ABSTRACT
The first historical Turks, that is, the first people to bear
the name 'Turk' and to be well documented, appeared only
the seat of their already extensive power was in the north-east
of present-day Mongolia, on the banks of the rivers Orkhon and
Selenga. There is no doubt, however, that their existence dates
well as by Chinese records, and indeed the language they spoke
at that time shows signs of considerable age. To undertake
research into a period which, for these peoples, belongs to
prehistory, is a difficult task, full of pitfalls; the results
so far reached are still debatable and may, in some cases, be
There seems to be no doubt, however, that their original
primitive life as hunters and gatherers. One can only guess at
the date in the first millennium Be when they left these forests
to become large-scale stock-breeders in Upper Asia and mixed
with the nomadic hordes already on the move in the steppelands
of Eurasia, from the plains of eastern Europe to the shores of
the Pacific; this is because neither the linguistic nor the
in their language is Tengri, which means 'sky' and which is at
the same time the name of their high god; this is mentioned in
Chinese texts of the third century Be but it is common both to
Turkic and Mongol. Their culture as revealed by Herodotus for
example, is largely uniform from one end of the steppes of
Eurasia to the other, an area containing people of many origins,
Indo-European, Altaic (namely, Turks, Mongols and Tungus), Uralians (Finns, Hungarians) and paleo-Asiatics. Archaeology alone might be capable of establishing the identity of the
Turks, were the skulls found in burial grounds to show devisive
the brachycephalic type rather than dolicocephalic has no
bearing on the matter. It seems probable that throughout history
and especially in these distant periods Turkic-speaking peoples
were of a Mongoloid or Indo-European racial type: the oldest-
known of these peoples, the Kirghi z, are described by the
Chinese as being tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed.
