Turkic Peoples

The early Turkic peoples were shamanists and worshippers of Tengri (a celestial god), Umay (a fertility goddess), Yol Tengri “Road God” (a god of fate), Earth-Water (nature spirits), and other natural phenomena. They also engaged in ancestor worship. In the 6th century and thereafter they came into contact with Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism (to which the Uygurs converted in 762), Judaism (to which the Khazars converted in the late 8th or early 9th century) and Islam. The Volga Bulgars (ancestors, in part, of the modern Volga Tatars) were the first to become Muslims in the 920s. Large-scale conversions followed among the Turkic peoples of the steppe, a process that continued well into the Chinggisid era. Today, the overwhelming majority of Turkic-speaking peoples are Sunni Muslims with Shiism well represented among the Azerbaijanis. The Chuvash and some Siberian Turks adopted Orthodox Christianity spread by Russian missionaries, although shamanistic influences remain. The Tuvinians and Yellow Yogurs (Uygurs in China) are Buddhists.

The pagan Turks believed that their Ashina qaghans ruled by virtue of heavenly mandated charisma (qut). Since their blood could not be shed, dethroned qaghans were strangled with a silk cord. The investiture ceremonies of the Ashina Turks and Khazar qaghans included ritual near-strangulation. As this charisma resided in the entire royal clan, the latter exercised a collective sovereignty over their realms resulting in frequent succession struggles.

The earliest Turkic texts date from the early 8th-century ad runic official inscriptions of the Second Turk Empire. Some scattered specimens may be earlier. Variants of this script are found among a number of Turkic peoples across Eurasia. A slightly altered form of the Sogdian alphabet, itself derived from Aramaic-Syriac scripts, was adopted by the Uygurs (most probably after 840). This alphabet continued in use for some time after the various Turkic peoples Islamicized and was adopted by the Mongols and later the Manchus. Turkic has also been written in Indic (Brahmi) and Tibetan scripts. With Islamization, from the 10th century onwards, the Arabic alphabet became widely used. In 1928 the Turkish Republic replaced Ottoman-Arabic script with the Latin alphabet. Turkic peoples under Soviet rule switched from Arabic to Latin and eventually to Cyrillic scripts during the period 1922-1940. After the fall of the Soviet Union, some Turkic peoples, both those still under Russian rule (for example, the Tatars) and those who now have independent states (for example, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan) have adopted Latin alphabets. Turkic peoples in Iran and China continue to use Arabic script.