19 articles
Places
Regions, mountains, rivers and cities.
- Altai minimal Mountain region in which the Chinese histories place the Ashina as subjects of the Rouran.
- Bukhara Sogdian city in the lower Zerafshan valley, one of the planned towns of the fifth century, seat of the largest Hephthalite garrison, taken by Istemi's army in the Göktürk–Hephthalite war and thereafter the residence of the Ashina nobility in the west; reached by Bahram Chobin in 589, mourned at Kül Tegin's funeral in 732, and the home of the Zandaniji silks.
- Cave of the ancestors The cave to which the khan led the nobles once a year to sacrifice, according to the Zhou Shu: the one Göktürk cult site the Chinese record and the inscriptions never mention, and the only one whose place is not given.
- Chach The Tashkent oasis on the middle Syr Darya, a zone of contact between nomad and settled, which entered the Sogdian cultural sphere in the sixth and seventh centuries under Göktürk overlordship; the Chinese raided it in 751.
- Derbent Fortress city on the Caspian shore of Dagestan where the Caucasus comes down to the sea, the 'gate' of the Persian and Arabic names: the gate of Sul that Khosrow I walled against the khagan Sinjibu, the place the king of the Khazars reached in 588 by Tabari's account, the fortress before which Börü Shad appeared with the Göktürk army in 627, and the Bab al-Abwab of the Arab–Khazar wars.
- Dzungaria The basin between the Altai and the Tian Shan, north of the Turfan depression: the country into which the Gaoche seceded from the Rouran in 487, the Tiele range of the sixth century, the ground Yavuz 2025 gives Bumin's victory of 546 and the first fight of 552, the corridor through the Dzungarian Gate by which the Göktürk reached the Tarim, the line where the eastern and western wings met, and the seat of the Tang's Beiting protectorate.
- Gaochang The kingdom of the Turfan depression, Karakhoja, ruled by the Qu family from 502 to 640: the region north-west of which the Sui Shu sets the cave of the Ashina wolf, the city to which Yavuz 2025 brings the five hundred Ashina families from Gansu, the refuge of Heshana in 611, the ally whose envoys sat at Tong Yabgu's court and whose king bore the Turkic title ilteber; Xizhou under the Tang from 640, Qocho under the Uyghurs.
- Herat City of Khurasan on the Hari Rud, in what is now western Afghanistan, the Haraiwa of the Achaemenid satrapies: the point to which Tabari's Šāba, king of the Türk, advanced with his army in 588, beyond which Bahram Chobin marched to kill him with an arrow, and where, by Yavuz 2025, Bahram in 589 retook the city and the golden throne of the Göktürk khan; Göktürk again after 607, and the western neighbour of the Tokhara yabgus.
- Huaihuang The easternmost of the Six Garrisons of the Northern Wei along the northern frontier, north of which Bumin destroyed the main Rouran army in the first month of 552; the line on which Anagui had put down the garrison revolt for the Wei in 525, and the ground where the Rouran khaganate ended.
- Mumocheng The walled capital that Anagui built for the Rouran in his last years, with a double wall, an elite guard and a Chinese adviser, which Bumin left standing in 552; the Chinese chapters read here do not name it, and archaeology has not found it.
- Ordos The steppe plateau inside the great bend of the Yellow River, the ground from which every Chinese wall could be turned: taken from the Xiongnu by the Qin and won back by Modu, the theatre of Datan's war with the Wei, the place where Issik Khan destroyed the last Rouran army in 553, Ilig's camp before his accession, the land the Tang gave the surrendered Göktürk in 630, and the six Sogdian prefectures the Tang handed to Kapgan in 698.
- Orkhon valley minimal The valley of the Orkhon in central Mongolia, the seat of every steppe empire from the Xiongnu to the Mongols and the site of the Göktürk inscriptions of the eighth century.
- Ötüken The forested upland of the Orkhon country that the Göktürk inscriptions call sacred and name as the one place from which the realm can be held; seat of the Rouran, the Göktürk and the Uyghurs.
- Paikent Merchant town at the desert edge of the Bukhara oasis, one of the small planned towns of fifth-century Sogdiana, walled on a square of 330 metres; the 'city of merchants' of the Arabic sources, whose richest man offered five thousand rolls of Chinese silk for his life when Qutayba took and sacked it in 706 after it had called on the Türk for help.
- Samarkand Chief city of Sogdiana on the Zarafshan; its citadel was raised by the Kidarite rulers in the fifth century, its throne held by a Xiongnu king in 457, and its Afrasiab painting shows Göktürk warriors at the feet of the king.
- Sogdiana The land of the Zarafshan and its neighbours between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, with Samarkand and Bukhara at its heart; remade under the Kidarites, held by the Hephthalites from 509, taken by the Göktürk in 560, and the base of the Sogdian trading network until the Arab conquest.
- Suyab Town on the Chu river in present-day Kyrgyzstan, the site of Ak-Beshim: a Sogdian colony grown up around a castle, the seat of the western Göktürk from Tardush onward, the place where Xuanzang met Tong Yabgu, the line between the Üç Tuğlu and the Nushibi of the Ten Arrows, the river on which Su Dingfang finished Ashina Helu, and from 690 the centre of the Türgesh.
- Tarim Basin The desert basin south of the Tian Shan whose rim of oasis cities, Kucha, Karashahr, Kashgar, Khotan and Gaochang among them, the Rouran and the Hephthalites had divided, which the Göktürk took in the 550s through the Dzungarian Gate and held as tributaries without governing them, and which the Tang took from the western Göktürk in the 640s and made the Four Garrisons.
- Tiflis Capital of the Georgian kingdom of Kartli, held for the Persians in the 620s, besieged by Heraclius and Börü Shad in 627 and taken and sacked by the Göktürk after the battle of Nineveh.