Beg

A beg was the head of a tribe or a clan, and the begs were the men who counted.^[1] The word runs through the Orkhon inscriptions as the natural partner of bodun, the commons. Where the two are named together, the whole people is meant. Where they are set against each other, the state is in trouble. Above the begs stood the khan, and below them everybody else. That short ladder is the whole social order as the inscriptions describe it, and the beg is its middle rung.

In the inscriptions

The Kül Tegin stone states most clearly what a beg was for, and it does so in an account of collapse. Begleri bodunı tüzsüz üçün means: because their lords and their commons were not straight with one another. The inscription adds a second cause. The Chinese were devious and full of guile, set younger brother against elder brother, and put lords and commons to slandering one another. As a result the Göktürks let slip the realm they had made a realm. They lost the khan they had made khan.^[2] The sentence assumes a reader who knows that lord and commons are the two halves of one body. It does not complain about bad men. It explains how the two halves came apart.

What followed is put in the same terms.

To the Chinese, the sons who should have been lords became slaves, and the unblemished daughters became serving-women. The Türk lords threw away their Türk titles. The lords who went over to China took Chinese titles and became subjects of the Chinese khan.

Kül Tegin inscription

Such is the inscription’s own account.^[2] The word for what those sons lost is beglik, the standing of a beg, the thing a well-born son was born to. The inscription names the loss of it and the taking of a Chinese title in one breath. This shows that the title was no decoration: a beg with a Chinese title was a Chinese subject. The ending in beglik forms words for a status assigned or still to be assigned. The sons in the line were therefore born to be lords.^[3]^[4]

The rank was also something a khan could give and take away. The Kirghiz khan Bars Beg carried both words in his name at once:

The khan of the Kırkız was Bars Beg. It was we who gave him the title of khan here. We gave him my younger sister as his princess.

Kül Tegin inscription

The Kül Tegin stone records this.^[2] The passage shows a beg raised to khan by a khan, and married into the ruling house to hold him there. It is the clearest evidence that the two ranks were understood as steps of one ladder, and that the upper step was in the gift of the man already standing on it. Bars Beg later went wrong. He died, and his people were enslaved.

The word is common on the Yenisei stones too. It stands twenty-six times in seventeen epitaphs.^[5]

Etymology

𐰋𐰏bägbekOld Turkic
beyTurkish
biKipchak
伯Chinese
佰Chinese

The origin is not settled, and it has not been settled for a century. Three derivations compete.^[6]

The first takes the word from Chinese 伯 bo, an elder brother and a rank of nobility. Its older pronunciation has been reconstructed as something like pak. Sinologists have held this view. The standard etymological dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish records it as the view of Giles and Karlgren.^[6] The dictionary compares Chinese po, “the head of a hundred men”, which Giles lists under another character, 佰, “the leader of a hundred men; a centurion”. That character is not 伯, and its meaning is not that of 伯. Which of the two the derivation rests on is open.^[7]

The second takes the word from Iranian baga, “god”. This is the word behind Middle Persian bay and Sogdian βγ-, and all of them were used as honorifics for kings and men of rank. The main objection is phonetic. The Middle Iranian form was baγ, so a borrowing should have produced baγ or beγ, not beg.^[6]

The third holds the word to be Turkic and the resemblances to be mere resemblances. Gerhard Doerfer argued that the Iranian derivation is far from certain and that the word may be native.^[5] He held a derivation from Mongol beki to be impossible, because the Mongol form would then be begi.^[5]

A separate argument cuts across all three. The title also turns up among peoples who were not Turkic-speaking. Barthold, Menges and Peter B. Golden took its spread as evidence that it was a loan into Turkic rather than out of it.^[6] The counter-observation is that a title spreads with the power that uses it, and that borrowing out of Turkic would produce the same distribution.

A further observation arguably weighs more than any of these. From the Göktürk period onwards the word is not to be found among the Iranians. Whatever baga had been in Sogdian and Middle Persian, it did not remain a living title of rank in the Iranian east. The steppe, by contrast, used beg on every rung of its order, from the lord of a tribe to the tümen begi of ten thousand men. A word borrowed from Iranian would be expected to stay in use among the Iranians who lent it. This one did not. The asymmetry indicates that the use of the title was Turkic in a way it was not Iranian, whatever the ultimate origin of the syllable turns out to be. The etymology does not decide among the three derivations. The finding rests on the distribution of use.

Beg and Kut

One document ties the rank to the Kut, the fortune that made a ruler a ruler. A Chinese inscription for two Göktürk princesses gives their father as the Great Khan of the Göktürks, … Kutlug Beg, Beg Çur, and says that he had received this title from high heaven.^[8] The sentence does two things at once. It names a man who is khan and beg together, and it says where his standing came from. It follows that a beg held his place by the same warrant as a khan, only with less of it.

Afterwards

The rank outlived the khaganates without much change of meaning. In the Middle Turkic texts beg is still the head of a clan, a chief, a high administrator or a commander. It now also appears in compounds that count: tümen begi for the lord of ten thousand, miŋ begi for the lord of a thousand, on begi for the lord of ten.^[9] Beside it, elig beg and elig khan are both used for a ruler, and ınanç beg and çağrı beg for a commander of the army.^[10] The decimal ladder is the ordering principle of a steppe army, and the word for lord appears at every level of it.

From there the word goes two ways. In the west it becomes Turkish bey, a form of address and a rank in the Ottoman service. In the Kipchak north it becomes bi. Among the Kazakhs the bi is the man who judges by Töre, the customary law. This office keeps the old sense of a beg as the man whose word settles a dispute inside the tribe.^[1]

The compound with the longest afterlife is the one that put ata, father, in front of it. The atabeg of the Seljuk chanceries is a beg set over a prince as guardian. Half a dozen dynasties grew out of that guardianship.

The Kutadgu Bilig, written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, lists ınanç beg, çağrı beg and çavlı beg among the honorary ranks a prince may give a servant who has risen at court, beside kül erkin, yavğu, yugruş, el begi and er ögi.^[11] The book does not say what any of these ranks commanded.^[12] It counts the türk begleri, the begs of the Turks, the best among the lords of the world.^[13]

Spelling

Beg names the rank and begs the estate in every period. The inscriptions put the ordinary plural ending -lär on beg as on terms of kinship, and give the genitive as begiŋ. In the Uyghur texts that follow, the plural of titles in -t appears beside it, as bägitlär, “the lords”.^[14] The other forms, bek, bi and bey, are the devoiced, the Kipchak and the modern Turkish outcomes of the same word. The article on the title of khan covers the ladder as a whole. Ilteber covers the rank the Göktürks gave to the rulers they had subjected. That rank is a different thing from a beg and is sometimes confused with one.

References

^ a b Yılmaz 2018, p. 269
^ a b c Kül Tegin inscription
^ Erdal 2004, p. 147,158
^ Tekin 1968, p. 311
^ a b c Erhan 2011, p. 11–12
^ a b c d Odabaşı 2019, p. 166
^ Erhan 2011, p. 11
^ Odabaşı 2019, p. 169
^ Turan 2018, p. 157
^ Turan 2018, p. 163
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 4068–4069
^ Kutadgu Bilig
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 276
^ Erdal 2004, p. 158,168

Sources

Literature

Fikret Turan, Eski Türkçeden Orta Türkçeye Askeri Rütbe ve Unvanlar / Military Ranks and Titles From Old Turkic to Middle Turkic (2018)
Saffet Alp Yılmaz, Eski Türk Runik Harfli Metinlerdeki Askerî ve Siyasî Terimler ile Unvan Niteleyicilerin Özbek Türkçesindeki İzleri (2018)
Zehra Odabaşı, Türk Devletlerinde Kullanılan İdari Ünvanlar / Used Administrative Titles in Turkish States (2019)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
Aydın, Erhan, Yenisey Yazıtlarında Geçen Unvanlar ve Unvan Niteleyicileri (2011)