Tengri as Sky-God: Ancient Turkish Supreme Being in Hikmet Tanyu and Raffaele Pettazzoni

Here I have confined myself to the earlier stages of the ancient Turkish Supreme Being as indicated in the All-Knowing God, by the most notable Italian historian of Religions, Pettazzoni (1883- 1959). By doing so, I will try to examine Pettazzoni`s ideas about this matter with a comparison of those of Hikmet Tanyu (1918- 1992), the founder of Turkish tradition of History of Religions in the republican era, especially his ideas exposed in his most effective works, The Religious History of Turks and The Belief of Monotheism in Turks of Pre-Islamic Period. First of all, in The All- Knowing God, which Tanyu knows its Italian edition too,

Both Pettazzoni, the founder of Italian School of religions and Tanyu, the founder of Turkish School of religions seriously shed a light on the historical development of the functions in the Turkish Supreme Being despite of its structural static in its later processions. It is observed that the traditional Turkish belief of the Supreme- God or “Gök Tanrı” represents some abstract structure of deity which is difficult to observe its origin and morphology. However, we may trace on its nature by referring to archetypical elements appeared in the historical evidence such as inscriptions, religious textes or epics belonging to various Turkish peoples. Therefore, evidently Tanyu’s national researches on the ancient Turkish deity confirm Pettazzonian understanding of the All- Knowing God.

In the last analysis, we can see that Tanyu has more particular and considerably narrower approach than Pettazzoni who has the global, well-designed and composite paradigms. For, Tanyu looks upon the belief of Gok- Tengri as somewhat monotheistic system of the ancient Turks having been existed even long before Islamic monotheism and he termed the Religion of Gok Tengri. Furthermore, Tanyu challenges that early Turkish belief of deity was very similar to Abrahamic concept of monotheism and therefore, the ancient Turks could be called muslims in miniscule letters.

Unlike Turkish ethnologists who have absolute reductionist and superficial comparisons, Both Pettazzoni and Tanyu having the strong paradigms of the History of Religions believe that the ancient Turkish belief of deity has preserved its main features in history. So, it is possible to see the impacts of this belief within later traditions believed by various Turkish peoples. Furthermore, each believed that despite of the complexity in the religious history of Turks, Tengri had preserved its own original form as being supreme god. By his great ability on the methodology, Pettazzoni presents us a discipline as the History of Religions which might be in a sense the story of the Supreme Being and of his cultural temples of the humanity.