Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (7 page)
The child who was the ancestor of the Türk people was abandoned in the wilderness to die, but he was saved by a she-wolf, who nursed him. Later the wolf, pregnant with the boy’s offspring, escaped her enemies by crossing the Western Sea to a cave in a mountain north of Qocho, one of the cities of the Tokharians.
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The first Turks subsequently moved to the Altai, where they are known as expert ironworkers, as the Scythians are also known to have been.
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Toward the middle of the sixth century the Türk under their leader *Tumïn
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were subjects of the Avars or Jou-jan,
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a people of unknown origin whose nomad warrior kingdom ruled the Eastern Steppe. *Tumïn had become a great lord in his own right, and had entered into diplomatic and commercial relations with the T’o-pa (Toba) Wei Dynasty in China.
When an enemy, the T’ieh-le, threatened the Avar Empire, *Tumïn led his men to attack them. He defeated them and subjugated the entire nation.
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Buoyed by his victory, *Tumïn requested an alliance with the Avars as recognition of his merit—this meant taking the hand of the daughter of the Avar kaghan in marriage.
But the kaghan, Anagai, refused his request. He sent an emissary to *Tumïn to rebuke him, saying, “You are my blacksmith slave. How dare you utter these words?” *Tumïn himself now became angry and killed the emissary. He cut off relations with the Avars and successfully sought a marriage alliance with the Chinese instead. The following year *Tumïn attacked the Avars and crushed them in a great battle. Anagai committed suicide in spring of 552, and his son fled to China.
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*Tumïn then took the title of kaghan.
Though he died shortly afterward, *Tumïn’s successors chased any Avars who did not submit to them across the length and breadth of Eurasia, from China in the East to Constantinople in the West,
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and became rulers of the entire steppe zone.
The Mongols were descended from a heavenly blue-gray wolf and a fallow doe. They crossed a great body of water to reach a safe land—an enclosed valley in the mountains—where they produced the progenitors of the later Mongols.
In the Eastern Steppe in the twelfth century, a remarkable son was born to the Mongol tribal chief, Yesügei. The boy Temüjin was the great-grandson of Khabul Khan, who had been captured and killed by the Tatars, the allies of the Jurchen of North China. Yesügei had named his son Temüjin (’Iron-smith’) after a Tatar leader he had captured. When Temüjin was still a child, Yesügei was murdered by the Tatars. His subjects were taken by his kinsmen the Taičighut, who left Temüjin’s mother and her children behind with nothing.
They were poor, and suffered greatly. Temüjin and his brothers caught fish in the Onon River, while his mother wandered in the steppe searching for wild onions, crabapples, and whatever else she could find to feed her children. They thus survived on their wits and grew up.
Slowly men recognized Temüjin’s leadership, and he acquired a personal following of four great warriors. He unified all the peoples of the Eastern Steppe, who acclaimed him Chinggis Khan (’universal ruler’).
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He conquered the Tatars, defeated the Jurchen, and went on to pacify the peoples of the four directions.
No one can say that the heroes who accomplished these deeds for their people did not do them. The Chou Dynasty of China, the Roman Empire, the Wu-sun Kingdom, and the Hsiung-nu Empire are all historical facts, as are the realms of the Koguryo, the Türk, the Mongols, and others. How these nations really were founded is obscured by the mists of time, in which the merging of legendary story and history is nearly total. Even the relatively late, more or less historical accounts of the foundation of the Mongol Empire contain legendary or mythical elements that are presented as facts along with purely historical events. Yet that is unimportant. What really mattered was that the unjust overlords who suppressed the righteous people and stole their wealth were finally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes.
In each case the subject people lived for a time under the unjust rule of their conquerors, and as their vassals they fought for them. By fighting in their conquerors’ armies, the subject people acquired the life-style of steppe warriors. They also learned from their rulers the ideal of the hero in the First Story, which was sung in different versions over and over from campfire to campfire around the kingdom along with other heroic epics that told stories almost as old, with a similar moral.
After the subject people had thoroughly assimilated their overlords’ steppe way of life, military techniques, pol itical culture, and mythology, they eventually rebelled. If successful, they followed the ideal pattern told in the stories and became free, replacing their overlords as rulers of the steppe.
In their successful campaign to establish their power over the land, the former vassal people, now the rulers of their own kingdom, inevitably subjugated other peoples, one of whom would serve them, learn from them, and eventually overthrow them in exactly the same way. This cycle began at least as early as the foundation of the Hittite Empire in the seventeenth century BO and can be traced historically in Central Eurasia itself over a period of some two millennia from the first known large, organized state of the steppe zone, the Scythian Empire, which was established in the seventh century BO, down to the Junghars and Manchus in early modern times.
These legendary accounts—nearly always presented as history by the people who preserved them—attest to the fact that nation after nation in Central Eurasia attempted to substantiate its belief in the First Story by following the state-formation model it prescribes.
The essential elements of the First Story, which may appear incompletely or in a slightly different order in the actual attested versions, are:
A maiden is impregnated by a heavenly spirit or god.
The rightful king is deposed unjustly.
The maiden gives birth to a marvelous baby boy.
The unjust king orders the baby to be exposed.
The wild beasts nurture the baby so he survives.
The baby is discovered in the wilderness and saved.
The boy grows up to be a skilled horseman and archer.
He is brought to court but put in a subservient position.
He is in danger of being put to death but escapes.
He acquires a following of oath-sworn warriors.
He overthrows the tyrant and reestablishes justice in the kingdom.
He founds a new city or dynasty.
This looks very much like a schematic folktale, not history, at least when presented as a list. It may be difficult for historians and other scholars today to accept that people of the early second millennium
BC
would believe such stories to be actual history, or perhaps idealized history, but the theory that human societies sometimes base far-reaching actions on ideological or religious beliefs should be no surprise to medievalists, or indeed to anyone living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
AD
. The mythological beliefs in the First Story belong to the collection of cultural elements shared by the peoples of premodern Central Eurasia that goes back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It is called here the Central Eurasian Culture Complex.
The Comitatus
The most crucial element of the early form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex was the sociopolitical-religious ideal of the heroic lord and his
comitatus,
a war band of his friends sworn to defend him to the death. The essential features of the comitatus and its oath are known to have existed as early as the Scythians and seem difficult to separate clearly from the oath of blood brotherhood to death, which is attested from ancient sources on the Scythians through the medieval
Secret History of the Mongols.
Lucian (second century
AD
) has his Scythian character Toxaris say:
Friendships are not formed with us, as with you, over the wine-cups, nor are they determined by considerations of age or neighbourhood. We wait till we see a brave man, capable of valiant deeds, and to him we all turn our attention. Friendship with us is like courtship with you: rather than fail of our object, and undergo the disgrace of a rejection, we are content to urge our suit patiently, and to give our constant attendance. At length a friend is accepted, and the engagement is concluded with our most solemn oath: “to live together and if need be to die for one another.” That vow is faithfully kept: once let the friends draw blood from their fingers into a cup, dip the points of their swords therein, and drink of that draught together, and from that moment nothing can part them.
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The core comitatus consisted of a small number of warriors, who are called or referred to as friends.
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Chinggis Khan himself had four: Khubilai, Jelme, Jebe, and Sübedei, whom Jamukha characterizes as the four fierce wolves or dogs of Chinggis. The characterization of the comitatus warriors as wolves or other fierce animals goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European times. The core group—usually a small number of men
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—committed ritual suicide (or was executed) to accompany the lord if he predeceased the group, and each man was buried “armed to the teeth” for battle in the next world.
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The comitatus warriors took their oath freely and, in doing so, broke their original connections to their clan or nation.
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They became as close or closer than family to their lord, they lived in their lord’s house with him, and they were rewarded lavishly by him in return for their oath. The comitatus is attested archaeologically in burials, historically in descriptions of cultures from all parts of Central Eurasia, and in early literary texts. The most famous are perhaps the
Rig Veda
hymns to the deified comitatus of Indra, the
Marut
chariot warriors. A vivid example is found in a dialogue between the lord and his warrior friends where
Ahi
is the snake-demon enemy, the dragon of many Central Eurasian heroic epics:
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