Central Asian Steppe

The Eurasian steppe, the vast grassland corridor running from Mongolia across Kazakhstan toward the Black Sea, was the homeland of the horse-riding Turkic and Mongolic peoples, and it gave the world one of its most durable indigenous religions: Tengrism, the worship of the eternal blue sky. Unlike many ancient religions known only through later or foreign sources, Tengrism is directly attested in the peoples' own words: the eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions, carved in the Old Turkic script on great stone steles for the Kok Turk rulers, open by invoking Tengri, the sky god, and describe the khagan as ruling by his mandate, "when the blue sky above and the brown earth below were created, between the two were created the sons of men."

The religion centred on Tengri and on Yer-Su (earth-water spirits) and the goddess Umay, protector of childbirth, and it sanctioned the authority of the khagan as sky-appointed. This sky-mandate ideology reached its widest influence under the Mongol empire of Chinggis Khan, whose conquests were understood as the will of Eternal Heaven. The steppe was also a great conduit of other faiths, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, and eventually Islam all travelled and took root along its routes, so that the region functioned both as the home of an indigenous sky-religion and as a highway over which the world religions crossed Asia.

Mobile pastoralists build little that stays and write little that lasts, so the steppe is known mainly through two sources: what settled neighbours said about it, and what was buried in it.

The written descriptions come from every direction and none of them is disinterested. Chinese histories describe the northern peoples as a security problem. Persian, Byzantine, Arab and later Russian accounts describe them as trading partners, threats or subjects. Where these sources agree, they may be agreeing because they copied one another or because they shared an assumption about what nomads are like.

The exception is important. Turkic inscriptions raised in the Orkhon valley in the eighth century are a self-written record: monuments erected by a steppe polity, in its own language and script, invoking Tengri, the sky, as the power that grants and withdraws rule. They are rare and they are decisive, because they show the religion stated from inside rather than reported from outside.

The material record is unusually rich for a mobile society because of burial. Kurgan mounds preserve grave goods, and in the frozen tombs of the Altai the ground preserved textiles, felt hangings, wooden objects and tattooed skin that would have rotted anywhere else.

Later layers complicate any simple picture: Buddhism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam all found adherents on the steppe, and the sky worship attested in the inscriptions coexisted with them rather than being replaced at a stroke.