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170 articles.

A

AfuzhiluoPersonsChief of the Fufuluo clan of the Gaoche who led more than a hundred thousand tents out of the Rouran khaganate in 487, founded a Tiele kingdom north-west of Gaochang with the title 'great son of heaven', beat Tulun Khan repeatedly, offered the Wei two arrows and a war against the Rouran, and was killed by his own people for cruelty.
AltaiPlaces · briefMountain region in which the Chinese histories place the Ashina as subjects of the Rouran.
AmrakPersonsSon of Taspar, elected khan at Ötüken in 581 as the compromise the assembly could accept, and gone within the year: he abdicated in Ishbara's favour to avert Töremen's revolt, and the revolt came anyway.
An LushanPersonsTang general of Sogdian and Göktürk parentage, born 703, whose rebellion of 755 to 763 ruined the Tang, cost them Central Asia, and brought the Uyghurs into China; the apogee, in de la Vaissière's reading, of the Turco-Sogdian milieu of northern China.
An NuopantuoPersonsThe Sogdian of Jiuquan whom Yuwen Tai sent to the Göktürk in 545, the first envoy of a Chinese state to Bumin; his name transcribes the Sogdian Anāhitā-banda.
AnaguiPersonsLast khan of the Rouran, who held the steppe for three decades, called Bumin his blacksmith slave, and died in 552 as the Göktürk army closed on his capital.
AnluochenPersonsSon of Anagui who fled to the Northern Qi after his father's death in 552; set up by the Qi as khan of the Rouran remnant and their instrument against the Göktürk, he rose against the Qi themselves in 553, was beaten twice, and with him the house ended.
AshinaLineagesThe ruling lineage of the Göktürk khaganates: a family of smiths in the Altai under the Rouran, the house of Bumin and Istemi, the dynasty of every Göktürk khan from 552 to 744 — and, by an argued claim, of the Khazar khagans on the Volga after them.
Ashina HeluPersonsLast independent khan of the western Göktürk: a fifth-generation descendant of Istemi who was yabgu of five tribes under the Üç Tuğlu Khan, fled to the Tang with thousands of tents in 648, served them as guide and commandant, proclaimed himself Shaboluo Khan over the Ten Arrows after Taizong's death, raided Tingzhou, and was hunted down by Su Dingfang across the Ili and the Chu in 657 and 658; presented at Taizong's tomb, pardoned, and buried beside Ilig Khan.
AtabegInstitutions and TitlesFather-lord: the commander set over a Seljuk prince as guardian and tutor, who governed the province in the prince's name — an office that in several places swallowed the dynasty it was meant to serve.
AvarsPeoplesThe people who appeared on the Byzantine frontier in the 550s and founded a khaganate in Pannonia that lasted until 796; their identification with the Rouran nobility that fled west in 552 is argued, argued against, and bound up with the alliance that brought Göktürk envoys to Constantinople.

B

Bagha KhanPersonsBrother of Ishbara and a lesser khan, who fought in the invasion of China in 583, led the Göktürk army across the Oxus in April 588 and fell to Bahram Chobin; whether he was the Šāba of the Persian tradition is disputed.
Bahram ChobinPersonsSasanian general who destroyed the Göktürk army in Hyrcania in 588, or at Herat in 589, retook Herat and reached Bukhara, then rose against his own kings, lost, fled to the Göktürk at Suyab and was poisoned there.
BasmïlPeoples · briefTurkic people of the Beiting country north of the Tianshan, used by the Tang against the Second Göktürk Khaganate in 721 and captured wholesale by Tonyukuk; in 742 they rose against the last Ashina khan, and in 744 they were crushed by the Uyghurs and Karluk.
Battle of BolchuBattles & EventsThe night march over the Altai and the Irtysh and the dawn attack, about 711, in which Tonyukuk, against his khan's order, fell on the army of the Türgesh at Bolchu, took their khan and broke the western Göktürk as an independent power for a generation.
Battle of BukharaBattles & EventsThe decisive engagement of the Göktürk–Hephthalite war, about 560: Istemi's army broke the Hephthalite king and the greater part of his army while Khosrow I closed from the south-west, and the victors divided the Hephthalite lands along the Oxus. Tabari names the killed king and no place; the battle is set at Bukhara after seven days and nights, and a reconstruction from the Persian tradition puts it in the hills at Nasaf.
Battle of Dzungaria, 552Battles & EventsThe first of the two engagements of 552: a Rouran force sent west to stop Bumin was beaten in Dzungaria in the opening weeks of the year.
Battle of Huaihuang, 552Battles & EventsThe second engagement of 552, north of Huaihuang near the Chinese frontier, in which the main Rouran army was destroyed; Anagui was dead within weeks and Bumin was khan.
BayirkuPeoples · briefA Tiele people of the Nine Surnames, north-east of the Orkhon toward the Tola and the Kerulen; beaten by Kül Tegin at Lake Türgi Yargun, the northern limit of Bilge Khan's campaigns, and the people whose straggler killed Kapgan Khan in 716.
BegInstitutions and TitlesThe lord of a tribe or a clan, and the estate of such men: the rank that stands between the khan above and the commons below, named on every face of the Orkhon stones and still audible in the modern Turkish bey.
Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi)SourcesOfficial history of the Northern Qi, largely lost and made good from the Bei Shi; juan 8 read at the text for this work.
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties)SourcesA compilation covering the northern dynasties; not an independent witness.
Bilge KhanPersonsKhan of the Second Göktürk Khaganate from 716 to 734, set on the throne by his brother Kül Tegin's coup, advised by Tonyukuk, at peace with the Tang from 721; the speaker of the Kül Tegin inscription and the subject of his own; poisoned by a minister in 734.
Bilge Khan inscriptionSourcesRuniform monument for Bilge Khan on the Orkhon, parallel to the Kül Tegin inscription in its historical section; the passages that are its own are given here.
Börü ShadPersonsNephew of Tong Yabgu with an independent command in the north-west, who led some forty thousand Göktürk through Derbent into the Caucasus in 627 and besieged and later took Tiflis with the emperor Heraclius; the name is Turkic for 'wolf'.
Buddhism among the GöktürkReligions · briefThe religion to which Taspar Khan was converted by a Chinese monk in the 570s, which no other Göktürk of the First Khaganate is recorded as adopting, and which the Bugut inscription is held to profess.
Bugut inscriptionSourcesA stone of about 584 on a stone tortoise at Bugut in central Mongolia, inscribed in Sogdian with a Brahmi text on the reverse and a wolf figure at its top: the earliest monument of the Göktürk state, held to commemorate Taspar Khan, and the earliest attestation of the name Ashina outside the Chinese histories.
BukharaPlacesSogdian city in the lower Zerafshan valley, one of the planned towns of the fifth century, seat of the largest Hephthalite garrison, taken by Istemi's army in the Göktürk–Hephthalite war and thereafter the residence of the Ashina nobility in the west; reached by Bahram Chobin in 589, mourned at Kül Tegin's funeral in 732, and the home of the Zandaniji silks.
Buluzhen KhanPersonsNephew of Hulü who deposed him by intrigue in 414 and left the government to the minister Shuli; he was strangled within the year by Datan, whom the Gaoche chief Chiluohou had chosen in his place.
Bumin KhanPersonsAshina Göktürk leader who overthrew the Rouran in 552 and founded the First Göktürk Khaganate.
ByzantiumPolitiesThe eastern Roman empire, which received Maniakh in 568, sent Zemarchos to Istemi in 569 and Valentinos to Turxanthos in 576, kept a hundred Göktürk at Constantinople, lost Bosporos to the Göktürk in 579, and under Heraclius in 627 made the alliance with Tong Yabgu that brought the Göktürk through Derbent to Tiflis; thereafter the ally and the in-law of the Khazars.

C

Cave of the ancestorsPlacesThe cave to which the khan led the nobles once a year to sacrifice, according to the Zhou Shu: the one Göktürk cult site the Chinese record and the inscriptions never mention, and the only one whose place is not given.
ChachPlacesThe Tashkent oasis on the middle Syr Darya, a zone of contact between nomad and settled, which entered the Sogdian cultural sphere in the sixth and seventh centuries under Göktürk overlordship; the Chinese raided it in 751.
Chounu KhanPersonsKhan of the Rouran from 508 to 520 and elder brother of Anagui: he sent a monk with a jewelled image to the Wei, crushed the Gaoche in 516 and made their king's skull a drinking cup, raised a young shamaness to khatun after she conjured his lost son out of the sky, let her kill the boy, and was killed by his mother and ministers after a defeat.
Chula KhanPersonsBrother of Shibi and khan of the eastern Göktürk from 619 to 620: he married the Sui princess Yicheng, set up the Sui emperor's grandson as king of Sui at Dingxiang, sent his brother's riders to help the Tang against Liu Wuzhou, let his men carry off the women of Bingzhou, and died within the year, by one account poisoned by a Chinese official at his court.
Civil war, 584–603ConflictsThe twenty years in which four Ashina princes fought for the khaganate, the Sui set them against one another, and the state that Bumin founded became two.
Climate and the steppe empiresHistoriographyWhat tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments say about the weather of the steppe between the Xiongnu and the Uyghurs, and who has argued what from it: the eruptions of 536 and 540, the Late Antique Little Ice Age, the cold summer of 627 and the fall of 630, the drought of the Uyghur decades.

D

Datan KhanPersonsKhan of the Rouran from 414 to 429, the strongest of the house before Anagui: he surrounded the young emperor Taiwu fifty ranks deep at Yunzhong in 424, drew three Wei campaigns into the steppe, and was scattered at the Li river in 429; the Otuz Tatar of the Orkhon inscriptions may carry his name.
Defeat of the Tiele, 546Battles & EventsBumin's interception of the Tiele rising against the Rouran: some ten thousand Ashina riders against a host several times their number, after which more than fifty thousand Tiele tents — about a quarter of a million people — passed into his domain and the Ashina became a power.
DengzhuPersonsUncle of Anagui, set up as ruler by the Rouran remnant in 552, beaten by Issik Khan north of Woye in 553, and killed with three thousand of his people outside the Qingmen gate of Chang'an at Mukan's request.
DerbentPlacesFortress city on the Caspian shore of Dagestan where the Caucasus comes down to the sea, the 'gate' of the Persian and Arabic names: the gate of Sul that Khosrow I walled against the khagan Sinjibu, the place the king of the Khazars reached in 588 by Tabari's account, the fortress before which Börü Shad appeared with the Göktürk army in 627, and the Bab al-Abwab of the Arab–Khazar wars.
Dīvān Lughāt al-TurkSources · briefMahmud al-Kashgari's dictionary of the Turkic languages, compiled at Baghdad in the 1070s; the fullest record of Turkic vocabulary and lore before the Mongol period.
DiwanPersonsShamaness at the court of Chounu Khan, a woman of about twenty who conjured the khan's lost son out of the sky, was proclaimed Holy Woman and made khatun, governed through the khan's trust, had the boy killed when he told the truth, and was strangled on the khan's mother's order in 520.
DzungariaPlacesThe basin between the Altai and the Tian Shan, north of the Turfan depression: the country into which the Gaoche seceded from the Rouran in 487, the Tiele range of the sixth century, the ground Yavuz 2025 gives Bumin's victory of 546 and the first fight of 552, the corridor through the Dzungarian Gate by which the Göktürk reached the Tarim, the line where the eastern and western wings met, and the seat of the Tang's Beiting protectorate.

E

Empress AshinaPersonsDaughter of Mukan Khan, promised to the Northern Zhou to seal the alliance against the Qi, held back three years while her father wavered toward the Qi, released after a ten-day storm he took for Heaven's anger, married to the emperor Wu in 568, empress dowager under two emperors, dead in 582 at thirty-one; her tomb yielded the only ancient genome of an Ashina.

F

Fall of the Second Khaganate, 741–744ConflictsThree years in which the Göktürk state destroyed itself and three subject peoples finished it: a boy khan murdered by his own shad, a khan whose people would not follow him, and a coalition of Basmïl, Uyghurs and Karluk that sent two Ashina heads to Chang'an and then turned on each other.
First Göktürk KhaganatePolitiesThe steppe empire founded by Bumin in 552 on the ruins of the Rouran state, ruled by the Ashina from Ötüken and from the west, divided by civil war after 584, and destroyed in the east by the Tang in 630.
Futu KhanPersonsSon and successor of Nagai, khan of the Rouran from about 506 to 508: twice he sent envoys to the Wei asking for peace and was twice refused with a reminder that Shelun had been a Wei rebel; he marched west against the Gaoche and was killed by their king Mi'etu north of Lake Barkol.

G

GaochangPlacesThe kingdom of the Turfan depression, Karakhoja, ruled by the Qu family from 502 to 640: the region north-west of which the Sui Shu sets the cave of the Ashina wolf, the city to which Yavuz 2025 brings the five hundred Ashina families from Gansu, the refuge of Heshana in 611, the ally whose envoys sat at Tong Yabgu's court and whose king bore the Turkic title ilteber; Xizhou under the Tang from 640, Qocho under the Uyghurs.
Gaoche secession (487)ConflictsThe departure of more than a hundred thousand tents of Gaoche under Afuzhiluo and Qiongqi from the Rouran khaganate to the north-west of Gaochang in 487, where they founded a kingdom of their own; Tulun Khan pursued them, was beaten repeatedly, and was killed by his own people in 492.
GöktürkPeoplesThe self-designation of the people ruled by the Ashina, attested in the runiform inscriptions of the eighth century.
Göktürk–Persian war, 588–589ConflictsThe first war between the Göktürk and Sasanian Persia: a Göktürk army crossed the Oxus, took Balkh and Herat, and was destroyed by Bahram Chobin, who then retook Herat and reached Bukhara before turning on his own king.
Göktürk raid of 542Battles & EventsThe first recorded act of the Göktürk on their own account: a winter raid across a frozen river into Western Wei territory that ended without a battle.
Göktürk war of restoration, 679–687ConflictsTwo risings and a decade of raiding by which the Göktürk of the Ordos threw off fifty years of Tang administration: the first, under an Ashina fetched from the frontier, was crushed and its khan beheaded in the market of Chang'an; the second, begun by a chieftain with a few hundred men in the hills, became the Second Khaganate.

H

Han ShuSources · briefDynastic history of the Former Han, compiled in the first century; its chapter 94 is the fullest early account of the Xiongnu.
Hegemony Wars in Northern ChinaConflictsThe editor's name for the century of wars that followed the break-up of the Northern Wei in 534 — two Weis, Qi against Zhou, Sui against Chen and the Göktürk, and the wars that made the Tang — in which the Göktürk fought on every side and ended as captives of the victor.
HephthalitesPeoplesThe last of the Hunnic powers of Central Asia, a confederation rather than a people, crushed between Istemi and Khosrow I about 560.
HeratPlacesCity of Khurasan on the Hari Rud, in what is now western Afghanistan, the Haraiwa of the Achaemenid satrapies: the point to which Tabari's Šāba, king of the Türk, advanced with his army in 588, beyond which Bahram Chobin marched to kill him with an arrow, and where, by Yavuz 2025, Bahram in 589 retook the city and the golden throne of the Göktürk khan; Göktürk again after 607, and the western neighbour of the Tokhara yabgus.
Heshana KhanPersonsKhan of the western Göktürk from 603 to about 611, Tardush's successor, whose taxation of the Tiele and execution of their chiefs set off the rising of about 605; deposed by his sub-khan Shegui, titled Heshana Khan by the Sui in 611, and executed at Chang'an by eastern Göktürk envoys in 619.
Hou Han ShuSources · briefDynastic history of the Later Han, compiled in the fifth century; its chapter 89 carries the southern Xiongnu and the campaigns of 89 to 91 against the northern Chanyu.
HuaihuangPlacesThe easternmost of the Six Garrisons of the Northern Wei along the northern frontier, north of which Bumin destroyed the main Rouran army in the first month of 552; the line on which Anagui had put down the garrison revolt for the Wei in 525, and the ground where the Rouran khaganate ended.
Hulü KhanPersonsYounger brother and successor of Shelun, khan of the Rouran from 410 to 414: he kept the peace with the Wei, made a marriage with Feng Ba of the Northern Yan, and was seized in his tent by his own nephew and sent to Feng Ba's court with the bride.
HunsPeoplesThe people who entered Europe in the fourth century and whose empire under Attila collapsed after 453; their identification with the Xiongnu is the oldest question of steppe history and is argued from names, archaeology, language and, lately, genomes.

I

Ilig KhanPersonsLast khan of the eastern Göktürk, 620 to 630: third son of Yami, he raided the Tang almost every year, stood before Chang'an eighteen days after Taizong's accession and swore peace at the Wei bridge, lost the Xueyantuo, the Uyghurs and his own nephew, was struck in the snow of 630 and taken alive, and died an honoured captive at Chang'an in 634.
IlteberInstitutions and TitlesThe rank of a subject ruler: the man left on his own throne under a khan who was not of his people, with a tax officer set beside him — attested from the Caucasus to Turfan, and known chiefly under a Chinese spelling whose equation with the Turkic word is disputed.
Ilterish KhanPersonsFounder of the Second Göktürk Khaganate: Kutluk of the Ashina, who rose against the Tang in 682 with a band in the hills north of the frontier, took the throne name Ilterish, brought his people back to Ötüken, raided China every year, and died in 691 leaving two small sons and a brother.
Inel KhanPersonsSon of Kapgan Khan, made Lesser Khan over the Ten Surnames of the west in 699 with the title Khan Who Expands the West; sent at the head of the army against the Türgesh and against Beiting; killed by his cousin Kül Tegin in the coup of 716.
Irk BitigSources · briefOld Turkic book of omens in runiform script; a Dunhuang manuscript of the ninth or tenth century.
Ishbara KhanPersonsSon of Issik and lesser khan under Taspar, who forced the assembly of 581 to pass over Töremen, took the throne when Amrak stood down, invaded China, drove Apa west, killed his own aunt, and in 585 made himself a vassal of the Sui; dead in 587.
Issik KhanPersonsEldest son of Bumin and second khan of the Göktürk, who finished the Rouran on the Ordos in 553 and died within the year.
IstemiPersonsBumin's younger brother, who held the west as yabgu for twenty-three years, destroyed the Hephthalites with Persia, took Sogdiana, made a pact with Khosrow and an alliance with Byzantium, and doubled the khaganate.

J

Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang)SourcesThe first official history of the Tang, completed 945; the principal Chinese source for the western Göktürk after 618, the Ten Arrows and the Türgesh.

K

Kapgan KhanPersonsSecond khan of the Second Göktürk Khaganate, 691 to 716: Ilterish's younger brother, who took the throne over his nephews, raided China to the plain of Hebei, destroyed the Türgesh and reached the Iron Gate, and was killed in a willow wood by a straggler of the Bayirku.
KarlukPeoplesTurkic tribal group of the Altai region, which revolted against Tong Yabgu about 627, fought the eastern Göktürk in the 720s, moved into the western Göktürk lands about 745 after the Uyghurs took the eastern khaganate, defected to the Arabs on the Talas in 751, and held Suyab and the Ten Arrows from 766.
Khan (Khagan)Institutions and TitlesThe title of the supreme ruler of the steppe, taken by Bumin from the Rouran in 552; the single place in this work where its forms, its history and the ranks around it are set out.
Khazar KhaganatePolitiesThe steppe empire of the lower Volga and the northern Caucasus, from the middle of the seventh century to 965: the western successor of the Göktürk, ruled by a sacred khagan who did not govern, and the one steppe state whose court took up Judaism.
KhitanPeoples · briefProto-Mongolic people of the eastern steppe toward Manchuria, subjects of the Rouran, conquered by Mukan between 554 and 560, and named among the mourners and enemies in the Göktürk inscriptions.
Khosrow IPersonsKing of kings of Sasanian Persia from 531 to 579, Istemi's partner in the destruction of the Hephthalites and his neighbour along the Oxus; the king who fortified the gate of Sul against the khagan Sinjibu, bought the Sogdians' silk to burn it, poisoned a Göktürk embassy, and so sent the Göktürk to Constantinople.
Kül TeginPersonsPrince of the Second Göktürk Khaganate, younger son of Ilterish, the fighting arm of his uncle Kapgan and his brother Bilge Khan; in 716 he killed the uncle's heirs and made his brother khan, commanded the army for fifteen years, and died in 731 at forty-seven, mourned by the monument of 732 on the Orkhon.
Kül Tegin inscriptionSourcesRuniform monument of 732 on the Orkhon, given here in full on all three Turkic faces: the history of the Göktürk state, the service record of one man, and a speech to the living.
KutInstitutions and TitlesThe heaven-granted fortune that made a man fit to rule: in the Xiongnu ruler's title, in the khan's own account of himself, in the name of the Ötüken forest — and in the name of the man who restored the khaganate.

M

Making of the first steppe empireHistoriographyWhy a steppe empire appeared north of China in the third century BC, and whether China made it: the frontier models of Owen Lattimore and Thomas Barfield, Peter Turchin's coevolution, the state-or-chiefdom argument, and Nicola Di Cosmo's case that the institutions of the Xiongnu came from the steppe and the west, not from China.
ManiakhPersonsSogdian of standing at Istemi's court who led the Göktürk embassy to Persia and, when Khosrow burned the silk, the embassy of 568 to Constantinople; he died before Zemarchos returned and his young son inherited his title.
ManichaeismReligionsThe religion of Mani, carried by the Sogdians to China and the steppe and adopted by the Uyghur khan at Luoyang in 762 and 763; the official religion, at times, of the hu in China, and the shield of the Sogdians there until 840.
Menander ProtectorSourcesA contemporary Greek history, surviving in fragments; the source for Göktürk contact with Byzantium.
Movsēs DasxurancʿiSourcesThe Armenian History of the Caucasian Albanians, which records the mission of Bishop Israyēl to the Huns north of Derbent in 681–682 and names their ruler Alp Ilitʿuer — the earliest attestation of the title Ilteber outside the Chinese records.
MugulüPersonsThe eponymous ancestor of the Rouran ruling house in the Wei Shu: a captured slave of the Tuoba with no name and no memory of one, who fled a death sentence into the Gobi with a hundred fugitives; his son Cheluhui first called the people Rouran.
Mukan KhanPersonsSecond son of Bumin and third khan of the Göktürk, 553 to 572, under whom the khaganate took the Kirghiz and the Khitan, fought the Northern Qi beside the Zhou, and married a daughter to a Chinese emperor.
MumochengPlacesThe walled capital that Anagui built for the Rouran in his last years, with a double wall, an elite guard and a Chinese adviser, which Bumin left standing in 552; the Chinese chapters read here do not name it, and archaeology has not found it.

N

Nagai KhanPersonsUncle of Tulun, the general whom the Rouran made khan in 492 after killing his nephew because Heaven seemed to fight on his side; he ruled until about 506, the Wei Shu recording of his reign only his title and his era.
Northern QiPolitiesThe eastern half of divided northern China, 550 to 577, which sheltered the beaten Rouran, bid against its western rival for Göktürk favour, and whose last emperor tried to flee to the khan.
Northern WeiPolitiesThe Tuoba (Tabgach) state that ruled northern China from 386 to 534, fought the Rouran across the whole steppe frontier for a century, resettled the Gaoche inside its borders, destroyed the Northern Liang in 439 and so drove the Ashina into the Altai, and split in 534 into the Eastern and Western Wei whose rivalry the Göktürk would exploit.
Northern ZhouPolitiesThe state of Yuwen Tai's sons at Chang'an, 557 to 581, the Göktürk's ally for a generation: it fought the Qi beside Mukan in 563 and 564, received his daughter as empress in 568, paid Taspar a hundred thousand pieces of silk a year, conquered the Qi in 577, lost its emperor on the march against Taspar in 578, and fell to its own general Yang Jian, whose Sui the Göktürk fought for the sake of a Zhou princess.

O

On OqPeoplesThe Ten Arrows: the confederation of ten tribes, five Üç Tuğlu east of Suyab and five Nushibi west of it, each chief holding an arrow as the token of his authority, into which the western Göktürk dissolved after the murder of Tong Yabgu in 630.
OrdosPlacesThe steppe plateau inside the great bend of the Yellow River, the ground from which every Chinese wall could be turned: taken from the Xiongnu by the Qin and won back by Modu, the theatre of Datan's war with the Wei, the place where Issik Khan destroyed the last Rouran army in 553, Ilig's camp before his accession, the land the Tang gave the surrendered Göktürk in 630, and the six Sogdian prefectures the Tang handed to Kapgan in 698.
Orkhon valleyPlaces · briefThe valley of the Orkhon in central Mongolia, the seat of every steppe empire from the Xiongnu to the Mongols and the site of the Göktürk inscriptions of the eighth century.
ÖtükenPlacesThe forested upland of the Orkhon country that the Göktürk inscriptions call sacred and name as the one place from which the realm can be held; seat of the Rouran, the Göktürk and the Uyghurs.
Ozmish KhanPersonsThe Left Shad of the Second Göktürk Khaganate, a cousin of Bilge Khan, who killed the boy khan Tengri in 741 and took the throne; rejected by the people, beaten by the Basmïl, and swept away with the dynasty by 744.

P

PaikentPlacesMerchant town at the desert edge of the Bukhara oasis, one of the small planned towns of fifth-century Sogdiana, walled on a square of 330 metres; the 'city of merchants' of the Arabic sources, whose richest man offered five thousand rolls of Chinese silk for his life when Qutayba took and sacked it in 706 after it had called on the Türk for help.
Poluomen KhanPersonsCousin of Anagui, set up as khan by the Rouran in 521 after he destroyed the usurper Shifa; beaten by the Gaoche within months, he surrendered at Liangzhou with ten tribes, was settled by the Wei at Dunhuang, tried to defect to the Hephthalites, whose ruler had married three of his sisters, and died a prisoner in Luoyang in 524.
Princess ChanglePersons · briefThe Western Wei princess given to Bumin in 551, the marriage that sealed the alliance against the Rouran a year before Bumin took the title of khan.

R

RouranPeoplesThe people of the Rouran Khaganate, overlords of the Ashina until 552: Donghu and Xianbei in origin by the Wei Shu, para-Mongolic by the usual classification with Turkic elements argued, known only under the names their enemies gave them and by the titles the Wei glossed.
Rouran civil war (520–521)ConflictsThe year of four rulers after the murder of Chounu: Anagui, khan for ten days, driven south to the Wei by his cousin Shifa; Shifa destroyed by Poluomen and killed by the Didouyu; Poluomen, khan for months, driven to Liangzhou by the Gaoche; and Anagui, restored by the Wei with a train of gifts and settled north of Huaishuo.
Rouran KhaganatePolitiesThe steppe empire that ruled from the Khingan to the Seven Rivers for a century and a half, held the Ashina as subjects, and fell to Bumin in 552.

S

SamarkandPlacesChief city of Sogdiana on the Zarafshan; its citadel was raised by the Kidarite rulers in the fifth century, its throne held by a Xiongnu king in 457, and its Afrasiab painting shows Göktürk warriors at the feet of the king.
Sasanian PersiaPolitiesThe Persian empire of the Sasanian house, 224 to 651: tributary of the Hephthalites for decades, Istemi's partner in destroying them and his neighbour along the Oxus, the power that walled the gate of Sul against Sinjibu and burned the Sogdians' silk, the enemy of the Göktürk in the wars of 588 and 606, and the victim of the pincer that Heraclius and Tong Yabgu closed on it in 627; its drachms were the currency of Central Asia and its Persians were among the mourners at Kül Tegin's funeral.
Second Göktürk KhaganatePolitiesThe Göktürk state restored by Ilterish in 682 after fifty years under the Tang, ruled from Ötüken by the Ashina through Kapgan and Bilge Khan, at its widest from the plain of Hebei to the Iron Gate south of Samarkand, and destroyed in 744 by the Basmïl, Karluk and Uyghurs; the state that carved the Orkhon and Tola inscriptions.
ShadInstitutions and Titles · briefA military rank of the Göktürk, held by a prince of the house over a wing or a subject people; Kül Tegin was šad over the Tarduš under his uncle.
ShahnamehSourcesFerdowsi's Persian verse epic, completed about 1010, four centuries after the events; in this work's account the only narrative source for the war of 588, with Bahram's arrow and the twelve thousand against three hundred thousand.
Shegui KhanPersonsKhan of the western Göktürk from 611 to 618 or 619, younger brother of Tardush, whom the Sui set up against his overlord Heshana with a white-feathered arrow; he drove Heshana to Gaochang, made the states west of the Jade Gate his subjects, held his court at Sanmi mountain north of Kucha and stood against the eastern Göktürk; elder brother of Tong Yabgu.
Shelun KhanPersonsFounder of the Rouran Khaganate, d. 410: a fugitive from the Northern Wei who killed his kinsman Pihouba, fled north of the Gobi, absorbed the Gaoche, gave the Rouran a military order of thousands and hundreds, and was the first steppe ruler to call himself khagan.
Shibi KhanPersonsSon of Yami and khan of the eastern Göktürk from 609 to 619: he took his father's Chinese wife, rebuilt the army, besieged the Sui emperor at Yanmen in 615, made the warlords of northern China his vassals with khan's titles and wolf's-head standards, lent Li Yuan the horsemen who took Chang'an, and died on a raid across the Yellow River.
ShijiSources · briefSima Qian's history, completed around 91 BC; its chapter 110 is the earliest sustained account of the Xiongnu.
SogdianaPlacesThe land of the Zarafshan and its neighbours between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, with Samarkand and Bukhara at its heart; remade under the Kidarites, held by the Hephthalites from 509, taken by the Göktürk in 560, and the base of the Sogdian trading network until the Arab conquest.
SogdiansPeoplesThe Iranian-speaking people of the Zarafshan valley, the merchants of Central Asia, who gave the Göktürk their script, their chancellery, their envoys and their silk trade, and whose settlements ran from Samarkand to the Ordos and the Chinese capitals.
Succession crisis of 581Battles & EventsThe assembly at Ötüken after Taspar's death, at which the nobility overrode the dead khan's wish, chose Amrak, saw him abdicate for Ishbara, and set the Ashina princes on the road to civil war and the division of the khaganate.
SuiPolitiesThe dynasty of Yang Jian that reunited China in 581 and 589 and broke the Göktürk without a decisive battle: it turned the succession quarrel into the division of the khaganate by agents and princesses, made clients of Ishbara and Yami, gave Yami a walled town and a ditch, refused him Chinese dress, lost its emperor's nerve to Shibi at Yanmen in 615, and fell in 618 to the warlords Shibi had armed.
Sui Shu (Book of Sui)SourcesThe official history of the Sui and the principal Chinese source for the western wing.
SuoPolitiesThe country north of the Xiongnu from which the Zhou Shu's second origin story brings the Ashina: a state of seventeen brothers, destroyed, whose survivors are placed on the upper Yenisei and in the Sayan, and whose eldest is given the name Türk.
SuyabPlacesTown on the Chu river in present-day Kyrgyzstan, the site of Ak-Beshim: a Sogdian colony grown up around a castle, the seat of the western Göktürk from Tardush onward, the place where Xuanzang met Tong Yabgu, the line between the Üç Tuğlu and the Nushibi of the Ten Arrows, the river on which Su Dingfang finished Ashina Helu, and from 690 the centre of the Türgesh.

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TabariSourcesArabic universal history of the early tenth century, whose Sasanian section carries the Persian tradition on the Göktürk wars: the king Šāba, 'the greatest king of the Turks', and his defeat by Bahram Chobin.
Taiwu's campaign against the Rouran (429)ConflictsThe Northern Wei emperor Taiwu's crossing of the Gobi in the fifth month of 429, against the counsel of his ministers and astrologers: Datan's people were scattered at the Li river, more than three hundred thousand surrendered, and the Rouran, in the Wei Shu's words, were left weak and far away.
TangPolities · briefThe dynasty that replaced the Sui in 618, destroyed the eastern Göktürk khaganate in 630 and the western in the 650s, and ruled the steppe through Ashina clients until 682.
Tang conquest of the eastern Khaganate, 626–630ConflictsThe four years in which the Göktürk went from standing on the Wei river within sight of Chang'an to having no khan at all: a rising of the subject peoples, a winter of snow that killed the herds, the defection of Ilig's own nephew, and a Tang column that struck while the surrender was being negotiated.
TardushPersonsSon of Istemi and yabgu of the west from 576 to 603, who moved the seat to Suyab, took Apa's side against Ishbara, reached for the whole khaganate, held it for three years about 600, and was driven into exile by a Tiele rising in 603.
Tarim BasinPlacesThe desert basin south of the Tian Shan whose rim of oasis cities, Kucha, Karashahr, Kashgar, Khotan and Gaochang among them, the Rouran and the Hephthalites had divided, which the Göktürk took in the 550s through the Dzungarian Gate and held as tributaries without governing them, and which the Tang took from the western Göktürk in the 640s and made the Four Garrisons.
Taspar KhanPersonsYoungest son of Bumin and fourth khan of the Göktürk, 572 to 581: ruler of the khaganate at its greatest extent, patron of a Buddhist monk, and the khan whose succession wish broke the house.
Tengri KhanPersonsBoy khan of the Second Göktürk Khaganate from 734, under the regency of his mother, Tonyukuk's daughter; invested by the Tang in 740; killed in 741 by the Left Shad, his father's cousin, after he and his mother had murdered the Right Shad.
TengrismReligionsModern name for the sky-centred religion of the Old Turkic peoples, whose attested core is Teŋri, the fortune he grants, and the sacred Earth-and-Water.
The language of the XiongnuHistoriographyWhat the Xiongnu spoke, argued from four words in a Chinese chronicle and some fifty glossed terms: the Turkic readings, the Yeniseian reading, the Eastern Iranian stratum in the titles and the dairy words, and what three genomes add to the question.
The steppe before the XiongnuHistoriographyWhat archaeology and Golden say of the Eurasian steppe before the first empire: the Bronze Age cultures of South Siberia, the horse and the coming of nomadism, the Early Nomads of the Iron Age, and the Cimmerians, Scythians and Saka of the west.
The Turkic ethnogenesis debateHistoriographyWho has claimed what about the origin of the Turkic peoples and the descent of the Göktürk: the Altaic and Transeurasian hypotheses, the Xiongnu and the Huns, the Ashina and the Wusun, the genome of an empress, and the national narratives; set out as positions, not findings.
The Turkic War of IndependenceConflictsThe six-year war by which Bumin's Ashina broke the Rouran overlordship: from the intercepted Tiele rising and the refused princess of 546 to the two battles of 552 and the taking of Ötüken.
Theophylact SimocattaSourcesByzantine history of the reign of Maurice, 582 to 602, written under Heraclius; the Greek witness to the Göktürk civil war, to the war of 588, and to Göktürk religion.
TielePeoplesThe federation of Turkic groups west of the Altai whose rising Bumin intercepted in 546, and whose fifty thousand made the Ashina a power.
TiflisPlacesCapital of the Georgian kingdom of Kartli, held for the Persians in the 620s, besieged by Heraclius and Börü Shad in 627 and taken and sacked by the Göktürk after the battle of Nineveh.
Tong YabguPersonsRuler of the western Göktürk from 618 to 630, who reunited the west, brought the Tiele to submission, recovered Bactria as far as Gandhara, allied with Heraclius and sent his nephew through Derbent to take Tiflis; assassinated by his uncle, after which the west dissolved into the Ten Arrows.
TonyukukPersonsCounsellor and commander of the first three khans of the Second Göktürk Khaganate, from the rising of 682 to the 720s; the author of the only first-person account of the restoration, and the man whom the Tang court named beside Bilge Khan and Kül Tegin as one of the three on whom the state rested.
Tonyukuk inscriptionSourcesRuniform monument of two stones at Bain Tsokto on the upper Tola, sixty-two lines in which the counsellor of the first three khans of the Second Göktürk Khaganate tells, in the first person, how the state was restored; given here in full.
TöreInstitutions and TitlesThe customary law of the Göktürk: succession, punishment, marriage, burial and the limits on taking from the land — the order a ruler was held to as much as anyone.
Töremen ApaPersonsSon of Mukan, whom Taspar wished to succeed him and whom the assembly of 581 refused; as Apa Khan he fought Ishbara with the western wing behind him, lost his mother to Ishbara's raid, and died in 587 in the same year as his enemy.
ToyInstitutions and TitlesThe assembly of the Ashina nobility: it raised Bumin to yabgu in 542, met each year at the ancestral cave, and in 581 elected a khan against a dead khan's wish.
TuğInstitutions and TitlesThe standard of the steppe ruler: a pole with a metal finial and horse tails, carried before the khan, raised over the camp and at the assembly, and counted by the tail — the visible sign of the authority that Kut makes invisible.
Tuhezhen KhanPersonsKhan of the Rouran from before 449 to 464: he besieged a Wei column dozens of ranks deep in 449, fled nine days and nights before it, lost his baggage and a million head of stock, and left the frontier quiet; in 458 Taiwu crossed the desert against him with a hundred thousand horse and found no one.
Tulan KhanPersonsKhan of the eastern Göktürk after Ishbara's death in 587, who tried to shake off the Sui, married his predecessor's Chinese widow, was betrayed by his nephew Yami, and was killed by his own followers in 603.
Tulun KhanPersonsKhan of the Rouran from 485 to 492, cruel and fond of killing by the Wei Shu's account: he executed the minister who counselled peace, lost the Gaoche when Afuzhiluo led more than a hundred thousand tents west in 487, was beaten by them again and again, and was killed with his mother by his own people, who put his uncle Nagai in his place.
TürgeshPeoplesTribe of the Üç Tuğlu wing of the Ten Arrows, in the Ili basin, whose khans ruled the western Göktürk lands from 699 to 744 from Suyab, fought the Tang, the Tibetans, the eastern Göktürk and the Arabs, and were broken at Kharistan in 737 and by the feud of their yellow and black tribes.
Türk-shadPersonsBrother of Tardush and a governor of the western Göktürk, who received the Byzantine envoy Valentinos in 576, charged him with sheltering the Avars, and sent the Utigurs and a Göktürk general against Bosporus in the Crimea; known only from Menander.
TuwuPersonsFather of Bumin and Istemi, the chief under whom the Ashina lived in the Altai as ironworkers of the Rouran in the early sixth century; the Sui Shu and the Bei Shi know him as the Great Yabgu under whom the stock grew strong, the Xin Tang Shu names him Tuwu, grandson of Nadulu, and father of Bumin and Istemi, and the Zhou Shu names no father.

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Uyghur KhaganatePolitiesThe steppe empire of the Uyghurs, a Tiele people of the Nine Oguz, which overthrew the last Göktürk khan in 744 and ruled from the Orkhon until the Kirghiz took Karabalghasun in 840.

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Wei ShuSourcesDynastic history of the Northern Wei, compiled by Wei Shou and presented in 554; its chapter 103 is the principal Chinese account of the Rouran from Mugulü to Anagui and of the Gaoche, read at the text in this work, and its chapter 9 carries the Six Garrisons revolt.
Western Göktürk KhaganatePolitiesThe western wing of the Göktürk state, founded by Istemi as a yabgu's command under the khan at Ötüken, independent after the civil war, at its height under Tong Yabgu, dissolved into the Ten Arrows after 630 and taken by the Tang in 657.
Western WeiPolitiesThe western half of the divided Northern Wei, 535 to 557, ruled from Chang'an by Yuwen Tai in the name of Tuoba emperors: it sent the first Chinese embassy to Bumin in 545, gave him a princess in 551, delivered the Rouran fugitives to Mukan in 553, and gave way to the Northern Zhou of Yuwen Tai's sons.
Western Wei embassy of 545Battles & EventsThe mission that the Western Wei chancellor Yuwen Tai sent to the Göktürk under the Sogdian An Nuopantuo: the first time a Chinese state addressed the Ashina as a party in their own right.
WusunPeoples · briefIndo-Iranian-speaking people driven from Gansu by the Xiongnu in the second century BC and settled on the Ili, whose wolf legend resembles the Ashina's.
Wuti KhanPersonsSon and successor of Datan, khan of the Rouran from 429 into the 440s: he made the first marriage alliance with the Northern Wei, married a Wei princess and gave the emperor his sister, then broke the peace in 436 and spent his last years fleeing Taiwu's columns.

X

XianbeiPeoples · briefPara-Mongolic people of the eastern steppe who succeeded the Xiongnu there, from whom the Rouran ruling house and the Tuoba of the Northern Wei descended.
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang)SourcesThe second official history of the Tang, completed 1060; for the Uyghurs and the Kirghiz the companion of the Jiu Tangshu, briefer, less precisely dated, and drawing on it.
XiongnuPeoplesThe steppe confederation north of Han China from the late third century BC to the end of the first century AD, the first nomadic empire of the eastern steppe; its language, its relation to the later Turkic peoples and its part in the origins of the Göktürk are all unresolved.
XueyantuoPeoples · briefA Tiele people, in Turkic the Sır Tarduš, who broke from the eastern Göktürk in 628 with Tang encouragement, ruled the Orkhon country after 630, and fell to the Tang a decade later.

Y

YabguInstitutions and Titles · briefThe title of the ruler of the western wing of the Göktürk, held by Istemi and his successors; a rank above a tribal chief and below a khan, and by the reading this work adopts the Ashina's own title before 552.
Yami KhanPersonsSon of Ishbara, who bought a Sui princess in 597 with the murder of Tulan's wife, fled to China with five horsemen in 599, was made Qimin Khan and given a walled town inside the frontier, marched into Ötüken with Chinese troops in 603, and ruled the eastern Göktürk as the emperor's client until his death in 609.
Yenisei KirghizPeoplesTurkic-speaking people of the upper Yenisei, known for iron and gold, conquered by Mukan in the 550s, and the power that ended the Uyghur khaganate in 840.
Yiran KhanPersons · briefSon and successor of Bilge Khan, set up by the people after the poisoning of 734, invested by the Tang and given a stele and a shrine, and dead of illness within months; his younger brother Tengri followed him.
Yucheng KhanPersonsKhan of the Rouran from 464 to 485, the first to proclaim a reign era of his own: beaten by the emperor Xianwen at the Nü river in 470 with fifty thousand dead, he sought a Wei marriage for ten years, was refused as faithless, and paid tribute without ever concluding it.
YujiulüLineagesRuling house of the Rouran Khaganate from Shelun, who took the title khan about 400, to Anagui, who died in 552, and his sons, who died as clients of the Northern Qi within two years of him; named, by the Wei Shu, after a bald slave called Mugulü.
Yuwen TaiPersonsChancellor and commander of the Western Wei, d. 557, who sent the Sogdian An Nuopantuo to Bumin in 545, gave him the princess Changle in 551, handed over the Rouran fugitive Dengshuzi to Mukan's envoys in 553, and was promised a daughter of Mukan for the alliance against the Qi that his sons, the emperors of the Northern Zhou, completed.

Z

ZemarchosPersonsByzantine envoy sent by Justin II with Maniakh in 568 to Istemi's camp at Ektag, who came home with a Göktürk embassy under the Tarkhan Tagma and Maniakh's young son, and used silk as bait to shake off a Persian army.
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou)SourcesThe official history of the Northern Zhou and the earliest sustained account of the Göktürk.
Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance)SourcesAn eleventh-century chronicle compiling the earlier histories; useful for chronology, not for attestation.