Once a year the khan of the Göktürk 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, and the inscriptions the Göktürk cut for themselves never mention it at all.[1] It is the oldest rite the sources give them, older than anything the stones say, and the one whose location the Chinese either did not learn or did not think worth writing down.

What the Zhou Shu says

The passage stands in the description of Göktürk custom. The khan lived on the mountain the Chinese write 都斤山, Dujin, which is read 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; and in the middle of the fifth month they gathered on the Tamir river to sacrifice to the spirit of heaven.[1] Then, in the next breath, the text turns to something else: four or five hundred li from Dujin rose high mountains on which neither grass nor tree grew, which the Göktürk called 勃登凝黎 and the Chinese glossed as the spirit of the earth.[1]

Three things are worth holding apart, because the accounts that run them together produce a cave with a distance and a direction that no text gives it. The cave has no place. The river has a name and a month. The mountain has a distance, and the distance belongs to the mountain.

The one direction in the texts is west, and it is a copyist’s letter

The Zhou Shu and the Pien-i-tien give the distance to the earth-spirit mountain without any direction: four or five hundred li from Dujin.[1] The Bei Shi and the Tongdian write instead “five hundred li to the west”.[2] The difference between the two readings is a single character: 四, four, against 西, west.[3]

No Chinese account of the cave or of the mountain points east.

Where the cave was

The Chinese did not say, and this is the point at which the evidence stops and the readings begin. Three are worth setting out.

The cave of the legend. The term the Zhou Shu uses is 先窟, the cave of the forebears, and the reading that has held since Pelliot takes it for the cave of the origin story: the mountain to which the she-wolf fled, in which she bore ten sons, and out of which the Ashina came.[3] The Zhou Shu places that mountain north of Gaochang, the Bei Shi north-west of it.[4] Gaochang is Turfan, on the northern rim of the Tarim; a cave north of it would 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 reading the yearly journey was a pilgrimage across the whole width of the steppe, and not a ride of a few days.

The eastern reading. Against this, the cave may be sought east of Ötüken, in the country from which the Xiongnu had ruled and towards which the Zhou Shu’s second origin story points: the state of Suo, north of the Xiongnu, whose commentators place its surviving branches on the upper Yenisei and in the Sayan.[1] This work holds that the cave lay east of the khan’s seat, on the ground that a cult the khan performed every year in person belongs within reach of the seat, and that the eastern origin story, not the Turfan one, is the one that points to a homeland rather than to a refuge. The Chinese texts do not support it and do not contradict it: on the cave they are silent, and silence is what a reading has to work with here.

East of the Western Sea. There is one east in the tradition, and it is not east of Ötüken. The Bei Shi adds to the wolf story that a divine being cast the wolf east of the Western Sea, and opens its account with the statement that the ancestors lived on the right bank of that sea.[2] Which water the Western Sea is has never been settled — the Caspian, Lake Balkhash and nothing at all have all been proposed — so the direction fixes nothing.

What was done there

Nothing is recorded beyond the fact of the offering: no victim, no words, no season. What can be said is structural. The rite was the khan’s, performed in person and once a year, and it was the only one of the three the Chinese describe that was not public: the sacrifice to heaven at the Tamir gathered the people, and the earth-spirit mountain was a landmark anyone could see, while the cave was for the house. 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 article on Tengrism carries the cult of heaven and earth, Ötüken the seat and the mountain, and the Ashina the origin stories the cave belongs to.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  2. ^ a b Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
  3. ^ a b Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition
  4. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99

Sources

Literature

  • Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)

Related

What links here4

Polities
Suo
Places
Ötüken
Lineages
Ashina
Religions
Tengrism

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Cave of the ancestors.” Turkic Atlas, revised 12 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/places/ancestral-cave/

Last revised: 12 September 2026