Turkic mythology is the body of stories about origins, divine powers and the order of the world among the Turkic peoples of the steppe. For the centuries of the khaganates, it survives in pieces. The Zhou Shu and the Sui Shu record the origin legends of the Göktürk ruling house. The Orkhon inscriptions name the divine powers in a few formulas.[1] The fuller picture of a tiered cosmos, a world tree and a lord of the dead comes from later texts and from the ethnography of the Altai and Siberia.[2][3] The worship of Heaven and of the powers beside it is Tengrism.

The she-wolf of the Ashina

The Zhou Shu opens its account of the Göktürks with the legend of the wolf.[4] A neighbouring state broke the clan and killed all its people except one boy of about ten. The soldiers would not kill him. They cut off his feet and threw him into a marsh.[4] A she-wolf fed him with meat. He grew, and the wolf conceived by him.[4] The king sent again to kill him, and the wolf fled to the mountain north of Gaochang. There a cave held a plain with rich grass several hundred li around, ringed by mountains on every side.[4] There she bore ten sons, each of whom took a surname, Ashina among them. After some generations they came out of the cave and became subjects of the Rouran. They worked iron for the Rouran on the southern slope of the Golden Mountain.[4][5] The Sui Shu tells a version of the story in which the she-wolf bears ten sons and the one surnamed Ashina is the ablest.[6][7] The western sea of this version may lie west of Turfan. The wolf flees to a mountain that lies north-west of Turfan, and the water would therefore have to be the Aral Sea or Lake Balkhash and not Kokonor.[8]

The she-wolf of the legend is known as Asena. The top of the Bugut stone of about 584 carries a relief of a wolf or she-wolf with the figure of a man under her belly. The image refers to the origin legend.[9] The first studies took the relief for a she-wolf suckling a child.[10] After repairs to the stone, a dragon motif has been proposed instead.[11] No inscription of the khaganates claims descent from a wolf or names a she-wolf.[12]

The Chinese compilations record five Göktürk myths in all. Two are accounts of origin: the wolf legend and the story of Suo. Scholars argue whether they are two tellings of one myth or the separate traditions of tribes that joined.[13] One survey reads the three origin legends, the wolf legend, the Suo story and the Youyang zazu legend of Shemo, as the sign of a composite people. It takes the wolf as a possibly Iranian element that tied part of the Göktürk ruling class to the Sogdians and, beyond them, to the Wusun. The authors call this a suggestion made with the utmost caution.[14] The caves have been taken for underground mines in which the people of Bumin worked iron for the Rouran.[15] The other three are told below, together with the three myths of an Old Tibetan report.

The tree of the succession

The Zhou Shu then gives a second account of the origin, set in the state of Suo.[4] In it the sons of the ten mothers went together beneath a great tree. They agreed that whoever leapt highest toward the tree should be set up as their lord.[4] Ashina’s son, the youngest of them, leapt highest, and the others raised him under the title Axian Shad.[4] This is the one tree of the Göktürk-period sources.[4][16] The wolf-and-cave legend may be the state’s own account of its origin and the Suo story a popular tale. The second contains both laws of succession: the eldest son leads first, and the youngest wins at the tree.[17] The tree at the centre of the world, Ulukayın, up which the spirit-medium climbs, belongs to the later material.

Shemo and the lake goddess

The ninth-century Youyang zazu tells of an ancestor of the Göktürks named Shemo, 射摩, a name understood as Yama. The Taiping guangji copies the story from it.[18] A god of a lake lived west of a cave of the Ashide, 阿史德窟.[19] Shemo had divine gifts. Every evening the lake goddess, or the daughter of the lake god, came to meet him on a white deer. She took him into the water and sent him out at dawn. So it went for decades.[20] The Chinese word hai, sea, also stands for lakes and is read so here. In both texts the deity is first called a god where the story needs a goddess or a goddess’s daughter, and a character for woman has probably dropped out.[21]

The tribe was about to hold a great hunt. At midnight the goddess told Shemo that on the next day a white deer with golden horns would come out of the cave in which his forebears were born. If he hit it with an arrow, they would be together for good. If he missed, they would part for ever. On the next day the deer appeared at the mouth of that cave. Shemo had the ring of hunters drawn close, but as the deer was about to leap out of it, it was killed.[20] Shemo was furious. With his own hand he cut off the head of the chief of the A’er, 呵唲, and swore that from now on they must sacrifice men to Heaven. He took the victims mostly from the A’er people and killed their sons and grandsons as the offering. To this day, the compiler adds, the Göktürks sacrifice men at the standard, and they always take them from the A’er.[22] That evening the goddess told him that he had killed a man with his own hands, that he reeked of blood, and that they could no longer share a fate.[22]

Some motifs of the story may be symbols of moon and sun: the meetings between sunset and sunrise, and the white deer. The compilations give the story in so short a form, however, that no firm interpretation is possible.[23] The lake goddess has also been set beside the White Mother of the Altaic creation story, who rises out of the water and counsels the creator. White is the colour of goddesses in that tradition.[24] Scholars have not decided whether it is the story of the Ashide, of a tribe named Sheli, or of all the Göktürks.[25] The name Yama is identified with the title of a Göktürk ruler in the Ongi inscription. A Tibetan report of about 750 gives a legendary Göktürk ruler Zha ma Kha gan, whom scholars match with him. The article on the report treats these matches.[26] The story does not say that its cave is the cave of the ancestors of the yearly sacrifice. A modern account adds that the Kirghiz kept apart from the descendants of the wolf, and that their first ancestors lived in a cave with a cow.[27]

The deer’s warning and the birth of An Lushan

The Taiping guangji has a short tale from the early years of the Sui Kaihuang reign, which began in 581, before Apa rebelled. A Göktürk chief with a few dozen riders chased a hare up a mountain. On the cliff at the top stood a deer. It told them to stop attacking the country of the sages in the south, or their own country would soon perish. Soon after, the realm fell into great disorder.[28] The chief may be Taspar Khan.[28]

The Xin Tang Shu and the History of An Lushan tell how An Lushan was born to a Göktürk mother of the Ashide, a shaman, who had no son. She prayed for one to the god of war, whom the Göktürks called Yaluoshan. That night, the History says, red light flashed beside her tent, wild beasts howled on every side, and the watchers of the sky saw an unlucky star blaze above it. The Xin Tang Shu has a light entering the tent and the watchers calling the sign good. A Tang commander sent men to search the tent and kill those in it, but mother and child were hidden. She took the boy for the god’s gift and named him Yaluoshan.[29]

Dogs and wolves in an Old Tibetan report

A Tibetan manuscript from Dunhuang, a report of about 750 on the peoples of the north, holds three further myths.[30] In the first, two soldiers of a Göktürk ruler have lost their way in a desert. A Turkic-speaking woman guides them, and a pack of dogs supplies them.[31] In the second, two peoples descend from a red dog, a black dog and a girl taken from a Turkic home. The sons were born dogs, the daughters women, and nobody had heard of men among them.[32] The third is a torn fragment about a hunter with a broken leg, a tiger and a spiny animal.[33] These myths stand apart from the five myths of the Chinese sources, and nothing in them links them to the Ashina. The article on the report gives them in full.

Heaven, Earth-and-Water and Umay

The Orkhon inscriptions describe a world in two parts. When the blue sky above and the brown earth below were made, mankind was made between them.[12] The line does not say who made them. Two studies do not take it as proof of a creator Tengri: it names no maker and does not use the verb yarat-, to create.[11] Against them stands the royal style of Bilge Khan, Teŋri teg Teŋri yaratmış, “made by Heaven”.[34] The Byzantine historian Theophylact also stands against them. He has the Göktürks worship only the maker of heaven and earth.[35] The divine powers they name are Tengri, Heaven, and the sacred Earth-and-Water, the land and its waters named together as a single power.[12]

In the Kül Tegin inscription the two speak together. The Göktürk Heaven above and the sacred Earth-and-Water of the Göktürks said: let the Göktürk people not perish, let them be a people again.[12]

Umay is the third named divine power of the inscriptions and the only female one.[12] She appears once, in a comparison: Kül Tegin got a man’s name by the Kut of his mother the katun, who is like Umay.[12] That she was the power of childbirth and of small children rests on the later Turkic material, not on the inscription. The three worlds of upper, middle and lower realm are a modern model drawn from the traditions of the Altai and Siberia. The inscriptions describe two.

The moon and the lord of the dead

Ay Ata, the Moon Father, is the moon as a male deity, paired with the sun as a mother.[36] The oldest records do not name him. They show what was done before the moon. The Xiongnu ruler bowed to it each evening. The Göktürks waited for it to grow full before they rode out. The Uyghur khagans of the late eighth century took it into their titles.[37]

Erklig, the lord of the dead in the popular account, is first an adjective for power in the older language. As ruler of the dead he belongs to the Old Uyghur religious literature, where he stands for the Indian Yama in texts translated for Buddhist and Manichaean communities. No runiform inscription of the Göktürk khaganates names a lord of the dead.[12]

Peri

The peri is a female spirit of Turkic folklore, at home at springs, in trees and in lonely country.[38] Her name is Persian, and she is known from the ethnographic record of the Islamic and modern period. No inscription and no book of the Göktürk centuries names her.

The Huns of Attila

The rites of the Huns of Europe survive only in Greek and Latin.[39] Scholars argue how their language should be classified, and whether it was Turkic. Jordanes, following Priscus, tells of the sword of Mars. A herdsman followed the trail of blood of a lame heifer and found a sword that the animal had trodden on while grazing. He brought it to Attila, who believed that through the sword of Mars the power of war had been granted to him.[40] The sword, Jordanes adds, had always been held sacred among the kings of the Scythians.[41]

After Attila’s death in 453, horsemen sang his dirge round his body. The Huns held over his tomb a strava, “as they call it”, with great revelling, funeral grief mixed with joy.[42] Then they buried the body at night.[42]

The sources of the khaganates give a she-wolf and a tree in the origin of the ruling house, and Heaven, Earth-and-Water and Umay in the inscriptions. The cosmos of three worlds, the world tree and the lord of the dead are known from later centuries.

Alp Er Tonga

The best-known hero at the Karakhanid court was Alp Er Tonga. The Kutadgu Bilig, written there in 1069–1070, calls him the most famous of the Turkic begs, a man of great wisdom and virtue. It says that the Iranians call him Afrasiab.[43] The poet adds that he knows the hero from Iranian writing and that without it nobody would know him.[44] The Karakhanid house traced its descent to Alp Er Tonga, and no Turkic epic about him has come down.[45]

The legend of Oghuz Khan

The legend of Oghuz Khan is kept in a manuscript in Uyghur script. It is sometimes treated as a witness for the early Turkic peoples. The story may be older than Modu and have been laid later over his youth.[46] Another argument puts the text after the Mongol conquests. It points to Persian words in it, to the Volga under the name Edil, to the Khagan of Rum, to Egypt, Syria and India, to the Tanguts and the Jurchen, and it concludes that the story cannot have been written before the thirteenth century. The manuscript was copied about 1500.[47] If so, the text cannot serve as a witness for Göktürk or Uyghur belief.[48]

The wolf legends of the Wusun, the Gaoche and the Göktürks have been taken as one line that begins inside the Xiongnu realm, with the story of the Wusun as the oldest wolf legend of Central Asia.[49] On this argument the wolf belongs to the Turks and not to the Mongols. It sets the wolf ancestress of the Turks against the Mongol descent myths, which run through light and the dog. It adds that the mother line was lost among the Turks and the father line grew.[50] It also holds that the Göktürks saw themselves as continuing the Xiongnu state, and names their titles as proof.[51] Another survey places the Xiongnu and the Wuhuan among the ancient Mongol nomads when it comes to the spirits of ancestors, Heaven, earth, the sun, the moon and the stars.[52] A third account holds that Orkhon Turkic carries Samoyed or Ugric loanwords, that the goddess Umay has a Mongol origin, and that many Göktürk names, among them Nivar and Ishtemi, cannot be explained from Turkic.[53]

Later origin stories of the Uyghurs

The Persian historian Juvaini, writing in the thirteenth century, gives the Uyghurs an origin on the Selenga. Two trees stood between two rivers, a light came down on them, and five boys were born, of whom the youngest became their khan.[54] A tomb inscription of the Uyghur rulers of Gaochang, written long after the event, has the Tang envoys break up the mountain of good fortune near Karakorum with fire and acid. After that the animals cried out, the khan died within a fortnight, and the Uyghurs moved to Turfan.[55]

One account notes that the founders of the great Turkic empires, the Huns and the Göktürks, have no giants in their stories, and that the Oghuz epic has none either. The figures of the folk tales came from outside.[56]

References

  1. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Kül Tegin inscription
  2. ^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 3–14
  3. ^ Holmberg 1927, p. 313–316,339–355
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  5. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 20–21
  6. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  7. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 22–24
  8. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Ögel 1993, p. 24
  9. ^ Golden 1992, p. 151
  10. ^ Roux 1994, p. 158
  11. ^ a b Erkoç 2018, p. 53
  12. ^ a b c d e f g Kül Tegin inscription
  13. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 52–53
  14. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 324–325
  15. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 326
  16. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 25–28
  17. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Ögel 1993, p. 25–29
  18. ^ 段成式 ca. 860, p. 62–63; Erkoç 2018, p. 62–63
  19. ^ 段成式 ca. 860, p. 63–67; Erkoç 2018, p. 63–67
  20. ^ a b 段成式 ca. 860, p. 67; Erkoç 2018, p. 67
  21. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 66–67
  22. ^ a b 段成式 ca. 860, p. 68; Erkoç 2018, p. 68
  23. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 67
  24. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 570–571
  25. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 66
  26. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 63–64
  27. ^ 段成式 ca. 860, p. 21–22; Ögel 1993, p. 21–22
  28. ^ a b Erkoç 2018, p. 69
  29. ^ Erkoç 2018, p. 69–71
  30. ^ Old Tibetan report on the northern kings; Erkoç 2018, p. 71
  31. ^ Old Tibetan report on the northern kings; Erkoç 2018, p. 72–73
  32. ^ Old Tibetan report on the northern kings; Erkoç 2018, p. 73
  33. ^ Old Tibetan report on the northern kings; Erkoç 2018, p. 74
  34. ^ Bilge Khan inscription
  35. ^ Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, p. 191
  36. ^ Harva 1938, p. 182–183
  37. ^ Shiji, juan 110; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84; Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 98
  38. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954
  39. ^ Jordanes
  40. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 183, p. 102–103
  41. ^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 183, p. 102
  42. ^ a b Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 258, p. 124
  43. ^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 276–280
  44. ^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 281–282
  45. ^ Dankoff 1983, p. 2–3
  46. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 11
  47. ^ Pelliot 1930, p. 248, 349–353
  48. ^ Pelliot 1930, p. 248
  49. ^ Wei Shu, juan 103; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Ögel 1993, p. 13–20
  50. ^ Ögel 1995, p. 111–115, 536
  51. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 288
  52. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 423
  53. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 325–326
  54. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 73–77
  55. ^ Ögel 1993, p. 80–82
  56. ^ Ögel 1995, p. 561

Sources

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
  • Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
  • Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
  • Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç, Çin ve Tibet Kaynaklarına Göre Göktürk Mitleri (2018)
  • Michael Whitby, Mary Whitby (trans.), The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)
  • Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Zweiter Band (1893 (zweite Ausgabe))
  • Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) I (1993)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)
  • Paul Pelliot, Sur la légende d'Uɣuz-khan en écriture ouigoure (1930)
  • B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)
  • Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)
  • Duan Chengshi 段成式, 酉陽雜俎 Yǒuyáng Zázǔ (ca. 860)

Unresolved source identifiers: youyang-zazu

Related

What links here6

Religions
Animism · Iye · Shamanism · Water Cult
Customs & Pastimes
Culture of the Turkic Peoples
Sources
Old Tibetan report on the northern kings

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Turkic Mythology.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/religions/turkic-mythology/

Last revised: 8 November 2026