The title khan has been traced to several peoples and to several languages. The debate has four strands: the first bearer of the title, the language of the word, the relation of khan to khagan, and the relation of the title to the Xiongnu chanyu. For the forms and the ranks of the title see Khan (Khagan).

The Chinese sources

The Zhou Shu says that Bumin styled himself Illig Khan, “as the chanyu of old”, and that he called his wife khatun, “as the yanzhi of old”.[1] The Chinese sources therefore set the title beside the old title of the Xiongnu ruler.

The Wei Shu tells of the Rouran chief Shelun, after his conquests, that he styled himself Qiudoufa Khan. It glosses the first part as “to drive and to open out” and the second, khan, as “emperor” in the speech of Wei.[2] The Wei Shu tells of his flight in the ninth year of Dengguo, then of the conquests, then of the title, and then of his raid in the fifth year of Tianxing. It gives no year for the title.[2]

The first bearer

Shelun about 400

The Tang compiler Du You wrote in the Tongdian, on the Rouran title, that the title khan began there.[3] Kurakichi Shiratori took up the remark in 1926. From the order of the Wei Shu he placed the adoption of the title between 394 and 402.[4] He concluded that, so far as the Chinese records bear witness, Shelun was the first to bear it.[5]

Shiratori went through the earlier cases one by one. The name Shamohan of a Tuoba ancestor, sent to China in 261, is a personal name as a whole.[6] The Yili Khan of 312 is a misreading of the name Yilu.[7] The titles that the Tuyuhun and Qifu chapters give to earlier chiefs are retrospective. On his count the first Tuyuhun chief to call himself khan did so in 405 if it was Shulohan, and not before 520 to 525 if it was Kualü.[8] Shiratori also asked why Shelun did not keep the title chanyu. The Rouran stood against the Wei as the Xiongnu had stood against the Han, and a chief of that standing wanted a title to match the Chinese huangdi. The old title had lost its meaning.[9]

The Xianbei in 261 and 278

A second position holds that the title was not new with Shelun. The Chinese annals have it as a Xianbei title in 261 and again in 278. Uchida and Olbricht give the evidence, and Franke treats the question at length.[10] Liu Mau-tsai names Shiratori and calls the tradition that makes Shelun the first bearer one that cannot be verified.[10] The two positions differ on the case of 261, where the word is part of a name for Shiratori and the title for the other.[11]

The Rouran and the Tuyuhun

A Russian study of the Turkic loanwords records that the title is first attested, in the Chinese records, as the title of the heads of the Rouran and of the Tuyuhun.[12]

Origin of the word

A Mongolic word

Shiratori held that the Xianbei were mainly Mongolic with a Tungusic admixture, and that the Rouran belonged to them. The title therefore arose in a Mongolic or Tungusic language.[13] He added two reasons. The earliest users of the title were all Xianbei peoples, and certain words used with the title are recognisably Mongolic, such as ze, “yes”, and the Tuyuhun and Rouran name Chu Khan.[14] No Turkic ruler had borne the title before the Rouran. The Wusun ruler had another title, and Bumin took the title only in 552 or 553, when the Gaoche still gave their ruler a title of their own.[15]

A word of the Rouran

Gerhard Doerfer proposed that khan, khagan and khatun are Rouran words. None of the three has a reliable etymology in a known language, and all three are first attested among the Rouran.[16] In the account of the linguist Dybo, Doerfer derives the title from the language of the Xianbei, thence to the Rouran and on to the Turks. The Khitan, the Khotanese Saka and the Sogdians took it over.[12] See Khan (Khagan) for an objection from the Xianbei evidence.

An Eastern Iranian word

Dybo holds that the word is not originally Proto-Turkic, since the reconstructed Turkic sound system has no initial x-. She derives the form from a Middle Iranian hva-kama-, “self-ruler”, and compares Sogdian xutkame.[12] Another summary of the same argument says that the origins of khagan most likely lie outside the Turkic family.[17] For the khatun an Eastern Iranian origin is proposed too, from an Early Saka form, with Sogdian xwt’w, “ruler”, and xwt’yn, “wife of the ruler”, as its counterparts.[16]

An Old Hunnic form

One recent history of the Göktürks derives the word from an Old Hunnic kehan, and says that it first appeared in the third century as the title of the ruler of the Rouran.[18]

The name of a clan

Ümit Hassan argues from the other side. Before the word was a rank, he says, it was a manifestation of the order of the clan. He cites the old name of the Great Bear, Yatıkan, the mountain names Akbakan and Ötüken, and the shaman called kan by some peoples.[19] Ferenc László receives the mountain names with doubt. He holds that the title kan is known among peoples certainly Turkic only from the Göktürks, and that the Göktürks took kagan from the Rouran, together with most of their court titles.[20]

Khan and khagan

The question is whether kan and kagan are two titles or one. Radloff read both forms in the Ongi inscription and in the Tonyukuk inscription, and took them for distinct forms. He suggested that kan might be the proper Göktürk form and kagan a variant caused by Chinese influence.[21] He took the kan of the Tonyukuk stone for the chief of a minor tribe.[22] In the Ongi inscription the forefather is kagan in the first line, and the next sentence calls the same man kan.[23]

Quatremère, Laguperie and Yule had drawn the line for the Mongols: khan the lower title, kaghan the higher.[24] Shiratori denied it. He found the Secret History of the Mongols calling the same ruler khan in one place and khagan in another, and the Chinese version giving both as huangdi. He found that Temüjin was called Chinggis khagan and then made khan.[25] He took khan for a contraction of khagan, as Schott and Blochet had before him.[26]

Dybo objects. Both forms stand in the Orkhon inscriptions, so the second can hardly be a phonetic contraction of the first, and the relation of the two words is hard to say.[12] The editor of the Ongi stone reads both forms there as respectful words of the same weight.[27]

Khan and chanyu

The Chinese sources equate the title with the chanyu.[1] Two positions follow. Shiratori holds that chanyu was a Chinese phrase for vastness, formed after the huangdi of 221 BC, and that the Rouran replaced a worn-out title.[28] László holds that chanyu is the older title and that khagan took its place later.[29] Hassan criticises both writers for treating the matter as a history of titles, and not as a history of social organisation.[30] Turkic Atlas reports the reading of the whole Xiongnu title as the Turkic Teŋri Kut Tanyu in its treatment of the title. For that reading and its opponents see the language of the Xiongnu.

Unsettled points

None of the derivations has won agreement, and the sources do not say what the word meant.[31] What the Zhou Shu does show is that Bumin took the title after he had destroyed the Rouran, and that the Chinese set it beside the title of the Xiongnu ruler.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  2. ^ a b Wei Shu, juan 103
  3. ^ Tongdian; Kurakichi 1926, p. 8
  4. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 7–8
  5. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 8
  6. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 1
  7. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 1–2
  8. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 7
  9. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 15–16
  10. ^ a b Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 18
  11. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 1; 18; Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 1; 18
  12. ^ a b c d Dybo 2007, p. 120
  13. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 16
  14. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 16–17
  15. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 17–19
  16. ^ a b Savelyev 2020, p. 10
  17. ^ Savelyev 2020, p. 6
  18. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 437
  19. ^ Hassan 1985, p. 232–233
  20. ^ Hassan 1985, p. 232–233, 265
  21. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 19–20
  22. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 20
  23. ^ Orkun 1994, p. 128; 224; Tekin 2003, p. 128; 224
  24. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 20–21
  25. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 21–23
  26. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 24
  27. ^ Ōsawa 2011, p. 194
  28. ^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 9–11, 15–16
  29. ^ Hassan 1985, p. 262
  30. ^ Hassan 1985, p. 256–262
  31. ^ Savelyev 2020, p. 10; 120; Dybo 2007, p. 10; 120

Sources

Literature

  • Shiratori Kurakichi, A Study on the Titles Kaghan and Katun (1926)
  • Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
  • Alexander Savelyev; Choongwon Jeong, Early Nomads of the Eastern Steppe and Their Tentative Connections in the West (2020)
  • Anna V. Dybo (А. В. Дыбо), Лингвистические контакты ранних тюрков. Лексический фонд: пратюркский период (2007)
  • Ümit Hassan, Eski Türk Toplumu Üzerine İncelemeler (1985)
  • Takashi Ōsawa, Revisiting the Ongi inscription of Mongolia from the Second Turkic Qaγanate on the basis of rubbings by G. J. Ramstedt (2011)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Hüseyin Namık Orkun, Eski Türk Yazıtları (1994)
  • Talât Tekin, Orhon Türkçesi Grameri (2003)

Related

What links here3

Institutions and Titles
Khan (Khagan)
Sources
Ongi inscription
Controversies
The origin of the Avars

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “The origin of the title Khan.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/historiography/khan-title-origin-debate/

Last revised: 8 November 2026