Name, Language and Memory: A Layered History of the Ethnonym Türk and Its Role in Successive Ethnogeneses (6th–17th Centuries)

Part I of the study “Türk: Name and People”. English text (canonical) and full Turkish translation (PDF); the Turkish translation is also published on turk.kim.

What happened to the ethnonym Türk after the fall of the Türk Qaghanate in 744? One position posits an essentially unbroken Türk identity from the sixth century to the present. Another, formulated by Barthold and developed by Joo-Yup Lee, holds that the name did not survive as a self-designation among the Qaghanate's successors and that its later breadth was the work of Muslim authors. This article, the first part of a two-part study, proposes a third reading: a layered history of the name. It distinguishes five functions — core ethnonym, elastic politonym, language-name, Islamic-period self-designation and genealogical charter — and codes each attestation against explicitly stated criteria, which separate the internal transmission of a name from the convergence of inside and outside usage, the internalized exonym, external categorization and homonymy. The evidence runs from Chinese, Sogdian, Mongolic and Old Turkic records of the sixth to eighth centuries, through Old Uyghur colophons, Kāshgharī's Dīwān, Qarakhanid coinage and the Kutadgu bilig, to Ilkhanid, Timurid and Chinggisid genealogies; Chinese-, Japanese-, Russian- and Turkish-language scholarship is read alongside the European literature. The Tang court already read its victory of 630 through the memory of the Xiongnu; this is treated as an external categorization, not as evidence that the name is older than the sixth century. After 744 the uses of the name diverged. The Uyghurs, who overthrew the Ashina in a contest for supremacy within one political and linguistic world, did not call themselves Türk, yet their Buddhist successors called their own language türk tili; Muslim Turkic speakers took the name up as a self-designation. For the western interval of 744–991 no internal carrier of the name is documented, and the Qarakhanid self-designation is best explained as the convergence of an externally carried generic with internally carried elements — a written language continuous with Old Turkic and, more weakly, a qaghanal titulature — rather than as unbroken continuity or simple re-borrowing. In the post-Mongol period the name served as a genealogical charter, in a Mongol-centred genus sense, and as the name of a language and of a population that spoke it. The continuity traced is one of name, language and selected memory; it is real, but it does not mean sameness, and in the sense of Smith's ethnie it is the material from which the modern Turkic nations were later formed. Descent is not used as a criterion of identity, though it is not irrelevant to ethnogenesis: what preceded the name, the populations that carried it, including the evidence of ancient DNA, and its course to the present, in which that material was taken up and enriched in the formation of the modern nations, are the subject of Part II.

Published independently, with open review. Files: the article in English and in Turkish translation (PDF); the Verification Report v1.1 with its item-by-item tables and the verifiers’ rules; Figure 1 in English and Turkish, with the script that generates it; citation files (CITATION.cff, BibTeX).