Asena the She-Wolf (Gök Börü)

The wolf runs through the Göktürk record in three places: as the ancestor of the ruling house, as the golden head carried on the standard, and as the name of the khan’s bodyguard.^[1] All three are in the Chinese histories. In the Göktürks’ own writing the wolf appears once. It is a simile.^[2]

The descent

The she-wolf of the origin legend is Asena, the mother of ten sons and through them of the house of Ashina.

The Zhou Shu opens its account of the Göktürks with the legend.^[1] The people were a branch of the Xiongnu and bore the surname Ashina.^[1] A neighbouring state broke them and killed the whole clan, except one boy of about ten. The soldiers would not kill him. They cut off his feet and threw him into a marsh.^[1] A she-wolf fed him with meat. He grew, and the wolf conceived by him.^[1] The king of that country sent again to kill him. The envoys found the wolf beside him and meant to kill her too. She 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.^[1] 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 settled on the southern slope of the Golden Mountain and worked iron for them.^[1]^[3]

The Sui Shu gives a variant of this legend. A boy whose arm and feet had been cut is thrown into a great marsh and fed by a she-wolf. Something like divine power carries the wolf to the east of the sea and onto a mountain north-west of Gaochang, with the cave and the grass beneath it.^[4] She bears ten sons, of whom the one surnamed Ashina is the ablest and becomes the lord.^[4]^[5] The Bei Shi repeats the Zhou Shu’s version and is not an independent witness.^[6]

The Zhou Shu then prints the second account, set in the state of Suo: Nišidu born of a wolf, the marriage to the daughters of the gods of summer and winter, and the succession decided by a leap at a great tree.^[1] It closes the account by saying that though this telling differs, they are of wolf stock in the end.^[1]^[7] That sentence is the compiler’s. It shows him holding two incompatible stories together by the one element both contain.

The Gaoche tell a wolf legend of their own. The Wei Shu says that a Xiongnu chanyu had two beautiful daughters, whom the people took to be divine. He would not give them to a man. He built a high tower in an empty land north of his country, set the two on it and asked Heaven to come for them.^[8] After three years their mother wanted to bring them home, but the chanyu said that the time had not come. A year later an old wolf kept watch at the tower day and night. The younger daughter said that the wolf might be a divine thing that Heaven had sent. She went down and became the wolf’s wife, and their descendants grew into a people.^[8]^[9] The text adds that this is why the Gaoche like to draw out their songs, which also sound like the howling of wolves.^[8] In this legend the wolf is male. A modern account sets it against the she-wolf of the Göktürk legends and finds a male wolf again in the Uyghur Oghuz epic.^[10]

Standard and bodyguard

The wolf is not only a story in these sources. Here the evidence is at its firmest. On the standards, the Zhou Shu says, a golden wolf’s head was set.^[1] The men of the khan’s guard were called fuli. The same passage adds that this also means wolf in Chinese. Since they were born of a wolf, their purpose was not to forget the old thing.^[1] The Sui Shu repeats the point from the other end: at the gate of the court they raised the wolf-head standard, to show that they did not forget their origin.^[4]^[11]

Two observations follow. First, the descent claim and the field sign are reported as one thing, not two: the standard is explained by the ancestry and the ancestry is visible in the standard. Second, the golden wolf’s head travelled as a grant of authority. The Sui Shu has Shibi giving Göktürk titles and wolf’s-head standards to Chinese warlords in the risings that broke the Sui.^[4] A sign of descent that can be handed to a foreigner has become a sign of rank. The gift could also come from the other side. The Sui court sent a wolf’s-head standard to Tardush with a show of respect and a very generous ceremony, to set him against Ishbara.^[12]^[13]

The wolf in the Göktürks’ own words

The runiform corpus has the animal once, in a sentence about an army. Because Heaven gave them strength, the Kül Tegin inscription says, İltiriš Khan’s soldiers were like wolves and his enemies were like sheep.^[2] The construction is böri teg, like a wolf. It is a comparison of the ordinary kind.^[2]

No inscription of the khaganates claims descent from a wolf, names a she-wolf, or mentions a wolf’s head on a standard.^[2] The monuments give their own origin instead: Bumin and Istemi sat over the sons of men, and later Heaven raised İltiriš and his katun by the crown of the head.^[2] A house that descends from Heaven has no need of a wolf. That is the strongest reason to keep the two accounts apart rather than to merge them.

The one monument of the first khaganate shows the animal instead of naming it. The top of the Bugut stone of about 584 has a relief of a wolf or she-wolf with the figure of a man under her belly. The image refers to the origin legend.^[14]^[15] The relief is worn. According to some scholars, the figure can now hardly be made out.

In the Kutadgu Bilig of 1069–1070 the wolf is a figure of strength and a beast of the hunt: the commander of the army is to be “strong as a wolf”, the soldiers ride out against the enemy and the wolf, and in the reign of the just king the lamb and the wolf walk together.^[16]^[17] No couplet of the book names a wolf as an ancestor or sets one on a standard.^[18]

The asymmetry of the sources

Three interpretations are current. The first takes the Chinese accounts as recording a genuine Göktürk tradition, which the monuments omit because a funerary inscription for an imperial house had no use for an animal ancestor.^[19] The Bugut relief is its strongest support: it was set up by the Göktürk state itself, a generation after Bumin. The second takes the wolf as a literary convention of the Chinese histories, which regularly give the northern peoples animal descents. On this view, the wolf is a statement about Chinese writing rather than Göktürk belief. The third separates the pieces and keeps only the strongest. Whatever the Göktürks believed about their origins, the golden wolf’s head on the standard and the guard called by the word for wolf were observed at the Göktürk court by people who had been there.

Other interpretations concern the making of the legend itself. Some scholars take the wolf ancestor for no totem. Descent ran in the father’s line, there was private property, one animal was sacred, there was no mana, and the wolf was not worshipped.^[20] A survey understands the three origin legends 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.^[21] One interpretation of the caves takes them for underground mines in which the people of Bumin worked iron for the Rouran.^[22]

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c d e Kül Tegin inscription
^ Ögel 1993, p. 20–21
^ a b c d Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Ögel 1993, p. 22–24
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ Ögel 1993, p. 25–28
^ a b c Wei Shu, juan 103
^ Pulleyblank 1990, p. 23
^ Ögel 1993, p. 17–18
^ Ögel 1993, p. 23
^ Cefu yuangui, juan 990
^ Ögel 2000, p. 41–42
^ Golden 1992, p. 151
^ Roux 1994, p. 158
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 1040, 2311, 5591
^ Ögel 1995, p. 119
^ Kutadgu Bilig
^ Şen 2018, p. 70
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 297–303
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 324–325
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 326

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
Kutadgu Bilig
Wei Shu, juan 103
Cefu yuangui, juan 990 (after Tongdian and Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Oraz S. Sapashev; Samat K. Samashev, Tradition of Continuity in State Standards and Weaponry of the Saka, Huns and Turks (2025)
Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Ali Ahmetbeyoğlu, Hüseyin Şen, Eski Türk Dininin Kozmolojisi ve Kozmogonisi (2018)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) I (1993)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş VIII: Türklerde devlet ve ordu mehteri (2000)
Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The 'High Carts': A Turkish-Speaking People Before the Türks (1990)
Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)
B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)