Sacrifice and the year

The Göktürk ritual year is known from the Chinese histories and from nowhere else. The inscriptions name a god. They say nothing about when or how he was approached. The Chinese name no god, but they set out the occasions.

The two fixed occasions

The Zhou Shu gives them in a single passage.^[1] The khan always lived on the mountain that the Chinese write 都斤山, read as Ötüken. His tent opened to the east, out of reverence for the place where the sun rises.^[1] Every year he led the nobles to sacrifice at the cave of the ancestors.^[1] In the middle of the fifth month, the people gathered at a river to sacrifice to the spirit of heaven.^[1]

The Sui Shu confirms the second occasion and says what was offered. In the middle of the fifth month, they killed many sheep and horses to sacrifice to heaven.^[2] Sheep and horses are the same animals that the funeral takes. This is what one expects of a pastoral people that sacrifices what it has.

The Bei Shi repeats the wording of the Zhou Shu and is not a second witness. Three texts that say the same thing here are one attestation.^[3]

The rite after the division

A later chapter on a different polity gives the best evidence that these occasions were not a compiler’s generalisation. The Sui Shu describes the Western Göktürks after the khaganate had split. It says that on the eighth day of the fifth month they gathered to sacrifice to the god.^[2] It adds that every year they sent a high minister to make offering at the cave in which their forebears had lived.^[2]

Both rites therefore survived the division of the state. They travelled west with the khans who took the western wing. The Western Göktürks maintained the cave rite by proxy across whatever distance separated their court from the cave. The Sui Shu also fixes a day where the Zhou Shu gave only a half-month. The two statements are compatible.

A year without a calendar

The same Zhou Shu passage ends with a sentence that has to be set against everything else. Their writing resembles that of the Hu, and they do not know the calendar. They mark the year only by the greening of the grass.^[1]

Taken at face value, this describes a year counted by the pasture rather than by a reckoning. It was a vegetative year that began when the grass came up in spring. Two other details in the sources fit it. The burial rule waits on the plants. Those who died in spring or summer are buried when the leaves yellow, and those who died in autumn or winter are buried when the leaves come out.^[1] The Sui Shu also says that the Göktürks waited for the moon to be near full before raiding. This is a lunar reckoning used for a practical purpose, not a calendar in the Chinese sense.^[2] The month names that nomads still used in the nineteenth century keep such a year. They speak of the lambing of the sheep, the foaling of the mares, the shearing of the sheep and the slaughter.^[4] In the Altai of the nineteenth century, months were named after the chipmunk coming out of its hole, the hunt for the maral and the old woman who hardly has time to pull on her boots.^[5] The philology of 1879 concluded that the Turks of the earliest times knew only two seasons, summer and winter.^[6] Some scholars hold that the Turkic words for astronomy are few in the first millennium and that much of the vocabulary was borrowed later, in the Uyghur states and under the Karakhanids.^[7] They cite an old calendar of the Pleiades on Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal, which divided the year by the evening rising of the stars. It glosses the Turkic word for the Pleiades, ülker, as “the divider”.^[7] It gives no date for the calendar.^[7]

The difficulty is that the inscriptions of the eighth century date events by the twelve-year animal cycle. This cycle is a calendar, and a borrowed one.^[8] A hundred and fifty years lie between the account of Göktürk custom in the Zhou Shu and the Orkhon monuments. The two statements therefore need not contradict each other. The cycle may have come in between. Alternatively, the Chinese observer may have been describing what he could see of a reckoning he did not recognise.

Making a khan

The Chinese describe one ritual in detail, and it is an installation. It stands apart from the calendar. According to the Zhou Shu, the close attendants and great ministers carried a new ruler on a felt at his raising. They turned him nine times, following the course of the sun, and at each turn the subjects bowed.^[1] Then they helped him onto a horse and twisted a silk about his neck until he was almost at the point of choking. They loosened it and asked him at once how many years he could be khan.^[1] In his confusion he named a number, and they took it as the measure of the length of his reign.^[1]

Three elements of the rite are religious in any ordinary sense. They are the nine turns, the direction of the sun, and the answer given in a state that is not the man’s own. Turkic Atlas treats what the rite means for the office under the title. It treats what it means for the body that performed it under the assembly.

Purification

One rite stands beyond the calendar, and a man who underwent it described it. In 569 the Roman embassy of Zemarchos was passed between fires, with its goods. Attendants performed what the report describes as the sounds and movements of possession.^[9] The purpose was to keep whatever the strangers carried from entering the land with them.^[9] In Menander, the goods were set down in the middle and censed with burning branches of frankincense. The men rang a bell and beat a drum over them. Working themselves into a frenzy, they drove off evil. Then they led Zemarchos himself through the flame.^[10] Purification bears on the ground and not on the year. It therefore belongs beside the sacred Earth-and-Water rather than here. It is recorded here because it is the only Göktürk rite that an outsider watched from inside.

Limits of the record

Theophylact Simocatta says that the Göktürks had priests who, in their view, foretold the future.^[11] Beyond that, no source of the khaganates names an order of priests, an offering calendar beyond these occasions, a sanctuary building, or a formula of prayer.^[1] The khan and the nobility perform the rites that the Chinese record. The ruler leads at the cave, the people assemble at the river, and the men whose state it is make the offering.^[1] As the sources give it, sacrifice among the Göktürks is an act of the polity and not of an institution standing beside the polity. In the Altai of the nineteenth century, the great sacrifice to Ülgen was a household duty. Every married adult owed him one pale horse, which was offered in spring in a birch grove, and only men took part. Erlik received an offering at every misfortune.^[12]

The Old Uyghur texts keep a native vocabulary of offering. Yagïš is the sacrifice, and yagïšlïg orun is the place where it is made.^[13]

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c d Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ Vámbéry 1879, p. 160–162
^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 30
^ Vámbéry 1879, p. 162
^ a b c Roux 1994, p. 103
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 145
^ Menander Protector
^ Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, vii.8.15, p. 191
^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 30–31
^ Wilkens 2024, p. 82

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)
Kül Tegin inscription
Menander Protector
Theophylact Simocatta

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Michael Whitby, Mary Whitby (trans.), The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)
Jens Wilkens (trans. Celalettin Bulut Bostan), Uygur Budizmi ve Manihaizm ile Yerel Dinlerin Etkisi: Dinî Terminoloji Örneği (2024)
Ármin Vámbéry, Die primitive Cultur des turko-tatarischen Volkes, auf Grund sprachlicher Forschungen erörtert (1879)
Vasilii Ivanovich Verbitskii, Алтайские инородцы (Altai Foreigners) (1893)
Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)