On Indo-European/Turkic Connection

[Siblesz]

What if I told you that a country like Japan and a country like Spain have some shared cultural heritage that goes back to a common source and mysterious time, over 5,000 years ago?

Most people tend to think cultures are isolated in their own geographic areas, when the historical reality is much more fluid than we could ever imagine.

One of the most impactful peoples in World history were the people who originated in the Central Eurasian plains. Of these, there were two major groups, the Indo-European tribes, originating somewhere in between the Black and Caspian Seas, and the Turkic peoples, originating either in the area around Baikal Lake in modern day Russia, or in the Altai mountains region, a place that is tucked in between Russia, Mongolia, China, and Kazahkstan and shares borders with all of them. Genetic evidence shows that these two tribes have been intermixing for thousands of years, and how far into the past this was been the case is not known.

Both of these people were into shamanism, believing in animism, the idea that there is spirit in all of nature. They would communicate with the spirits of the forests, and they would many times drink from a mysterious elixir ("moksha") that would allow them to communicate with the gods. They were also a very war-like people. They practiced martial exercises since early childhood, which included wrestling, horse-back riding, archery, among other sports. To this day, the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Mongolians hold their own Olympic games called 'Naadam', where they gather every year in summer time and compete in war-like exercises, exercises aimed at instilling martial values in the population, training their young to prepare for wars, as well as instilling in the people the cult-worship of the hero and the hero's journey. There is indeed a connection between Naadam and the olympics as practiced in Ancient Greece, all the way to our own modern-day, evolved olympic games.

The first evidence of domestication of the horse happened in this area, allowing the Indo-European tribes to migrate in all directions, the steppes being open highways that allowed easy access from West to East. It also made them an unstoppable invasive force, no peoples having the warlike advantage that these guys had. Even after the established civilizations of the time took up horse riding in order to defend themselves against the the threat of these warmongering people, the Indo-Europeans and Turkic tribes still had the advantage of the humongous strip of plains that stretched for thousands of kilometres, a plain that could maintain and feed tens of millions of horses at a time. For that reason, this home turf advantage of these migratory peoples meant that they had ten times the amount of horses to people, whereas in other places like Egypt or Mesopotamia they could at most have one horse for every fifth men. This logistical advantage lasted all the way up until the 1500s, when gunpowder made cavalry obsolete. In China, the threat of Mongolian invasion lasted even until the 1700s, when Kangxi, emperor of the Qing dynasty, finally defeated the last Mongolian Dzungurian Khanate and put an end to a 3,000 year saga.

In any case, sometime in between the third and second millennium B.C., one branch of these Indo-European tribes eventually moved Westwardly towards Bulgaria, another branch moved Southeast, displacing the pre-Vedic Harappans in India as well as the local pre-Aryan peoples of Iran. In India they established the caste system and introduced Vedic philosophy as these two cultures mixed. In Iran, they were the people behind the religion of Zoroasterism. Further West, they invaded Mesopotamia to become the Hittites. Eventually they displaced the Minoan civilization in Greece and Turkey to become the Hellenistic tribes. And even further west they became the Celtic tribes of Iberia, Gaul and the British isles. The Romans were a later invasion into Italy. Over time, the Scythians, the Germanic tribes, and finally the Vikings, the last of the Indo-European invasive family followed suit. They got as far east as Xinjiang, modern-day China, establishing city-states in oases dotting the Taklamakan Desert. As they went along conquering, they usually became the elites but still learned from the people they were conquering, so the Greeks learned from the Minoans, the Romans from the Etruscans, the Vedic Aryans from the Harappans, the Germanic tribes from the Romans, and so on.

The Turkic tribes kick-started their invasions a bit later, and it is debated where exactly they originated. Genetic evidence suggests Altai. Some folk tales suggest Baikal Lake in modern-day Russia. The reality is probably more complex, because the Turkic peoples were not as aristocratic in the aims as the Indo-European tribes and were much more likely to inter-mix with the local populations that they invaded than the Indo-Europeans were. So wherever they went, they mixed and mingled. What we do know, is that relatively early on, these two tribes had a lot of cultural exchanges. In many cases even the same gods. ("Tengri was the main god of the Turkic pantheon, controlling the celestial sphere.[20] Tengri is considered to be similar to the Indo-European sky god, *Dyeus, and the structure of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion is closer to that of the early Turks than to the religion of any people of Near Eastern or Mediterranean antiquity." see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengri#Mythology )

The case of China and Japan:

The Turkic peoples and Indo-Europeans had more contact with each other than most people give them credit. The Indo-European tribes taught them technologies such as bronze-making, horse-back riding, and chariot making. They traded goods with each each other, inter-married (sometimes by kidnapping the wives of the enemy tribe), fought each other, and exchanged stories in times of peace.

Evidence of these links is copious, not only found in strong similarities of these two peoples in the art work, sculpting, and weaving that they produced, but there is now, thanks to genetic mapping, strong proof of interexchange between the two genetic pools going back to at least five thousand years. The appearance of the modern day peoples of Central Asian countries, such as the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Uighurs, is more than confirmation that intermixing happened at a massive scale. At what rate it did, and when it started, is anyone's guess.

Like the Indo-Europeans, there were many waves of invasions by the Turkic tribes. Many of these established vast khanates that were controlled by the force of their violent wills, but many times fractured after a few decades. The Huns were the first to come out of the steppes, followed by the Uighurs, followed by the Kyrgyz, followed by the Liao, followed by the Western Xia, followed by the Mongols, followed by the Dzungarians, and eventually by the Manchu. The Turkic tribes gravitated more in the northern part of China, and only later in time did they move westwardly, pushing the Indo-European tribes out (that is why the Goths and Germanic tribes invaded the Roman Empire... They were being pushed by the Huns, a mixed Scythian and Turkic tribe that was eventually defeated by the Romans at a colossal cost)... The Mongols followed suit, creating the largest empire the world had seen, stretching from Vietnam to Ukraine to Syria. They were followed by the Moghuls of Timur the lame, who created a vast empire stretching from Turkmenistan all the way to India and Persia. A tribe contemporary with the Moghuls, the Seljuk Turks, eventually reached all the way to Constantinople in 1453 and even beyond, knocking at the door of Vienna and even reaching Morocco, creating the vast Ottoman Empire.

The Turkic tribes didn't have a written language. Eventually they would, like the Indo-Europeans, learn from the people they conquered and would either adopt the writing of the conquered tribes or create their own based on elements of languages that they learned from others (see Uighur script). There's many theories about how these people started out and what they did in the early days. There are even some theories that they the Hunnic tribes (know then as the Xuanyu) had been mixing with Han Chinese even prior to the founding of the Shang dynasty in China, as well as theories that posit that the founders of the Zhou dynasty were actually Indo-European tribes that invaded and conquered the Shang.
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...w_River_Valley
Other theories say that Turkic tribes formed a great part of the people of the Qin state, the militaristic horse-riding kingdom that eventually went on to defeat all the other kingdoms in ancient China to establish the Qin dynasty through the conquests of emperor Qin Shihuang.

These theories of course are mostly discredited in China since they threaten the nationalistic narrative of the modern-day nationalist Chinese state, but they are interesting to consider and investigate nonetheless, and there is genetic evidence now backing up these claims.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418768/
What is more than true is the impossible contribution that trade links from Central Asia to China, dating back to at least 4,000 years ago, had on Chinese civilizations. Without these interactions, the Han would never had ridden a horse, created chariots, made bronze tools, been introduced to cattle and sheep, and plants such as wheat, barley, or hemp would never have been cultivated.

We don't know too much about the early Turkic tribes, only that the Chinese were always fending them off, and even built the great wall of China to keep them out. That of course didn't work out, and centuries after their debut, they were already causing havoc. Eventually they were even directly responsible for the destruction of the Tang and the Song dynasties, one through a usurpation of power from within through the connivings of a romantic half-Sogdian, half-Turkic general (see Anlushan rebellion), and the other through the Mongol invasions of the 1200s.

They are also indebted with establishing three other dynasties that lasted hundreds of years, including the Liao dynasty by the Khitan, the Yuan by the Mongols, and the Qing by the Manchu, so the imprint they have had on Chinese history is massive.

The Indo-European tribe most attributed to have influenced the East were the Scythians. The Scythians are now seen more as a assortment of different Indo-Iranian tribes than one tribe in of itself. These tribes started being chronicled sometime in the 6 century B.C. when they started their raids into Persia. Other Scythian tribes included the Sarmatians, which came a bit later in the game, the Yuezhi and Tocharians, an early Eastern branch of Sychtian tribes that inhabited the Tarim basin all the way to Turkmenistan, and the Sogdians, also an eastern branch, probably the same people who were chronicled by latter historians under a different name. The Persians knew the Sythians as the Saka, and also divided them into three distinct tribes, the Western Saka, Central Saka, Eastern Saka. These difference were mostly created mostly differentiated by each tribe's unique sense of dressing, their customs, and manners and probably some because of some slight differences in physical appearance (the eastern Scythians having more Mongoloid genes, the Western being more Indo-European).

The Scythians were a feared bunch... the ancient Greeks revered them as being fearless warriors, their women would even march into battle alongside men, and they were considered very agile horsemen. The reality of who these people really were, were they exclusively Indo-European, or had they mixed with the Turkic tribes, is up for grabs. Genetic evidence points in the direction of the latter though. What is most likely is that they still had an aristocracy made up of Indo-Europeans that eventually mixed up with Turkic and other tribes.

What we do know is that these people were the masters of the steppes leading all the way up to the third century AD, and those very people who settled in the far-flung oases towns of Xinjiang, in modern-day China. The Eastern flank of these Scythian tribes, known as the Yuezhi, Tocharians, or the Sogdians, at first were shamanistic in their beliefs. Later on they had a strong Zoroastrian faith, but they would eventually take up Buddhism. The story of how these people became Buddhists took place when the Yuezhi invaded the Greco-Buddhist kingdom of Bactria in the 2nd century AD. The Han Chinese historians of the time chronicled the event, describing how the Huns eventually and slowly displaced them in Central Asia. and pushed them out of their traditional home turfs in the Tarim Basin.

The cultural spread of these people was quite immense. New theories coming out of just how far did their cultural domains reach suggest that the Sogdians, or another Indo-European tribe, or perhaps a Turkic tribe that took up Indo-European cultural motifs, spread into Northern China through the Silk Road, and eventually ended up in Korea and then Japan, introducing these cultures to their shamanistic way of life, as well as spreading some of their medicinal plants, cultural motifs (solar worship rituals, dragon slaying stories, the way they aligned their homes, etc.) The kingdom of Silla of Korea is known to have sent emissaries to the Sogdian Kingdoms of Central Asia, and Sogdian embassadors were sent to Korea as well, so it is perhaps through these diplomatic missions that the Central Asian culture was spread.To this day, many elements of Japanese Shinto worship date back to the ancient interactions these people had with the Central Asian tribes. How exactly this unfolded is up for grabs, because there is little written evidence. But the evidence, both found in eerily similar myths and stories, as well as artistic evidence, is uncanny.

The images of the sculptures that I posted above are called Balbals. They dot the Central Asian plains and are found all over the place. They were used as burial mounds by the surrounding Turkic and Indo-European tribes, and to this day they remain there, men sculpted out of stones, peering into the vast plains, testaments of a time long forgotten. Go all the way over to Japan, and you find the same sculptures. The similarities are uncanny, too much so for it to be mere coincidence.

For more in-depth information about this and other strange connections between Central Asia and Japan, read these links:
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/sp...lbal_japan.pdf
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp214_japan_king.pdf
https://japanesemythology.wordpress....od-prototypes/

The Yuezhi 月氏, or Eastern Scythians are also indebted with introducing Buddhism to China and Japan, a religion which quite ironically came from a city state in Northern India that was founded by some of the descendants of the first Aryans who invaded India in the second millenium B.C. When the Yuezhi were pushed out of their home territories in Western China by the Huns, they were forced to seek new lands, so they invaded the Greco-Bactrian states in order to seek new lands. At this moment in time, something quite interesting took place: You had three different Indo-European tribes meeting each other, three tribes that had been separated for thousands of years and had gone into three different directions. They met each other, oblivious of this fact.

The Macedonians, also an Indo-European tribe that had just learned in a few decades to be "civilized" from their Greek neighbors to the South, had just conquered all of the Persian Empire and a group of them settled themselves in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, establishing the Greco-Bactrian Kingdoms. They learned Buddhism from the Vedic civilization that was already well established there and converted to Buddhism in the 3rd century BC, but also introduced some Hellenistic motifs into the religion. A hundred years later the Scythians invaded the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and also converted to Buddhism, this time introducing their own shamanistic rituals into Buddhism and establishing the Mahayana school of Buddhism, the very school that would eventually send monks to China and convert China into Buddhism, which would eventually send monks to Japan and do the same...

The more we find out about these people, the more interesting it becomes. Who would have thought that a small group of horse riders from Central Asia would have had such an impact in the history of culture and civilization, spreading their culture motifs as far wide as Japan, Northern China, India, Persia, Turkey, Greece, Rome, and later European civilization?

The world is a small place indeed... What we consider East and West is more complicated than that. Most of the civilized world has been communicating and sharing the same story since the beginning. The funniest part of this story is that most of neither the Japanese, nor Chinese, nor the Indians, nor the Spanish or Italians nor English or Russians or Persians or Turks, are even aware that they are so connected to each other.

In places like India and China, such theories are controversial because they unravel the official narrative of these nation states, implying that much of their cultures came from elsewhere. In the end, the truth is that everyone and everything just simply comes from somewhere else, and everything is borrowed. These migratory people knew of this first hand, otherwise they would never had gone to eventually write down the Bhagavad Gita. In that text, the most cited quote is, "Tat tvam asi." Or, "Thou art that".

We indeed are that. We are the Sun. We are the Moon. We are everything that we encounter and brush our lucks with. We are that, everything under the stars. All else but this is an illusion. If you go to the Central Asian steppes, and sit next to one of those bal bals, they seem to be the only ones who haven't forgotten these eternal truths. They stand there silently, witnessing all the different epochs of man as everything around themchanges... and yet nothing changes... the steppes continue being there, the seasons change, spring turns to summer which turns to fall and then winter... and yet spring comes again... and the bal bal remain there... silently watching.

If you were to listen carefully, you might even hear them speak.
"I am the stone man. I stand here, and have witnessed before me eons of time. I don't remember my name, but it doesn't matter. All I know is that even time has forgotten me, but that I am alive, and still happy. I see the clouds appear and disappear, mountains appear and disappear, and entire civilizations of man have appeared... and disappeared. I still stand here, gazing at the stars, to see if one day I am released from my waking slumber and can join the stars again."

[NorthernXY]

For the time it takes to read this, I'm going to have to be on the toilet all day.

The Turkish people definitely played a huge role in history, for better or worse.