Ulukayın (Turkic World Tree)

The best-known single image of Turkic cosmology is a tree standing at the centre of the world. It is rooted in the lower world and reaches into the upper, and the spirit-medium climbs it.^[1] The evidence for this image is late. The Göktürk-period sources give one tree, and it decides a succession.^[2]

The tree in the Zhou Shu

The Zhou Shu records a second origin account beside the wolf legend. It is set in the state of Suo north of the Xiongnu.^[2] Nishidu, born of a wolf, could summon wind and rain. He married two wives, said to be the daughters of the god of summer and the god of winter.^[2] Of the four sons of one birth, one became the ruler of the people who bore the name Türk.^[2] That man, Nadulu, had ten wives. His sons took their mothers’ clans as their surnames, and Ashina was among them as the son of a secondary wife.^[2]

A tree settles the succession. When Nadulu died, the sons of the ten mothers wished to raise one of their number. They went together beneath a great tree and agreed among themselves that whoever leapt highest toward the tree should be set up.^[2] Ashina’s son, the youngest of them, leapt highest. The others raised him as their lord under the title Axian Shad.^[2]^[3] The Bei Shi gives the same account and is not a second witness.^[4]

Limits of the passage

In the account, the tree is a place of decision and a measure of height. The Chinese text says nothing about its roots, its crown, or any world it holds together.^[2] Understanding it as a world axis is an inference, and a reasonable one. A contest of rising, held at a tree and settled in favour of the one who rises furthest, fits an axis between worlds. It is nonetheless an inference. The text itself supports only the narrower interpretation: the tree is where the assembly met, and the leap was measured against it.

The placing of the passage speaks against the wider interpretation. The Zhou Shu gives the tree inside a legend it distrusts. It closes the whole of the second account with the remark that, though this telling differs, they are in the end of wolf stock.^[2] The wolf is the compiler’s version of Göktürk origins, and the tree is the variant he sets beside it.

The corpus without a tree

No runiform inscription of the khaganates names a tree, a world axis, or a climb between worlds.^[5] The inscriptions do name sacred places: a forest, a spring and the land at large. They are Ötüken as ıduk, the sacred head of Tamag, and the Earth-and-Water. None of them is described as reaching between an upper and a lower world.^[5] A forest held sacred and a tree holding up the sky are different ideas, and the corpus gives the first.

Eagle and tree in finds of other peoples

A tree with a bird in its crown stands in finds of the first centuries AD and of the fifth century. None of them is Göktürk. A looted Sarmatian grave of the middle imperial age at Ust-Labinskaja on the Kuban held three bronze figures covered with gold sheet. They were an ibex, a stag and a tree with birds on four side branches, carried by a double-headed ibex.^[6] A pair of golden temple pendants from a woman’s grave of the Hunnic age at Verchne-Jabločno on the Don shows a tree with a bird in granulated gold. Ibexes flank it above and stags below. A late Hellenistic diadem from Novočerkassk on the Don combines tree, birds, stags and ibexes in the same way.^[7] In the graves of the kings and nobles of Silla at Kyŏngju in Korea, of the fifth century, the dead wore crowns of gilt bronze, and the king wore one of gold, with upright trees. They also wore caps with the wings of birds.^[8]

These finds are taken as signs of a belief in an eagle in the crown of the world tree. For Ust-Labinskaja, the figures may have been the equipment of a Sarmatian shaman. Another suggestion is that they were made for the burial. The find is unique, and the two cannot be told apart. The crowns of Silla are held to copy shamanic head-dress made for the dead.^[9] Both suggestions rest on later parallels among the Yakut and other peoples of Siberia.^[10] The finds place the image of the bird tree among the horse peoples and their neighbours from the first centuries AD to the fifth, before the Göktürk age.^[11] They say nothing of the Göktürks.

The later material

The world tree in its familiar form comes from the ethnography of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the Altai and Siberia, recorded from the eighteenth century onward. In this form, Ulukayın rises through the tiers of heaven, the bay terek appears in the later epics, and the shaman ascends the tree.^[12] The twentieth-century syntheses built on that ethnography fixed the image. In the Altaian account taken down in the nineteenth century, the creator makes a tree with nine branches grow out of the earth. He sets a man under each branch, and the nine men are the forefathers of the nine peoples of the earth.^[13] It is good evidence for those peoples in those centuries.

The figure is also very widely distributed beyond the Turkic world, in Siberia, in northern Europe and in Inner Asia generally. It is therefore a poor instrument for establishing what any one people believed at any one date. A shared image proves contact, borrowing or independent invention equally well. The Göktürk-period sources give nothing that would decide between them.

References

^ Şenesen 2024, p. 1523–1524; 62; Şen 2018, p. 1523–1524; 62
^ a b c d e f g h i Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Ögel 1993, p. 25–28
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ a b Kül Tegin inscription
^ Werner 1956, p. 69–70
^ Werner 1956, p. 64, 69–70
^ Werner 1956, p. 74–76
^ Werner 1956, p. 71–72, 75–76
^ Werner 1956, p. 70–71
^ Werner 1956, p. 74, 76
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 340,349–351
^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe), p. 4

Sources

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

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)
Ali Ahmetbeyoğlu, Hüseyin Şen, Eski Türk Dininin Kozmolojisi ve Kozmogonisi (2018)
İsmail Şenesen, Tengri İnancında Üç Dünya İle İlgili Ritüeller (2024)
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)
Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) I (1993)