Iron Gate

The Iron Gate is the narrow pass in the Baysun range through which the road from Samarkand runs south towards Bactria. In the Göktürk inscriptions it serves as a measure of reach, not as a place in its own right. The Kül Tegin inscription says the armies of the second khaganate campaigned westward as far as the Iron Gate and the Pearl river. The Tonyukuk inscription tells the march there in the first person.^[1]

Tonyukuk’s account gives the sequence. The army went across the Pearl River and the Syr Darya to the mountain called Tinsi Oglı, and on to the Iron Gate. There the Sogdians came in.^[2] The Iron Gate is not the Caspian Derbent. The inscriptions do not name Derbent, and the Göktürks reached it from the other side.

The boundary of Sogd and Tokharistan

The Arabic geographers make the Iron Gate and the watershed between the Oxus and the river of Nakhshab the boundary between the kingdoms of Sogd and Tokharistan.^[3] The Göktürks may at first have taken only the Hephthalite lands north of it, between 563 and 568. The Göktürk shad who ruled the small kingdoms south of it from Huo about 630 would then have come later.^[4]

References

^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 288–289, 381, 403
^ Markwart 1938, p. 92
^ Markwart 1938, p. 44–45,148

Sources

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)
Josef Markwart, Wehrot und Arang. Untersuchungen zur mythischen und geschichtlichen Landeskunde von Ostiran (1938)