The clearest report of salt among a Turkic people is a geographer’s note of 982.[1] Seven tribes of the Khallukh, the Karluks, took their salt from one lake, which the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam calls Tuz Köl, “Salt Lake”.[1] Other reports come from later centuries or from outside the Turkic states: a rock-salt deposit in Tuva, the salt lakes of the Irtysh steppe in Russian records, and the salt that merchants brought to the Kimak. The sources of the Göktürk age report no salt-working at all.

Deposits around the Altai

Dus-Dag, “the salt mountain”, stands about 15 kilometres north of Uvs Nuur in Tuva.[2] It holds a deposit of rock salt, which is quarried today.[2] Two more deposits lie to the west of it: Torgalyg at 7 kilometres, and Davs, in Mongolia, at 11.[2] The three are the remains of a large salt-bearing basin of Devonian age.[2]

The geologist who describes them says that the deposit at the foot of Dus-Dag has been known “since time immemorial”.[2] His article gives no date for the first quarrying and names no earlier writer for it. The remark stands in a study of place names, and it dates no use of the salt.

The steppe of Western Siberia has salt lakes of its own. Works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries describe how their salt was taken, in Russian, Latin and German.[3] In 1594 an instruction for the founding of the town of Tara ordered salt to be provided for the garrison.[4] Gerhard Friedrich Müller, who wrote the history of Siberia in the 1740s, explained that this meant the usual salt lakes of the steppe. The salt there settles of itself in the heat of the sun and can be taken without great labour.[4] Müller also thought that the Tatars had told the Russians of the large lake Yamysh by that year. Later Russian editions of his text put this as a possibility.[5] In 1610, he says, the Kalmyks took possession of the lakes and refused to let the Cossacks of Tara take salt. A shortage followed in the towns of Siberia.[6] These reports concern the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They do not reach back to the Göktürk age.

The lake of the Karluks

Main article: Tuz Köl of the Karluks

The Ḥudūd names the lake twice, once among the lakes of the world and once in its list of Karluk places.[1] Both notices give the same number: seven tribes took their salt from it.[1] The text does not say where the lake lay. Three lakes of the Tian Shan region have been proposed for it, and the question is open.[7]

One of the proposals is the Shor Köl, “Salt Lake”, north-east of Kashgar.[8] A traveller of 1905, quoted by the translator of the Ḥudūd, says that the people collect its salt, carry it as far as Kashgar and use it as it comes, without cleansing.[8] The Ḥudūd itself says only that salt forms in the lake.[9]

Salt in trade

Marvazī wrote about 1120.[10] His chapter on the Turks says that the Kimak have no salt except what merchants import. For a maund of it, the merchants obtain “a fox and sable skin”.[11] The Ḥudūd, for its part, names sable-martens and sheep as the goods of the Kimak.[12] Marvazī also says that the people of Bulghār carry clothes, salt and other goods to the Yūra, a people of the northern forests.[13] They travel in vehicles drawn by dogs over the snow.[13] From the Yūra, excellent sable and other furs are imported.[13] Some of Marvazī’s notices on the Turks go back to the lost geography of Jayhānī. Which ones is argued, and so the date of these two is not known.[14]

A modern account of nomadic trade says that the land of the Uyghurs of Ganzhou was said to produce red salt, among other goods.[15] A note in the same book presumes that it came from Jirantai-nor, the salt lake of the Alashan area in western Inner Mongolia.[16] The Ganzhou kingdom arose among the Uyghurs after 840.

Uses of salt

The Armenian chronicle of Movses Dasxuranci describes the camp of the northern army at Partaw, after the plunder of Tiflis.[17] Each man had a bowl of meat and dishes of salt water to dip it in.[17] The chronicle calls the army Khazar. Whether it was Göktürk is disputed. The article on the Göktürk feast gives the scene in full.[17] The Kutadgu Bilig of 1069–1070 names “bread and salt” as the bond between a leader and the men he feeds.[18] The commander is to keep an open table, and the warriors repay the debt of bread and salt to a generous lord.[18] Mahmud al-Kashgari, who wrote between 1073 and 1077, lists the word tuzluq, “salt container”.[19]

The sources read for this article do not say that salt was boiled from brine, that it preserved meat or that it dressed hides. The Ḥudūd gives the winter food of the Kimak as preserved meat.[20] Marvazī gives it as jerked meat.[11] Neither says how the meat was preserved.

The age of the Göktürks

Apart from place names, the Chinese accounts of the Göktürks contain no word for salt. This holds for the Zhou Shu, the Sui Shu, the Jiu Tang Shu, the Xin Tang Shu, the Bei Shi and the Tongdian. The inscriptions of Kül Tegin, Bilge Khan and Tonyukuk do not mention salt.

One name points to salt without describing it. When the Tang took the lands of Ashina Helu, the last khan of the western Göktürks, they divided them into prefectures.[21] The Hulu Wuque, one of the five Duolu tribes, became the governor-generalship of Yanbo, 鹽泊都督府.[21] The name means “salt lake”.[21] The text does not say whether a lake in the tribe’s country gave it.

The Ashina are known as smiths. The Zhou Shu says that they lived on the southern slope of the Golden Mountain, the Altai, and worked iron for the Rouran.[22] The Sui Shu calls them skilled at ironwork.[23] No source names a salt mine of the Ashina, or any other salt-working of theirs, in the sixth century. Salt lakes and deposits lay in the lands round the Altai, and a people living there could have used them. That is a possibility. The sources do not record it.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 54,98
  2. ^ a b c d e Mongush 2016, p. 67
  3. ^ Gefke 2014, p. 5
  4. ^ a b Gefke 2014, p. 7
  5. ^ Gefke 2014, p. 8
  6. ^ Gefke 2014, p. 9
  7. ^ Minorsky 1970, p. 28,184
  8. ^ a b Minorsky 1970, p. 184
  9. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 54
  10. ^ Minorsky 1942, p. 2,6
  11. ^ a b al-Marwazī early 12th c., p. 32; Minorsky 1942, p. 32
  12. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 99
  13. ^ a b c al-Marwazī early 12th c., p. 34; Minorsky 1942, p. 34
  14. ^ Minorsky 1942, p. 6,106,262; Minorsky 1955, p. 6,106,262
  15. ^ Jagchid 1989, p. 167
  16. ^ Jagchid 1989, p. 218
  17. ^ a b c Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, II.14, p. 99
  18. ^ a b Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 2317–2322
  19. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 350
  20. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 100
  21. ^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  22. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  23. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84

Sources

Literature

  • V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold, 2nd ed. (1970)
  • V. Minorsky, Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir Marvazī on China, the Turks and India (1942)
  • V. Minorsky, Addenda to the Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam (1955)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Andrei A. Mongush (Андрей Александрович Монгуш), О геологическом значении некоторых топонимов Тувы (O geologicheskom znachenii nekotorykh toponimov Tuvy; On the geological roots of some toponyms in Tuva) (2016)
  • Natalya A. Gefke (Наталья Алексеевна Гефке), История соляного дела в Западной Сибири в трудах Г. Ф. Миллера и его последователей в XVIII в. (Istoriya solyanogo dela v Zapadnoi Sibiri v trudakh G. F. Millera i ego posledovatelei v XVIII v.; Western Siberia salt industry in works of G. F. Miller and his followers in the 18th century) (2014)
  • Sechin Jagchid; Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall. Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (1989)
  • Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)
  • Charles J. F. Dowsett (trans.), The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movsēs Dasxuranci (1961)
  • Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir al-Marwazī, طبائع الحيوان Ṭabāʾiʿ al-Ḥayawān (early 12th c.)
  • Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)

Related

What links here5

Places
Tuz Köl of the Karluks
Peoples
History of the Turkic peoples
Institutions and Titles
Furs and Musk among the Turkic Peoples · Raw Materials and Trade among the Turkic Peoples · The Economy of the Steppe Empires

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Salt among the Turkic Peoples.” Turkic Atlas, revised 7 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/institutions/salt-among-the-turkic-peoples/

Last revised: 7 November 2026