Orkhon Inscriptions- Mongolian ArtifactArtifact

The Monuments

Three stone stelae stand in Mongolia's Orkhon Valley, erected in the first half of the eighth century CE. The Kül Tigin inscription (732 CE) commemorates a military commander and prince, commissioned by his brother Bilge Khagan. The Bilge Khagan inscription (735 CE), raised after the khagan's death, records his deeds and counsel to his people. Both stand in the Khöshoo Tsaidam area, surrounded by ruins of funerary temple complexes. A third, the Tonyukuk inscription (c. 720 CE), stands apart at Baın Tsokto: the memoirs of the khaganate's chief minister, the earliest known autobiographical text in any Turkic language.

The valley was sacred ground. The Xiongnu had ruled from here, and after the Göktürks the Uyghurs would do the same. The Mongols later built Karakorum nearby. Successive steppe empires returned to this stretch of river and grassland as if drawn by the land itself. The stelae were placed where heaven and earth were believed to be in closest communication.

The main texts face the Turkic heartland and are carved in Old Turkic runes, an angular alphabet of some thirty-eight characters designed for stone. Shorter Chinese texts face south toward Tang China. The stelae spoke to two audiences in two directions.

Tengri's Mandate

The Kül Tigin inscription opens with a foundational declaration: "When the blue sky above and the brown earth below were created, between them human beings were created. Over the human beings, my ancestors Bumin Khagan and Istemi Khagan ruled. Having become rulers, they organized and governed the Turkic people's realm and institutions."

Heaven and earth as the frame of human existence, with divinely sanctioned rulers between them. The khagan rules not by personal ambition but because "Tengri above so ordained." When the Turkic people fall into disunity, they have lost heaven's favor. When they rise again, Tengri has granted a new mandate. The inscriptions state this plainly, without qualification.

The Fall and Restoration

The Bilge Khagan inscription recounts how the Turkic people, once great under their early khagans, fell under Chinese domination because they abandoned their own customs and leaders. Turkic nobles took Chinese titles. Turkic commoners labored for the Tang dynasty. The text presents this as a cosmic catastrophe: the people had lost Tengri's favor through their own failings.

The restoration came when Tengri took pity on the Turkic nation and raised up new leaders. The narrative carries a direct charge to its audience: the Turkic people must remain true to their own ways and their own land. Seduction by Chinese luxury leads to ruin. Only faithfulness to Tengri's ordained order ensures survival.

Tonyukuk's Counsel

The Tonyukuk inscription speaks in a different voice. Where the other two address the people with the authority of the khaganate, Tonyukuk's text is personal: a strategist reflecting on his own role in the restoration of Turkic power. He describes his counsel to the early khagans and the reasoning that guided his campaigns.

His sharpest argument was against building Buddhist temples within the khaganate. Tonyukuk warned that sedentary practices would weaken the nomadic warrior culture that was the source of Turkic strength. The Turkic people's power lay in their mobile, austere way of life under Tengri's open sky. Walls and temples were for settled peoples. The Göktürks were riders.

The Balbal

Surrounding the principal stelae stand rows of balbal, rough standing stones representing enemies defeated by the commemorated ruler. Kül Tigin's complex includes dozens of these silent witnesses, each marking a slain adversary or a conquered people. The ruler's victories were inscribed in stone not only through written text but through the physical presence of his defeated foes, rendered as standing stones within his funerary enclosure. Turtle-shaped pedestals supported the main stelae, and surrounding walls defined sacred precincts where commemorative rituals took place.

The Decipherment

For over a millennium after the fall of the Göktürk khaganate, the inscriptions stood unread. Travelers noted the mysterious carved stones but the script had passed out of living knowledge. In 1889, Nikolai Yadrintsev rediscovered the major monuments, and photographs were dispatched to scholars across Europe.

In 1893, the Danish philologist Vilhelm Thomsen cracked the script. The Russian Turkologist Vasily Radloff published parallel translations shortly after. For the first time, the Turkic peoples' own account of their origins and beliefs could be read in their own words and their own script. The theology of Tengri's mandate, known until then primarily through later Mongolian sources, was already fully articulated here, carved in stone in the eighth century.