By year
Years
Every year for which the work records something, from the rise of the Xiongnu to the fall of the Uyghurs. Each page shows what happened in the eastern and western steppe, in China, Persia and Byzantium at the same time, and which reigns and wars were under way.
25th century BC
20th century BC
15th century BC
13th century BC
10th century BC
8th century BC
7th century BC
6th century BC
5th century BC
4th century BC
3rd century BC
2nd century BC
1st century BC
1st century
2nd century
4th century
5th century
6th century
7th century
8th century
9th century
10th century
13th century
The twelve animals
- ratsıçgan
- oxud
- tigerbars
- haretavışgan
- dragonnek
- snakeyılan
- horseyund
- sheepkoñ
- monkeybiçin
- hentakıgu
- dogit
- pigtoŋuz
The Göktürk counted years in a cycle of twelve animals, and their own monuments date by it: the Kül Tegin inscription puts Kül Tegin's death in the Year of the Sheep and the finishing of his monument in the Year of the Monkey — 731 and 732. Every year page here carries its animal, reckoned forward and back from those two. Golden 1992 takes the Bugut inscription of the 580s to show that the Göktürk knew the cycle already then, and calls its origins obscure.
One thing the reckoning does not claim. The animal year and the year in this list do not cover the same twelve months: the Turkic year began in spring, so each animal runs across parts of two years as they are numbered here.
The names themselves are attested. Only sheep and monkey stand in the inscriptions quoted here, but all twelve are set out in the eleventh-century dictionary of Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, under the entry for bars, together with the story of how the cycle was made: a khan who could not find out in which year a battle had been fought had the wild beasts driven into the Ili, and named a year for each of the twelve that swam across, beginning with the mouse. He wrote in Muḥarram 466, which he says was a year of the snake.