Cave of the ancestors

Once a year the khan of the Göktürks took the nobles of his house to a cave and sacrificed there. The Chinese record it in a single sentence, without a name, without a month and without a place. The inscriptions the Göktürks cut for themselves never mention it at all.^[1] It is the oldest rite the sources give them, older than anything the stones say. The Chinese either did not learn where it took place or did not think the place worth writing down.

The account of the Zhou Shu

The passage stands in the description of Göktürk custom. The khan lived on the mountain the Chinese write 都斤山, Dujin, which is identified as Ötüken. His tent opened to the east, because the place where the sun rises was held sacred. Every year he led the nobles to the cave of the ancestors, 先窟, to make offering. In the middle of the fifth month they gathered at the Taren water, 他人水, to sacrifice to the spirit of heaven.^[1] The text then turns to something else. Four or five hundred li from Dujin rose high mountains on which neither grass nor tree grew. The Göktürks called them 勃登凝黎, and the Chinese glossed the name as the spirit of the earth.^[1]

The three places in that passage have to be kept apart. Accounts that run them together end up with a cave that has a distance and a direction no text gives it. The cave has no place at all. The river has a name and a month. The mountain has a distance, which belongs to the mountain and to nothing else.

The direction in the texts

The only direction any text gives belongs to the mountain, not to the cave, and it rests on a single character. The Zhou Shu and the Pien-i-tien give the distance to the earth-spirit mountain as four or five hundred li from Dujin, with no direction at all.^[1] The Bei Shi and the Tongdian write instead “five hundred li to the west”.^[2] Between the two versions stands one character: 四, four, against 西, west.^[3] No Chinese account of the cave or of the mountain points east.

Location

The Chinese did not say where the cave lay. At that point the evidence stops and the interpretations begin. Four interpretations have been put forward.

The oldest interpretation takes the cave for the cave of the legend. The term the Zhou Shu uses is 先窟, the cave of the forebears. Since Pelliot, it has been understood as the cave of the origin story. In that story the she-wolf fled to a mountain, bore ten sons in a cave there, and the Ashina came out of it.^[3] According to the Zhou Shu, the cave opens onto a plain of several hundred li, ringed by mountains on all four sides. The descendants of the wolf multiplied there for several generations. Then they came out of the cave, became subjects of the Rouran, and lived south of the Golden Mountain as ironworkers.^[1] Pelliot takes the Golden Mountain for the Altai, and not for a mountain in Gansu.^[4] The Zhou Shu places that mountain north of Gaochang, and the Bei Shi places it north-west of Gaochang.^[5] Gaochang is Turfan, on the northern rim of the Tarim. A cave north of it would therefore lie in the eastern Tian Shan or on the southern edge of Dzungaria, a thousand kilometres and more west and south of the Orkhon country. On that account the yearly journey was a pilgrimage across the whole width of the steppe, and not a ride of a few days.

The cave may instead lie east of Ötüken, in the country from which the Xiongnu had ruled. The Zhou Shu’s second origin story points the same way. It names the state of Suo, north of the Xiongnu, whose surviving branches commentators place on the upper Yenisei and in the Sayan.^[1] The cave most likely lay east of the khan’s seat, for two reasons. A cult the khan performed every year in person belongs within reach of the seat. And the eastern origin story, not the Turfan one, points to a homeland rather than to a refuge. The Chinese texts neither support this nor contradict it. On the cave they say nothing, and any interpretation has to work with that gap.

A third possibility is raised by the one “east” in the tradition, which is not east of Ötüken at all. The Bei Shi adds to the wolf story that a divine being cast the wolf east of the Western Sea. It opens its account with the statement that the ancestors lived on the right bank of that sea.^[6] Scholars have never settled which water the Western Sea is, so the direction fixes nothing. It has been identified with the Caspian and with the Aral Sea.^[7] A third identification takes it for the lakes of the Edzin Gol and notes that a distant homeland is a common feature of foundation legends.^[8]

A fourth interpretation concerns what the cave was and not where it lay. The Ashina worked iron for the Rouran, and the Chinese speak of caverns as the ancestral or birth places of the Göktürks. The caverns may then have been mines, and the yearly offering was the rite of a house of smiths.^[9] The Sui Shu adds that the western Göktürks sent a high minister every year to the cave where their ancestors had lived, to make the offering.^[10] A Chinese miscellany of the ninth century, the Youyang zazu, is said to tell of a spirit of the lake and to name a cave A-shih-tê.^[11]^[12] The same work is said to give the first ancestors of the Kirghiz a cave and a cow.^[11]^[13]

The rite

Nothing is recorded beyond the fact of the offering: no victim, no words, no season. What can be said concerns its shape rather than its content. The khan performed the rite in person, once a year. Of the three rites the Chinese describe, it was the only one that was not public. The sacrifice to heaven at the Taren water gathered the people, and the earth-spirit mountain was a landmark anyone could see. The cave, by contrast, was for the ruling house alone. A dynasty that returned every year to the place it said it came from was doing with the cave what the stones would later do with the inscriptions.

The Göktürk calendar of rites has a precedent among the Xiongnu. The Shi Ji and the Han Shu give them three gatherings a year. In the first month the chiefs met in a small assembly at the court of the chanyu and made offering. In the fifth month they held the great assembly at Longcheng, 蘢城, and sacrificed to their ancestors, to heaven and earth and to the spirits. In the autumn, when the horses were fat, they gathered at Dailin to count people and herds.^[14] The fifth month is also the month in which the Göktürks gathered at the Taren water to sacrifice to heaven.^[1] The two calendars share the month and the pairing of ancestors with heaven. The sources do not say whether the Göktürks took the rite over from the Xiongnu or both followed the same rhythm of the steppe year.

Turkic Atlas treats the cult of heaven and earth under Tengrism, the seat and the mountain under Ötüken, and the origin stories the cave belongs to under the Ashina.

References

^ a b c d e f g Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99; Tongdian, juan 197
^ a b Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition
^ Pelliot 1929, p. 214
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition, p. 19
^ Golden 1992, p. 118
^ Sinor 1990, p. 296
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b 段成式 ca. 860
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 323–325
^ Ögel 1993, p. 21–22
^ Shiji, juan 110; Han Shu, juan 94

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)
Tongdian, juan 197 (after Sui Shu and Zhou Shu)
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Shiji, juan 110
Han Shu, juan 94 (after Shiji)

Literature

Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
Paul Pelliot, Neuf notes sur des questions d'Asie Centrale (1929)
B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) I (1993)
Duan Chengshi 段成式, 酉陽雜俎 Yǒuyáng Zázǔ (ca. 860)