstruction. In the Altaian account taken down in the nineteenth century, the jajutshi brings the child. He takes the life-force from the Milk Lake in the third heaven and lets the newborn come into the world. He stands at the man’s right shoulder for the rest of his life. Umay is not named there.^[19]^[20] The Yakuts pray for children to Ajysyt, the birth-giver.^[21]

The distance is not only in time. The societies recorded were small, forest-dwelling and stateless. The inscription that names Umay was cut for an imperial court speaking about a mandate to rule the steppe. A household protectress and an imperial theology can share a name and share very little else. The two lines in the stones do not decide which of the two the Göktürks had.

References

^ a b c d Kül Tegin inscription
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288, 391
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1994, p. 17, 45–46
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 2003, p. 161
^ Ögel 2000, p. 120
^ Tonyukuk inscription
^ a b Roux 1994, p. 113
^ Sevim 2023, p. 45–46; 232; Potapov 1996, p. 45–46; 232
^ Tokyürek 2013, p. 121
^ a b c d Erkoç 2026, p. 235
^ Barthold 2004, p. 17
^ Ögel 1984, p. 141–142
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 325–326
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 80; 47–48; Sevim 2023, p. 80; 47–48
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 80–81; 46; Sevim 2023, p. 80–81; 46
^ Sevim 2023, p. 46; 48, 52; Şen 2018, p. 46; 48, 52
^ Potapov 1996, p. 219
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 11–12
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 394–395
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 415

Sources

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)
Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç, Asya Hunlarında Dinî İnançlar (Religious Beliefs of the Xiongnu) (2026)
L. P. Potapov (trans. Muvaffak Duranlı), Etnografik verilerin ışığında eski Türklerin tanrısı Umay (1996)
Serap Sevim, Eski Uygurca Budist Metinlerde Umay: Doğum ve Kadının Temsili (2023)
Jens Wilkens (trans. Celalettin Bulut Bostan), Uygur Budizmi ve Manihaizm ile Yerel Dinlerin Etkisi: Dinî Terminoloji Örneği (2024)
Ali Ahmetbeyoğlu, Hüseyin Şen, Eski Türk Dininin Kozmolojisi ve Kozmogonisi (2018)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Zweiter Band (1893 (zweite Ausgabe))
Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
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Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş II: Türklerde ziraat kültürü (2000)
Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)
Talât Tekin, Tunyukuk Yazıtı (1994)
Talât Tekin, Orhon Türkçesi Grameri (2003)
B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)
Hacer Tokyürek, Runik Türk Yazıtlarında ve Eski Uygur Metinlerinde Kadın Hiyerarşisi (2013)