The Turkic languages have no single word for the soul. They have a group of words. Each names a different thing that a living being has and a dead one has lost: breath, luck, a likeness, the thinking part, the ghost that stays behind.[1] The words are tın, breath; kut, life force and fortune; sür, appearance and vigour; süne, the thinking soul; tyula, a small white soul; and üzüt, the soul of the dead. One of them, Kut, stands in the inscriptions of the Göktürks, in the mouth of the khan. The others come from the Old Uyghur texts, from the dictionary of Kashgari, and from the missionaries and ethnographers who wrote down the beliefs of the Altaians from the middle of the nineteenth century.

Kut in the inscriptions

The Göktürk inscriptions use Kut in the words of the ruler. The ruler says that he sat on the throne because Heaven ordained it and because his Kut was there. He says that by the Kut of his mother the katun, who was like Umay, his brother Kül Tegin received a man’s name.[2] Kut belongs to a woman here as well as to a khan. One line of the Bilge Khan inscription takes it away: Heaven and the sacred Earth-and-Water, it says of the khan’s uncle, did not give him his Kut.[3]

A runic inscription from the Uyghur capital, the second of Karabalgasun, puts the same word into a lament: on the blue sky my Kut was thin, on the brown earth my road was short.[4] The lament joins a thin Kut to a short road. The Old Uyghur Buddhist texts say the same of Kut as a whole: a thick Kut means a long life, a thin one a short life.[5] In the Irk Bitig, the book of omens, the Kut of Heaven is given to birds, to wild animals and to people alike. An omen counts the lack of Kut among the signs of a bad answer.[6]

The inscriptions never say what Kut is. The text of the Kül Tegin inscription does not use tın, tınlıg, sür, süne, tyula or üzüt.[2]

The Old Uyghur texts

The Old Uyghur Manichaean and Buddhist texts supply further words. The commonest word for a living being in them is tınlıg, “having tın”.[7] It occurs only in Manichaean and Buddhist texts and not in the Göktürk inscriptions.[8] It is probably a loan translation of the Sogdian wātδār, “living being”. The Sogdian word is built on wāt, wind or breath. The Turkic word therefore renders it member by member: a being “with breath”.[9] Tın itself means breath or spirit.[10]

Kut has more than one use in these texts. In Manichaean and Buddhist writings it stands in the doublet kut wahšik, “protective spirit”, whose second member is a Sogdian loan. Kut in this sense is therefore probably a local Turkic word that is older than the Manichaean period.[11] Manichaean texts and, more rarely, Buddhist ones use it for a spirit, also a forsaken spirit.[11] A prayer in the Maitrisimit wishes a lady, “our mother”, a long life with thick Kut, and compares her to the deity of Kut who stands before the eyes.[12] The derived words are kutlug, fortunate, kutsuz, unfortunate, and kutad-, to find divine favour or to bring good luck. Kıv and ülüg are probably old synonyms or near synonyms.[12] A Manichaean confession has the hearers keep asking for kut and blessing. The Maitrisimit knows “such good favour, such good luck and Kut” that a Buddha is born in the speaker’s house.[13]

Üzüt is the soul that survives. The Old Uyghur texts gloss it as the indestructible element in a person.[12] It can be released from the torments of hell. It is fed: one should give food to a departed soul.[12] The phrase üzüt yäklär, spirits and demons, stands in the oldest manuscripts of the Sūtra of the Eight Brilliances and renders the Chinese 鬼神.[12] The texts also have öz konok, a translation of the Sanskrit word for a vital point, which they gloss as the place of the soul.[12]

Kashgari’s dictionary

Kashgari’s dictionary of the 1070s has the roots of two of these words. The verb tın-, to breathe, stands behind tındur-, “he let me rest”, whose root, Kashgari says, is tındı, “he breathed”.[14] The word öz means the heart and what the belly holds, and a belly-ache is özüm agrıdı.[15] Under it stands öz qonuqı, “the soul’s guest”, the name of a part of the body that palpitates. Kashgari says that it is said to be the spirit. He quotes a verse about a beloved who has gone and taken the speaker’s spirit with him.[15] A man who has a familiar spirit is called ešlig, from eš, companion.[15] Kashgari’s öz qonuqı and the Old Uyghur öz konok are probably the same compound.

The six souls of the Altaians

The Altai missionary Verbitskii, who served among the Altaians from 1853 for about thirty-seven years, gives the fullest list.[16] The Altaians, he says, recognise a duality of the soul. When a man is confused and weak they say that an evil spirit has carried off his soul. They hold that a man can stay alive a long time without it. The lost soul can be brought back by ransom through the kam’s rite, and the man then recovers. This is because beyond the souls that were carried off, one soul remains in him: tın.[17]

Tın is breath, from the verb for breathing. It is vitality, the soul that animals and plants have too, and the tie between soul and body. Fresh trees, fresh grass and a sharp blade of steel are said to be tındu, “with tın”, and sown seed revives with rain: its tın enters it. When the tın tears, the man dies. The Altaians are said to hear it tear in a dying man, and “may your tın snap” is a curse. They keep people from standing close to a dying man, because they believe that the tın of a healthy person passes its life on to the dying one and prolongs his struggle.[18] If the soul that was carried off does not come back, the tın breaks. The soul of a dead man is called üzüt-tın, the one that has torn off.[17]

Suzy, the second, is the strength that a man or a beast needs to be healthy and to live long. The dead are said to have taken the suzy of the cattle, and the suzy of a dead man wanders.[19] Kut is almost the same. Verbitskii derives it from kudup, “to vanish”, and gives it as vital force, fertility, luck and comeliness. Kudu čılıp pardı, “the soul has leapt out”, is said of a man so frightened that he has lost his wits, and the kam brings the soul back. The land can lose its Kut and then bears nothing and has lost its beauty. A dwelling place can lose it and become unlucky.[19]

Tyula is found in men only. It is imagined as small as a rifle bullet, white, round and always moving, like quicksilver. The kams show it on the palm as a soul that they have caught in the rite.[19] Sür, from the verb for driving out, is the soul that leaves a man at death, or that the kam drives out of the yurt on the fortieth day after it. It is also a likeness, a picture, and cattle have it too. The word means in addition fat, and appearance, beauty and majesty. A man who has lost his sür is half dead. A man of sür has an imposing bearing and a penetrating eye. The sür of the dead howls and does not want to part from the things with which it grew together in the body.[19]

Süne is found in men only. It is the reasoning part of a man, and it has the shape of a whole man when it leaves the body. After death it wanders about the places it knew and cries. Sometimes it calls a living person by name, after which that person soon dies.[19] In the great rite for the herds the kam goes in trance to the dwelling of the souls of the dead kin of the house, üzütter eri in Verbitskii’s spelling. He speaks with them in their voices, gets them drunk, and drives away their cattle. The dead are believed to lead the cattle off with them.[17]

SIX ALTAIAN SOULS AND WHO HAS THEM mancattle andother animalsplantsland anddwellings tınsuzykuttyulasürsüne breath, vitalitystrength to live longlife force, fertility, lucksmall white soullikeness, vigourthe reasoning soul
The six souls of the Altaians and the beings and places that have them. A dot means that the missionary's account of the nineteenth century gives the soul to that being. Other accounts of the same peoples add trees and the flock for kut. Modern diagram.

The same words in other accounts

Later surveys of the same peoples draw on that material and on a few other collectors. One of them names the soul that leaves the body of an Altai Tatar at a fright kut, and gives the word the senses of good looks, luck, life force and fertility. Earth and dwelling can lose it too.[20] A second survey says the same of the earth and of a tree, which wither when their kut leaves them, and of the kut of a dwelling, which takes the feeling of home with it.[21] It gives sür the senses of appearance, beauty, comfort, power and soul, and records that when an army loses its sür it cannot defeat its enemy and that bread whose sür has gone no longer nourishes.[21]

The same survey gathers the souls under the heading of the shadow. The Altai Tatars have sür and süne among its names, the Yakuts kut, and a person who loses it loses his shadow. The Yakuts say that a man has three shadows and that spirits have none. Animals, plants and lifeless things have a shadow-soul as well.[22] In sleep the soul wanders and visits places. In sickness it has been driven out, and the shaman finds the lost soul.[23] Another author says that the words for the wandering soul meant first appearance, form, mirror image, shadow and picture. The Abakan Tatars, it adds, use tys for appearance, soul, spirit and ghost-image.[24]

For breath the same sources give tyn among the Altai Tatars and the Yakuts.[25] In their view it is not an independent soul. The Teleuts use the word for the soul-animal of a shaman, the tyn-bura.[25] A Turkish account of shamanism sets the Yakut and Altaian lists side by side. For the Yakuts it gives tın, kut and sür, with the remark that when tın leaves the body death follows, and when kut leaves it does not. For the Altaians it gives tın, süne and kut, with tın in every living creature, süne in men only and kut in everything, even in lifeless things. A shepherd’s staff that has kut keeps disease and wolves from the flock.[26] It adds a double, yula, that travels in sleep, and üzüt, the Altaian name of the wandering souls of the dead.[27] Western Turks keep tın only in the verb for resting, and Kashgari’s tındur-, “let rest”, already points that way.[28]

Interpretations of Kut

The meaning of Kut in the inscriptions is argued from these later words. Four interpretations can be counted. The first, the usual one in the literature today, takes Kut as the favour that Heaven grants to the ruler it chooses, a kind of charisma.[29] A second begins from “soul” or “vital principle”, a viaticum of life that comes from Tengri and returns to him. It lets the royal meaning of fortune grow from it.[30] A third holds that every context of the inscriptions fits a life force or energy that any living being can have. The khan then differs from other men only by his office. The Kut of Heaven and the Kut of a ruler need not be a different kind of thing.[31] The second and third interpretations lean on the ethnographic material: for the Yakuts animals and birds have Kut, and among the Altaians even lifeless objects can have it.[32] A fourth, from the Altaian words, sets Kut beside sür and süne as a kind of shadow-soul or appearance and takes the sense of luck for a later one.[20]

The question of age runs through all of them. The Altaian words are recorded more than a thousand years after the inscriptions, and the Old Uyghur texts fall between. Verbitskii’s own derivation of Kut from kudup, “to vanish”, is a missionary’s etymology. A work of 1879 had already put the word at the root of both the Turkic word for madness and the word for happiness. Its ground was that a man possessed by a spirit and a man possessed by luck share a stem.[33]

The Göktürk evidence and the Altaian words

For the Göktürks the evidence is short. The inscriptions have Kut. The Chinese histories describe the burial rites in detail: the body in the tent, sheep and horses killed in front of it, the riders circling it seven times, the cutting of faces, the burning of the body with its horse and goods and the burial of the ashes in a chosen season.[34] The Zhou Shu names no word for what leaves the body.[34] The ride round the dead and the cutting of the face have their own articles; none of the Altaian souls is tied to them in the sources.

A history of Central Asia finds in the inscriptions the idea that the soul was thought to take the shape of a bird or an insect after death. It notes that the verb for dying in the inscriptions is “to fly”. It adds that among the western Turks even after their conversion to Islam one said şonkar boldu, “he became a falcon”, where others said “he died”. From this it concludes that little weight was laid on keeping the body.[35]

A runiform text of the Altai, the Jabogan stone, speaks of the dead man as “the blind one in heaven”.[36] One reader sets the phrase beside the Altaian körmös, the soul of the dead, which was recorded in the nineteenth century.[37] The same reader gives öz the senses “self” and “soul, life”.[38] The link runs from a belief recorded in the nineteenth century back to the stone, and so it is an inference.

The Altaian words show what the Altaians of the 1860s and after believed about the soul. That the same set of souls stood behind the Kut of a Göktürk khan is an inference, and a weak one for the words that the inscriptions do not use. Treating a khan’s Kut as one of the Altaian souls, the one that can leave a man at a fright and that the kam calls back, rests on that inference.

Names and terms

Tın is breath or spirit in Old Turkic, and tınlıg is formed from it.[39] The Altai Tatars and the Yakuts say tyn. The verb tın-, to breathe, stands in Kashgari, and Turkish dinlenmek, to rest, keeps it.[28] Kut is the word of the inscriptions and of the Altai. Under Kut, Turkic Atlas gives its forms. Its derivatives are kutlug and kutsuz, and kutad- is the verb.[12] Verbitskii derives it from kudup and sür from sürüp, to drive out, süne from sünelep, to advise, and tyula from tyulup, to pluck.[19] These are the derivations of a missionary and are not the accepted etymologies.

The ethnographers write the words in their own transcriptions: tyn, suzy, kut, tyula, syur, syune in Verbitskii’s Russian spelling; tyn, kut, sür, sünä and tzula in the German of a later survey.[40] The form üzüt is the same in Old Uyghur and in the Altai. Verbitskii takes it from the verb üz-, to tear, so that the soul of the dead is the one that has torn off. The Old Uyghur texts call it indestructible.[41] The word öz, with its Old Uyghur use öz konok, joins the group through Kashgari’s öz qonuqı, the soul’s guest.[15]

Reliability of the sources

The evidence has four layers. They are not equal. The inscriptions are the oldest and the shortest: one word, in the mouth of a ruler, in a few lines.[2] The Old Uyghur texts are translations, and they show which local words the translators kept beside the Sogdian and Sanskrit loans.[5] Kashgari’s dictionary gives the words as an Arabic-writing lexicographer heard them.[15] The Altaian lists are a missionary’s, written by a man who held the kam to be in the service of an evil spirit. The later surveys depend on him and on a few other collectors.

What the inscriptions give is Kut in the khan’s own claim. The Altaian lists show how many things a single word of that kind could cover. A man had breath, luck, an image, a mind and a soul that could leave him. A land or a house could lose its luck as a man loses his.[18] Whether the khan’s Kut was one of these, the whole of them, or the favour of Heaven alone is open.[42]

References

  1. ^ Harva 1938, p. 251, 253, 261
  2. ^ a b c Kül Tegin inscription
  3. ^ Bilge Khan inscription; Tishin 2022, p. 110
  4. ^ Tishin 2022, p. 111
  5. ^ a b Wilkens 2024, p. 81–82
  6. ^ Irk Bitig; Tishin 2022, p. 112–113
  7. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 140
  8. ^ Özertural 2013, p. 94
  9. ^ Özertural 2013, p. 94–95
  10. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 53
  11. ^ a b Wilkens 2024, p. 81
  12. ^ a b c d e f g Wilkens 2024, p. 82
  13. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 250, 274
  14. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, ii 138
  15. ^ a b c d e Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, i 47
  16. ^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 5
  17. ^ a b c Verbitskii 1893, scan 47
  18. ^ a b Verbitskii 1893, scan 47–48
  19. ^ a b c d e f Verbitskii 1893, scan 48
  20. ^ a b Harva 1938, p. 261
  21. ^ a b Holmberg 1927, p. 463
  22. ^ Holmberg 1927, p. 472
  23. ^ Holmberg 1927, p. 473–474
  24. ^ Harva 1938, p. 253
  25. ^ a b Harva 1938, p. 251
  26. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 176–177
  27. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 177
  28. ^ a b İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 176
  29. ^ Tishin 2022, p. 107
  30. ^ Tishin 2022, p. 107–108
  31. ^ Tishin 2022, p. 105–106, 113
  32. ^ Tishin 2022, p. 108
  33. ^ Vámbéry 1879, p. 253–254
  34. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  35. ^ Barthold 2004, p. 21
  36. ^ Nurdin 2017, p. 106–108
  37. ^ Nurdin 2017, p. 111–112
  38. ^ Nurdin 2017, p. 111
  39. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 53, 140
  40. ^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 48; 251, 261; Harva 1938, scan 48; 251, 261
  41. ^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 47; 82; Wilkens 2024, scan 47; 82
  42. ^ Tishin 2022, p. 113

Sources

Literature

  • Vladimir V. Tishin, Понятие qut в памятниках древнетюркской рунической письменности: ревизия трактовок [Ponjatie qut v pamjatnikah drevnetjurkskoj runičeskoj pis'mennosti: revizija traktovok] (2022)
  • Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
  • Zekine Özertural, Mitteliranische Einflüsse auf die manichäisch-türkische Wortbildung (2013)
  • Jens Wilkens (trans. Celalettin Bulut Bostan), Uygur Budizmi ve Manihaizm ile Yerel Dinlerin Etkisi: Dinî Terminoloji Örneği (2024)
  • Vasilii Ivanovich Verbitskii, Алтайские инородцы (Altai Foreigners) (1893)
  • Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
  • Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
  • Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
  • Ármin Vámbéry, Die primitive Cultur des turko-tatarischen Volkes, auf Grund sprachlicher Forschungen erörtert (1879)
  • Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
  • V. V. Barthold, Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Dersleri (Orta Asya Türk Tarihi Hakkında Dersler) (2004)
  • Useev, Nurdin, Altay Yazıtlarından Yabogan (A 84) Yazıtı ve Köktürkçe Vefeyat, At Tasviri Formülleri (2017)

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Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Soul Words.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/religions/soul-words/

Last revised: 8 November 2026