Honour of Death in Battle

The Sui Shu closes its account of Göktürk custom with two judgements.^[1] The Göktürks valued death by arms and were ashamed to end their lives by illness. In most things their customs were those of the Xiongnu.^[1] The Bei Shi repeats the words.^[2] In one rendering the Göktürks gloried in dying in battle and would have blushed to die of illness.^[3]

The Zhou Shu and the Sui Shu also say that the Göktürks thought little of the old and valued men in their prime.^[4] The word for the prime of life, zhuang, is explained as the age of thirty to forty.^[5]

The grave

Both judgements fit what the same chapters say about the grave. After the burial a stone was set up at the grave for each man the dead had killed in his life. Some graves had a hundred or a thousand of them.^[4] The Sui Shu adds that a house was built at the grave. It was painted with the likeness of the dead man and with the battles he had fought.^[1] At the grave a life was counted by the men killed in it.

The Chinese pattern

The Zhou Shu likens the Göktürks in their disregard for the old to the ancient Xiongnu.^[6] The Shiji had said of the Xiongnu that the strong ate the fattest food and the old what was left. It added that they valued the strong and despised the old and weak.^[7] The same chapter says that the Xiongnu were not ashamed to flee when a battle went against them.^[7]

The sentence about the old therefore belongs to a Chinese description of the northern peoples that is centuries older than the Göktürks. The sentence about death by illness has no counterpart in it. The Tongdian opens its own account by saying that the customs of the Göktürks were like those of the ancient Xiongnu. It then names what was different. Neither sentence appears in its account.^[8]

What the Chinese histories record is an outside verdict on Göktürk values, built in part from older words about the Xiongnu.

In the Kutadgu Bilig

The Kutadgu Bilig, written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, makes shame, uvut, the mark of a good soldier. Out of shame a man routs his enemy. The shameless man flees first. The man of honour, when he dies, dies fighting.^[9] The commander is to bear the dead with honour and give their children what is owed.^[10] The Chinese verdict on the Göktürks, that they honoured death in battle and were ashamed to die of illness, describes a similar ideal. The book is a comparison, not a witness for the sixth century.