Bilge Khagan

On the banks of the Orkhon river in central Mongolia stand two large inscribed stones, one raised in 732 for Kul Tigin and one in 735 for his brother Bilge Khagan. They are written in the Old Turkic runiform script, they are long, and they are cast as speech: the khagan addresses his people, his begs and his kinsmen, and tells them what happened and what they must not do again.

Nothing else like them exists for the early steppe. The written record of Inner Asia is otherwise almost entirely external, set down in Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Greek or Syriac by people describing nomads from outside and usually with a purpose. Here the ruler of a nomadic empire gives his own account of legitimacy, defeat, recovery and obligation, in his own language, on a monument his people would come to.

The Kul Tigin stone also carries a Chinese inscription, commissioned by the Tang emperor, on another face. The two texts do not say the same thing, and reading them together is one of the more instructive exercises in Inner Asian history. The Chinese face presents a client mourned by a benevolent court; the Turkic face presents a sovereign warning his people about that court. The stones were recorded by Russian and Finnish expeditions in the 1890s and the script was deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893, which is when this voice became audible again after eleven centuries.

The religion of the inscriptions is not a system laid out for a reader. It appears as the grammar of the political argument. Tengri, the sky, is the source of rule: the khagan says that because Tengri willed it and because the earth and the waters were favourable, he was seated on the throne. Tengri also punishes, and the collapse of the earlier khaganate is explained as a withdrawal of favour after the Turks turned against their own leaders. Umay, a female power associated with the fertility of women and the protection of children, is named beside Tengri, and the holy earth and water, yer-sub, form the third term.

The practical instruction that follows is about staying on the steppe. The inscriptions warn that Chinese gold, silver, silk and sweet words are the means by which the Turkic people are drawn to settle near the frontier, where they lose their independence and die far from home. The Chinese histories preserve a related episode from the same generation: Bilge is said to have proposed building walled towns and Buddhist and Taoist temples, and to have been talked out of it by the old counsellor Tonyukuk on the ground that a mobile people cannot be besieged and a settled one can.

Whether or not that exchange happened as reported, the same argument is in the stones, which makes it a Tengrist political theology rather than only a piece of military advice.