Tamga

A tamga is a mark: a few strokes cut into the hide of an animal, into rock, into a coin die or a seal. It says whose the thing is. A branch of a house takes its parent’s mark and alters it. Therefore a set of tamgas can carry a claim about descent.

Tamgas are among the few steppe records that survive without a scribe. Scholars read them for exactly that reason. The mark of the Ashina, the marks on the coins of the Türgesh and the Karluks, and the signs on the rocks of Semirechye have each been used to place a house on a map or in a line. The Türgesh struck coins on the Chinese model, with Sogdian letters and Turkic legends, and some of them carry a tamga.^[1] The stone of Suci in northern Mongolia carries a tamga at its very top.^[2] It is an open question how far the variation between related marks encodes an actual genealogy, and how far it follows a convention. In the later genealogy of the Oghuz, every four of the twenty-four tribes share one totem, a bird of prey, and each has its own tamga.^[3] The Oghuz may therefore have lived at first as six tribes.^[3]

In Mongolia, tamgas also stand beside inscriptions. At Soyo Khüren two tamgas stand at the head of a text.^[4] At Tavan Tolgoi some twenty tamgas, all derived from a snake sign, surround a runiform text.^[5] The finders think that the tamga on a standing stone at Dövön may belong to the Yaglakar, and that the one beside a text at Dukhyn Buuts may belong to the Ediz.^[6] At Ikh Bichigt in Govi-Ugtaal, a runic line and two words in Uyghur script stand beside three tamgas. One of them is the ibex sign, which the finder takes for that of the Ashina.^[7] Rock pictures and rock texts in Mongolia are dated to the Göktürk age mostly by comparison with the ibex sign on the Kül Tegin stele or with runic texts whose date is known.^[8]

The word is older than the book. Among those who came to the funeral from the Türgesh khan and from the Oguz, the Kül Tegin inscription names a tamgaçı, the man who bears the royal seal and uses it.^[9]

The Tonyukuk inscription says that no tögin horse galloped among the Göktürks. Orkun understands tögin, following Kashgari, as the branded gelding, which was led to war only in the last necessity. Thomsen had read the word as “reins”.^[10]

In later Turkic sources, gold stands for rule: the golden tamga, the golden belt and the golden cup are signs of a ruler.^[11]

In the Kutadgu Bilig, written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, tamğa is the seal of office. The king hands his vizier the seal. Letters are sealed with it. The cupbearer seals the drink he has mixed. The keeper of the seal is the tamğaçı.^[12] The book never uses the word for the mark of a clan or a herd.^[13]

References

^ Ögel 1984, p. 194
^ Orkun 1994, p. 155
^ a b Sümer 1972, p. 4
^ Badam 2024, p. 30
^ Badam 2024, p. 33
^ Badam 2024, p. 33–34
^ Battulga 2000, p. 48
^ Tsogtbaatar 2000, p. 369
^ Erdal 2004, p. 148
^ Orkun 1994, p. 118, 124
^ Ögel 1978, p. 175
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 1036, 2902, 3275, 4046
^ Kutadgu Bilig

Sources

Kutadgu Bilig

Literature

Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
Hüseyin Namık Orkun, Eski Türk Yazıtları (1994)
Faruk Sümer, Oğuzlar (Türkmenler). Tarihleri, boy teşkilâtı, destanları (1972)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş IV: Türklerde yemek kültürü (1978)
Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)
Azzaya Badam, Moğolistan’da 2018–2021 Yılları Arasında Bulunan Runik Yazıtlar (2024)
Tsendiyn Battulga, Moğolistan’da Yeni Bulunan Göktürk Yazıtları (2000)
B. Tsogtbaatar, Moğolistan Bölgesindeki Eski Türk Anıtları Çalışmaları Meselesi Üzerine (2000)