Ordu-Balık

Ordu-Balık stood on the left bank of the Orkhon, a day’s ride from the monuments of the Göktürk khans. It is the first city on record that a steppe empire built for itself to live in. The name joins ordu, the khan’s camp, to balık, a walled town. That is what the city was: a camp that had been given walls. The ruin field is known by its Mongolian name, Karabalgasun.

The building of it

The Uyghurs took the Orkhon country in 744. They did there what neither Göktürk khaganate had done: they walled a seat. Bayanchur Khan, the second of their khans, built Ordu-Balık within a generation of 744. He raised a second town on the Selenga as well.^[1] He records the building of fortified places on the Šine-Usu stone. The work was done with Sogdian and Chinese craftsmen. The stone has the khan order Chinese and Sogdians to build a city called Bay Balïq on the Selenga. It dates the palace to about the time of the city itself.^[2] Work on Bay Balïq began in 757. This town was built about the same time, so that both were finished under Bayanchur.^[3]

What stood there was a citadel with a wall and a ditch, quarters laid out beside it, workshops, and outside the wall the ordinary encampment of a steppe court. The khaganate did not stop being nomadic. It acquired a fixed point that could hold a treasury, a garrison, a chancery and an archive. That is a different kind of state from the one the Orkhon inscriptions describe.

The word first needs one qualification. The Göktürk inscriptions name a town on the Tola. The Kül Tegin inscription says that the first of five battles against the Nine Oguz in one year was fought togu balıkda, at the town of Togu.^[4] The Bilge Khan inscription tells the same year in the first person: the first battle at the town of Togu, and the men swimming across the river Togla.^[5] Both monuments were raised in the 730s, a decade before the Uyghurs took the Orkhon country. They give the name and the word balık. They say nothing about who founded the town, whether it had walls, or whether anyone lived there through the year. The texts leave open whether Togu was a built town, and so an earlier one.

The town

The Arab envoy Tamim ibn Bahr reached Ordu-Balık, probably in 821.^[6] He described a royal castle and twelve iron gates of huge size. The town was populous and thickly crowded with markets and trades, and villages and cultivated ground lay close around it.^[1] Above the flat top of the palace stood a golden tent. It could be seen from some distance outside the town and held a hundred people.^[3] The town was no less a tent town for all that. Ministers and commoners lived in tents even in Karabalghasun, and the tent remained the commonest dwelling of the Uyghurs.^[7] An enormous army was garrisoned there.^[8] Excavation has found what such a place needs: metalworkers, potters, weavers, stonemasons, irrigation channels and millstones. It has also found mines for iron, copper, gold and silver in its country.^[1]

The stele

The Karabalgasun stele stood at the site. It carried the same text in three scripts: Chinese, Sogdian and the runiform Turkic. This is the clearest single statement of what the Uyghur court was: a steppe khaganate that conducted its affairs in three written languages at once. The stele is the principal source for the adoption of Manichaeism as the religion of the ruling house.

The end

In 839 the Uyghur lands suffered famine, an epidemic and snow heavy enough to kill the herds. The court was in a struggle over the throne.^[9] In 840 the Kirghiz came down from the upper Yenisei, killed the khan and burned the city.^[10] The city was not rebuilt, and the Kirghiz did not move into it. They took the treasure of the Uyghurs and the Tang princess Taihe. Then they remained in their homeland on the upper Yenisei.^[11]

The fall of 840 ended the Uyghur khaganate on the Orkhon. The Uyghurs scattered to the Tarim and to Gansu.

Some scholars place the cause of the fall in the town life itself. By 840 the Uyghurs drew their wealth from the oasis cities of the south-west. The sanctity of Ötüken had lost its hold once the court took up a foreign religion. The highland fortress no longer seemed worth a war with the Kirghiz.^[12]

The city and the steppe order

From 552 to 840 the Orkhon valley was held by whoever ruled the eastern steppe. For the last ninety-six of those years, the holder lived in a town. The line of steppe empires centred on the Ötüken country breaks with the burning of Ordu-Balık. The Turkic states that follow are built in the Tarim, in Transoxiana and further west, among settled subjects and in cities that were already old.

References

^ a b c Mackerras 1972, p. 14
^ Sinor 1990, p. 321,337
^ a b Sinor 1990, p. 337
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Ross 1930, p. 869
^ Bilge Khan inscription; Ross 1930, p. 874
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 311
^ Sinor 1990, p. 339
^ Sinor 1990, p. 338
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 124
^ Drompp 2005, p. 37-38
^ von Gabain 1943, p. 694–695

Sources

Karabalghasun inscription
Šine-Usu inscription
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
Kül Tegin inscription
Bilge Khan inscription

Literature

Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Michael R. Drompp, Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History (2005)
E. Denison Ross (after Vilhelm Thomsen), The Orkhon Inscriptions; The Tonyukuk Inscription. Being a Translation of Professor Vilhelm Thomsen's Final Danish Rendering (1930)
Annemarie von Gabain, Köktürklerin Tarihine Bir Bakış (1943)
Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)