Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
  • 400
  • 500
  • 600
  • 700
  • 800
  • 900

The Ashina were the ruling dynasty of the Göktürks. In 552 Bumin overthrew the Rouran and founded the First Khaganate. His brother Istemi established the family’s power in the west.[1] Every khan of the First Khaganate from Bumin to the fall of the eastern court in 630 was an Ashina, and so was every ruler of the western wing to its end. Rivalry between the branches of the house divided the realm into an eastern and a western khaganate.[2] The fall of the eastern court in 630 did not end the family. Ashina princes entered Tang service, and Ilterish restored an independent Göktürk state in 682.[3] His sons Bilge Khan and Kül Tegin left the monuments that are the only Turkic-language account of the family.[4] By a claim that is still argued, the khans of the Khazars were Ashina too.[2]

Before 546 the Ashina were a few hundred households in the Altai. They were subjects of the Rouran and ironworkers for them.[5] The Chinese sources answer in several ways how they came to the Altai, where they had been before and what their name means.

Name

The Chinese histories write the name 阿史那, and it is the family name, not a tribal one.[6] The people the Ashina ruled were the Göktürks. The Kül Tegin inscription names the founders and their descendants, but it never writes Ashina at all.[4] No other Old Turkic inscription gives the name in Turkic form either.[7][8] The name has been found in line B1 of the Sogdian Bugut inscription. The monument was set up for the khaganate itself about 584, so this would make the name an attestation from within the realm.[9] The name travelled far. A Turkic military slave rose to govern Egypt for the Abbasid caliph in the 830s and 840s. He bore the name Ashinas, and the scribes who recorded him could not explain it.

Its meaning is not known. In the wolf legend, Ashina is the name of one of the she-wolf’s ten sons. He is the ablest and becomes the ruler of the others.[6] The Zhou Shu and the Sui Shu give the she-wolf no name.[10] One interpretation of the legend makes the wolf the ancestor of the house, Ashina her descendant of the second generation, and his mother a woman of the country.[8] Sergei Klyashtorny proposed a Khotanese-Saka word for “blue”, which he gives as āṣṣeina or āṣṣena. That would make the Ashina “the blue ones”. In his view the form fits the name in sound and in sense, but the claim still needs a text to rest on.[11] He also takes the kök of kök türk to render the name itself, so that the phrase would mean “the Ashina and the Türk”. The proposal is one position among several.[11] Haussig derived the name from Old Persian axšaēna, “dark-coloured”.[12] Two older proposals derive it from Turkic verbs, from aş-, to cross a mountain, and from eş-, to leap. Their evidence is too accidental to persuade.[12] Two further proposals derive the name from a Sanskrit word for a holy sage, ṛṣi, borrowed into Turkic as aši or arši, and from a Tokharian word for noble, ārśi, which gives Aršilaš, noble kings.[7] Nothing in a Turkic source explains the name.

Origin narratives

The Chinese histories give the Ashina several origins, and they do not agree.[13]

The first is a genealogy. The Zhou Shu makes the Göktürks a separate branch of the Xiongnu.[14][15] The Xin Tang Shu says that the Ashina were probably the northern division of the ancient Xiongnu.[16][17] One position adds that the Ashina went back to the house of Modu, through the line of the Southern Xiongnu chanyu.[18] The Bei Shi and the Sui Shu place their earliest home by a “western sea”. Scholars have identified this sea with the Caspian, with the Aral Sea and with nothing at all.[19] This is the claim of compilers writing a century after the Göktürks appeared on the frontier. It is a historiographical position, set out in the ethnogenesis debate, and not a premise. Read loosely, the claim is sound. As Turkic-speaking steppe nomads, the Ashina must have lived within the Xiongnu confederation as one small group among many. Much of the scholarship tests the claim against the Xiongnu core, and tested that way, it fails.[20]

The second is the wolf legend. A neighbouring state destroys a people, and one boy survives, maimed by the soldiers and left in a marsh. A she-wolf feeds him and conceives by him. When the soldiers return, she flees to a cave in a mountain north-west of Gaochang, where she bears ten sons. The sons take wives from outside. One of them is Ashina, and he, the ablest, becomes their ruler.[6][21] The Zhou Shu tells the same story more briefly.[14][22] It is an origin myth and is not to be read literally. It encodes a small group nearly destroyed, unable to fight or to move freely, dependent on others, and reborn in a new country.[20] Scholars interpret the catastrophe of the legend as the Wei conquest in Gansu, which the Sui Shu names in its other account of the family.[20]

The third is a migration. The Sui Shu opens its account by saying that the ancestors of the Göktürks were mixed hu of Pingliang, surnamed Ashina. Taiwu of the Wei crushed the Juqu, the house of the Northern Liang in Gansu. The Ashina then fled with five hundred families to the Rouran, and they lived for generations on the Golden Mountain working iron.[6][23] The Wei Shu records the capitulation of the Liang in 439.[24] That dates the flight. The Bei Shi keeps the Gaochang of the legend. The route of the five hundred families from Gansu through Gaochang to the Altai joins the two accounts.[20] The Sui Shu gives the wolf legend only after that, as what some say. The Zhou Shu has no account of Pingliang, and it ends the legend with the explanation of the name Türk from the helmet shape of the Golden Mountain.[10] That explanation is probably a folk etymology.[25] The link between the Ashina and the Juqu house of Pingliang may be no more than a rumour. The Zhou Shu and the Jiu Tang Shu do not have it. The biography of the Juqu leader Mengxun names neither the Altai nor a crossing of the desert to the Rouran, and his people are found later at Shanshan and Turfan. If so, the Altai is the first certain home of the Ashina.[26]

The Pingliang of the Sui Shu places the ruling clan in the mixed population of the north-western frontier, between Gansu and Chang’an. Local peoples, Xiongnu, Iranians, Indians and Chinese had mingled there for centuries.[27] That frontier origin explains the early and close association of the Ashina with the Sogdians, whose trading communities were established in Gansu. In 545 the Western Wei sent An Nuopantuo, a hu of Jiuquan, to Bumin.[14] His name is Sogdian.[28]

A further account in the Zhou Shu makes the Ashina rulers of a state called Suo, north of the Xiongnu. It traces their rulers through a supernatural genealogy.[14][29] Its commentators place the surviving branches of that state on the upper Yenisei and in the Sayan. The Transeurasian hypothesis names the same region as the homeland of the Turkic languages. The connection of the two is speculation. One position goes further and regards the basin of the Kem, on the upper Yenisei, as the first home of the Göktürks. It attributes the inscriptions found there to the Göktürks and not to the Kirghiz.[30] Another position puts their homeland in the middle Tian Shan, by Lake Issyk-Kul.[31]

In the Suo story the youngest son wins the leap at the tall trees and takes the title A-hsien Shad.[14] The Sui Shu and the Bei Shi use the same title for the man who led the people out of the cave and served the Rouran.[32][33] Scholars argue whether the wolf legend and the Suo story are two tellings of one myth or the separate traditions of tribes that joined.[34] One interpretation regards the wolf-and-cave legend as the state’s own account of its origin and the Suo story as a popular tale. It finds in the second both laws of succession: the eldest son leads first, and the youngest wins at the tree.[35]

The narratives share more than what divides them: a home in Gansu, a catastrophe at Wei hands, a flight north-west, a settlement in the Altai under the Rouran, and iron.[20]

Wolf legend and the Wusun

The wolf legend was not the Ashina’s alone. A closely similar story was told of the Wusun, an Indo-Iranian-speaking people whom the Xiongnu had driven out of Gansu in the second century BC and who settled on the Ili. Versions of it circulated in China as well. A variant of the legend implies kinship between the Ashina and the Kirghiz.[20] The Ashina most likely took the story from the Wusun, their older neighbours in Gansu. The same myth is unlikely to have arisen twice in two adjacent peoples.[20]

The wolf outlived the story. The Zhou Shu reports that the khan’s guards were called fuli, 附離, which it glosses as wolf. It also reports that a golden wolf’s head stood on the standards, because, it says, they were born of a wolf and did not forget it.[14] The Göktürk khans of the seventh century gave wolf’s-head standards to their Chinese clients. In the later tradition, the wolf of the legend is blue, kök böri, blue as the sky of the sky-god. The Chinese accounts give it no colour, and the grey wolf of modern usage is a later recolouring.

Descent

Two facts about the Ashina have seemed to point in opposite directions. The names of the founders and their descendants, Bumin, Istemi, Mukan and Taspar, are not obviously Turkic, and several are plausibly Iranian.[27] Klyashtorny proposed the Saka etymology of the name in a study, and in the same study he argued early Turkic–Iranian contact from these names. The Ashina also lived in Gansu beside the Wusun. From both facts, scholars and, with less restraint, popular discussion have argued an Indo-Iranian or west-Eurasian origin of the ruling house.

The genetic evidence points the other way. In 2023 a genetic study published the ancient genome of Empress Ashina. She was the daughter of Mukan Khan and granddaughter of Bumin, married the Northern Zhou emperor Wu in 568, and died in 582.[36] Her remains, from the Xiaoling mausoleum of her husband near Xianyang in Shaanxi, showed 97.7 per cent north-east Asian and 2.3 per cent west-Eurasian ancestry. The study takes the result as refuting both a west-Eurasian and a multiple origin of the ruling house.[36] It adds that she shared most of her genetic affinity with the Tungusic and Mongolic steppe pastoralists of the post-Iron Age, Rouran, Xianbei and Khitan among them. It also finds that she differed genetically from other ancient Göktürks, which suggests several sources for the population of the khaganate.[36] On this evidence the ruling house of the Göktürks was not Indo-Iranian, and the empress’s parents and grandparents had not intermarried with west-Eurasian groups. The non-Turkic names are then borrowings of the kind every Turkic dynasty made from its neighbours. The Ottomans, too, took Arabic and Hebrew names.[20] One genome establishes the ancestry of one woman. It does not establish the language her great-grandparents spoke.

Under the Rouran

For a century after 439, the Ashina appear in the sources only as subjects. They lived in the Altai, worked iron and rendered it to the Rouran. When Anagui called Bumin his blacksmith slave, both halves of the insult described the relation as the Rouran understood it.[14] The taunt has been taken as a sign that the Ashina were not of nomad origin, since smiths held an honourable standing among nomads.[23] It has also been argued that the ruling houses of the Göktürks and the Khazars came from a line of smith tarkhans.[37] Their leaders bore the title yabgu, a rank above a tribal chief and below a khan. It was most likely the Ashina’s own title from the start.[20] Tuwu, Bumin’s father, held the family through the Tiele risings of 508 and the 520s without joining them. Before 542 the Zhou Shu knows only that the Göktürks raided the Wei frontier every winter, without naming a year or a leader. The raid of 542 is the first it dates.[38]

The location was the family’s principal asset. The Altai gave ore. It also lay on routes running west and south, away from the Rouran centre in the Orkhon and toward the Tiele, the Western Wei frontier and the Tarim.

Map of East Asia about 460: the Rouran in the steppe with their hatched reach west to Lake Balkhash, the Ashina as a small subject territory on the southern slope of the Altai, the road of the Ashina from Gaochang, the march of the Rouran against the Tiele, the Northern Wei and the Liu Song in China
About 460: The Ashina, five hundred families, settle on the southern slope of the Altai as subjects of the Rouran. In the west the Rouran subject the Tiele; in 460 they also make Kan Bozhou king of Gaochang. South of the Gobi lie the Northern Wei and the Liu Song. Modern map; the road of the Ashina is one reconstruction, and the borders in the steppe are approximate.
© Emre-E Yavuz 2026

Scholars have compared the archaeology of the Altai with the story of the migration. One review of the sites of the fourth to sixth centuries takes the five hundred families as having reached the Altai in 460.[39] The burial of a man with his horse under a stone mound is the old tradition of the Altai, and it continues without a break. Square stone enclosures are the memorial structures that later mark the Göktürks everywhere from Mongolia to the Tian Shan. They appear in the Altai in the fifth century as something new. After the seventh century, they stand beside the horse burials as the two forms of the Göktürk rite.[39] The same study locates the bloomery furnaces of the Ashina smiths in the south-east of the region. It sees the early victories over the Rouran as the work of the best-armed army in the steppe. It notes that no excavated site fully corresponds to the Chinese description of the Göktürk funeral, which looks compiled from more than one period.[39]

Ironworking itself was old in the steppe. At the domestic sites of the Khanui valley, north of the Khangai, slag turns up at six of the excavated occupation areas of the Xiongnu period. These were open seasonal camps rather than permanent settlements.[40] What made the Ashina useful to the Rouran was scale, skill and location, not the possession of a secret.

Map of Asia around 542: the Rouran Khaganate across the eastern steppe, with the Ashina in the Altai and the Tiele from Dzungaria to the Caspian as its subjects, beside the Western and Eastern Wei, the Liang, the Tuyuhun, the Tarim Basin, the Hephthalites, the Nezak Huns, Sasanian Persia, the Eastern Roman Empire and Goguryeo
Asia around 542, the year Bumin became yabgu of the Ashina: the Ashina in the Altai and the Tiele as subjects of the Rouran, who rule the eastern steppe, beside the Western and Eastern Wei, the Liang, the Tuyuhun, the Hephthalites, Sasanian Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire. Modern map; the frontiers are approximate.
© Emre-E Yavuz 2026

The eastern and western branches

Bumin’s victory in 552 made the family the ruling house of an empire.[14] His sons Issik, Mukan and Taspar followed him in turn in the east.[14] Istemi held the west as yabgu, and his son Tardush followed him there. Each branch of the family thereby had its own territory and its own following.[2] In one view the Ashina formed an estate of their own. Over the conquered countries the aristocracy acted as a ruling class, and among its own people it was the leading estate.[41]

The succession followed the rule of Töre: brother followed brother before a son followed a father, so that the throne did not stay in one line of the house. The crisis after Taspar’s death in 581 was the exception.[6] Taspar wanted Mukan’s son Toremen to succeed him. The great men objected to Toremen’s mother, and Ishbara threatened war if Toremen were raised. The Sui Shu gives the objection as the low rank of his mother.[6] Therefore Taspar’s son Amrak took the throne instead. Amrak then yielded it to Ishbara, and Toremen received the title Apa Khan and remained a rival.[6] Where the rule ran out, between the sons of brothers, the standing of a prince’s mother and the backing of powerful men decided.[6] The descent of the Ashina from a she-wolf has been taken for a sign of a matrilineal society. The later Göktürk order was patrilineal, however, and the one case in which a mother’s rank counted is this passing-over of Toremen.[42]

The Göktürk inscriptions give the rule’s other half. Heaven chose the khan, and he held the realm and the law. The begs and the people who were straight with each other were what let him hold it.[4]

Once a year the khan led the nobles to sacrifice at the cave of the ancestors, 先窟. In the middle of the fifth month, they gathered at a river to sacrifice to the spirit of heaven. The Chinese did not learn where the cave was, or what was done there beyond the sacrifice.[14][43] However the cave of the ancestors is interpreted, the house returned once a year to the place it said it came from. Some scholars hold that the khans, who were believed to descend from the Ashina, were buried apart from the common people, who called themselves “black bone”.[44]

Marriage carried the family beyond the steppe. Mukan promised his daughter to the Northern Zhou, then weighed an offer from the Northern Qi. The Zhou envoys waited at his camp for years before Empress Ashina reached her husband’s court in 568.[45] After Emperor Wu’s death she was empress dowager at Chang’an. She outlived the Zhou dynasty and died under the Sui in 582, at thirty-two sui.[45] Her tomb near Xianyang and its gold seal survive, and her genome is the one piece of biological evidence for the family.

Under the Tang (630–682)

The Tang defeated the eastern court in 630 and brought the western khaganate under their authority in the 650s.[46] For fifty years the Ashina served the Chinese emperor as generals and governors. The chiefs of the old realm kept their followers and their hereditary titles. The Jiu Tang Shu places Ilterish’s own forebears among these chiefs.[3]

The Kül Tegin inscription remembers the period as fifty years of service to China, in which the Göktürk begs gave up their Göktürk names and took Chinese ones. It blames the loss on rulers and followers who failed each other, and on Chinese deceit.[4]

The restored dynasty (682–745)

In 682 Ilterish gathered followers and founded the Second Khaganate.[3] The Jiu Tang Shu calls him a distant kinsman of Ilig, the last khan of the eastern court, and an Ashina. He gave his brothers the senior commands and rebuilt the state around the family.[3] His brother Kapgan succeeded him. Ilterish’s sons Bilge and Kül Tegin grew up as commanders in their uncle’s realm.[47]

Kapgan died in 716. Kül Tegin killed his uncle’s son and his followers and raised his brother Bilge to the throne.[3] Bilge ruled as khan, and Kül Tegin commanded the army.[3] The brothers’ monuments speak of service to the people and of fidelity to the founders. The Chinese account keeps the killing by which their branch took the throne.[48]

After Bilge’s death, the dynasty weakened under young rulers and rival commanders. The Basmil, the Karluk and the Uyghurs rose against it. The Xin Tang Shu records the death of Ozmish in 744 and of his brother Baimei in 745. After that, Bilge’s widow and her followers submitted to the Tang.[16] The Uyghurs took the Orkhon in 744, and with it the last Ashina throne in the east.[2]

After 744

In the west, the line is held to have gone on for two centuries more. The khans of the Khazars ruled the Volga and the northern Caucasus into the 960s. Scholars argue that these khans were Ashina, and the case is strong. It rests on the royal title itself, on the closeness of the Khazars to the western Göktürk realm, and on an investiture with ritual strangulation like the ceremonies the Chinese sources describe for the Ashina. It also rests on the steppe setting, where royal Göktürk descent was the only source of legitimacy there was.[49]

Three objections stand against the case. The first concerns the derivation of the house from Yipishekui, a beaten Nushibi khan who is supposed to have moved west about 651. It is a hypothesis with many problems. The second concerns the one text that seems to say the descent outright, the Ḥudūd al-ʿālam with its “descendants of Ansā”. Scholars have understood it differently, taking the word for a corruption of the title išād. The third is that the Chinese transcription of Ashina is itself uncertain in pronunciation. If the case holds, the line lasted until the Khazar state fell in 969. For the years after 744, it remains contested.

A second claim to the name comes from the Karluks. After the fall of the Uyghur khaganate in 840, the ruler of the Karluk union of the Yaghma, Chikil and Tukhsi proclaimed himself khan as a descendant of the Ashina. Two khans shared the rule, and the Chikil one was the senior.[50]

The family’s own account of itself is short. The inscriptions say that Bumin and Istemi sat on the throne and held the realm and the law of the Göktürk people, and that their descendants lost it and won it back. They say nothing of Gansu, of the wolf, of the Xiongnu or of Suo.[4] Everything else about where the Ashina came from was written by their neighbours.

Family table

No descent recorded for Üç Tuğlu Khan, Ashina Simo, Irbis Ishbara Yabgu Khan, Ashina Helu, Ashina Funian, Ozmish Khan, Right Shad (d. 741), Axian Shad, Börü Shad, Chebi Khan, Diqincha, Duoxifu, Silifa.

Drawn from the kinship given in each article: fathers and sons, daughters, wives and husbands, those from other houses in their own colour. A dashed box stands where a grandparent is named but no parent; a dot marks a place taken from a brother.

References

  1. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Kül Tegin inscription
  2. ^ a b c d Golden 1992
  3. ^ a b c d e f Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  4. ^ a b c d e Kül Tegin inscription
  5. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  7. ^ a b Erkoç 2018, p. 54
  8. ^ a b Klyaştornıy 1990, p. 137
  9. ^ Bugut inscription; Erkoç 2018, p. 54
  10. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  11. ^ a b Klyaştornıy 1990, p. 139
  12. ^ a b Klyaştornıy 1990, p. 138
  13. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
  14. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  15. ^ Kwanten 1979, p. 29–32
  16. ^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  17. ^ Hassan 1985, p. 244
  18. ^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 97–99
  19. ^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  20. ^ a b c d e f g h i Yavuz 2025
  21. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 22–24
  22. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 20–21
  23. ^ a b Lattimore 1951, p. 528
  24. ^ Wei Shu, juan 4
  25. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 57
  26. ^ Taşağıl 1995, p. 13
  27. ^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 206
  28. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 205
  29. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 25–28
  30. ^ Ögel 1984, p. 196, 198
  31. ^ Togan 1981, p. 25, 36–37
  32. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
  33. ^ Taşağıl 1995, p. 12, 14
  34. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 52
  35. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Ögel 1993, p. 25–29
  36. ^ a b c al. 2023, abstract
  37. ^ Togan 1981, p. 44, 51
  38. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 27
  39. ^ a b c Konstantinov 2018
  40. ^ Houle 2011
  41. ^ Khazanov 1994, p. 146, 256
  42. ^ Kwanten 1979, p. 42
  43. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 21
  44. ^ Togan 1981, p. 112
  45. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 9
  46. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  47. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Kül Tegin inscription
  48. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  49. ^ Golden 1992, p. 240
  50. ^ Khazanov 1994, p. 260

Sources

Literature

  • Jean-Luc Houle; Lee G. Broderick, Settlement Patterns and Domestic Economy of the Xiongnu in Khanui Valley, Mongolia (2011)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Nikita Konstantinov; Vasilii Soenov; Synaru Trifanova; Svetlana Svyatko, History and culture of the early Türkic period. A review of archaeological monuments in the Russian Altai from the 4th–6th century AD (2018)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Yang et al., Ancient genome of Empress Ashina (2023)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç, Çin ve Tibet Kaynaklarına Göre Göktürk Mitleri (2018)
  • Sergey G. Klyaştornıy (Klyashtornyj), Orhon Anıtlarında Türklerin Krallık Soyunun Adı (1990)
  • Ümit Hassan, Eski Türk Toplumu Üzerine İncelemeler (1985)
  • İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
  • Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1994)
  • Luc Kwanten, Imperial Nomads. A History of Central Asia, 500–1500 (1979)
  • Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1951)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) I (1993)
  • Ahmet Taşağıl, Gök-Türkler, Bd. I (1995)
  • Zeki Velidi Togan, Umumi Türk Tarihine Giriş I (1981)

Related

What links here88

Persons
Anagui · Arsilas · Axian Shad · Börü Khan · Bumin Khan · Diqincha · Dusuliu · Empress Ashina · Ilterish Khan · Istemi · Kuhanzhen · Mukan Khan · Nadulu Shad · Nishufu Khan · Qinyu Shad · Rudan Khan · Rudan Tegin · Silifa · Taspar Khan · Tuwu · Wuti Khan · Yizhi Nishidu
States
First Göktürk Khaganate · Khazar Khaganate · Northern Wei · Rouran Khaganate · Suo · Tang · Xiongnu · Yabgus of Tokharistan
Conflicts
Rouran Domination of the Turkic Peoples · The Rouran–Wei wars, 402–449 · The Turkic War of Independence
Battles & Events
Defeat of the Tiele, 546 · Göktürk raid of 542 · The Flight of the Ashina (439) · The Rouran Marriage Refusal (546) · Western Wei embassy of 545
Places
Altai · Cave of the ancestors · Pingliang · Shiveet Ulaan · Wuwei · Xihai
Peoples
Eurasian Nomads · Göktürks · History of the Turkic peoples · On Oq · Rouran · Sogdians · The Great Empires of the Steppe · Tiele · Wusun · Xianbei
Lineages
Ashide · Luandi
Institutions and Titles
Baga · Bloomery Furnaces of the South Altai · Chur · Göktürk Ironworking · Göktürk Weapons · Khazar Dual Kingship · Kirghiz Iron and Gold · Shad · Tamga · Tarkhan · Tegin · The Economy of the Steppe Empires · Toy · Tuğ · Yabgu · Yi Khan
Religions
Asena the She-Wolf (Gök Börü) · Buddhism among the Göktürks · Kam (Turkic Shaman) · Stone Figures · Tengrism · Turkic Mythology · Ulukayın (Turkic World Tree)
Languages
The Sogdian language
Sources
Bugut inscription · Old Tibetan report on the northern kings · Runiform finds in Mongolia, 1990 to 1999
Controversies
Archaeogenetics of the Steppe Empires · The Göktürks and the Xiongnu · The language of the Xiongnu · The origin of the Old Turkic script · The Turkic ethnogenesis debate

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Ashina.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/lineages/ashina/

Last revised: 8 November 2026