Names of Anatolia

This article discusses the various names throughout history by which the country we now know as Anatolia and Turkey has been referred to.

The English name for Turkey is derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia (c.1369).^[1] The name for Turkey in the Turkish language, Türkiye, subdivides into two words: Türk, meaning "strong" in Old Turkish and usually signifying the inhabitants of Turkey or a member of the Turkish or Turkic peoples,^[2] a later form of "tie-le" (铁勒) or "tu-jue" (突厥), name given by the Chinese to the people living south of the Altay Mountains of Central Asia as early as 177 BC;^[1] and the abstract suffix -iye, which means "owner" or "related to". The first recorded use of the term "Türk" or "Türük" as an autonym is attested in the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks (Blue Turks) of Central Asia (c. 8th century CE)....

Turks, Turan and Turkestan

Main article: Turk (disambiguation)

Tablets of the Orkhon Inscriptions of Eight century, in which "Turk" was first used as an endonym by the Göktürks.

The term "Türk" "Türküt" corresponding to the Chinese name "tu-jue" was first used as an endonym in the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks (English: Sky Turks or Blue Turks) of Central Asia. However, the Chinese name "tie-le", corresponding to "Türük", was used much earlier, around the period when the Mongolic tribes Tuoba and Rouran vied for hegemony over the Mongolian steppes around the 5th and 6th centuries.

The land of the Turko-Mongol nomads north of Persia (later approximately coinciding with Khorasan) was vaguely named "Turan" by pre-Islamic Persians. In contrast, on their own country the Persians conferred the name "Iran", or "Land of Aryans". Also, ancient Persian national myths attribute the names of Turan and Iran to the names of mystical heroes, not unlike the Magyars' original myth which connected the birth of the Magyar and Hunnish nations to the brothers Hunor and Magor.

In a legend of Iranian folklore first alluded to in the Avesta and subsequently developed in the early Islamic-era Shahnameh, when the primordial king Thraetaona (Fereydun) had ruled for 500 years, he divided his kingdom (which encompassed the world) amongst his three sons. To the youngest he gave Iran, which lay in the middle. To another son, he gave the semitic lands that lay to the west. To his eldest son, Turya/Tuirya, he gave the lands in the north and north-east. Avestan language 'Turya'—in later Iranian languages as 'Tur'—is the stem of the word 'Turan', a semi-mythological region beyond the Jaxartes River. Through a process not reconstructable, but complete by at least the 10th century Shahnameh, these peoples—who were of various ethnic groups, to include ethnic Turks—came to be known collectively as Turks, or Turkmens. Through Persian language influence these regions eventually received a -stan suffix, thus generating both Turk-e-stan and Turkmen-i-stan.

By early modern times, the name "Turkestan" has several definitions:

1. land of sedentary Turkic-speaking townspeople that have been subjects of the Central Asian Chagatayids, i.e. Sarts, Central Asian Mughals, Central Asian Timurids, Uyghurs of Chinese Turkestan and the later invading Tatars that came to be known as Uzbeks; This area roughly coincides with "Khorasan" in the widest sense, plus Tarim Basin which was known as Chinese Turkestan. It is ethnically diverse, and includes homelands of non-Turkic peoples like the Tajiks, Pashtuns, Hazaras, Dungans, Jungars. Turkic peoples of the Kypchak branch, i.e. Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are not normally considered "Turkestanis" but are also populous (as pastoralists) in many parts of Turkestan.
2. a specific district governed by a 17th century Kazakh Khan, in modern day Kazakhstan, which were more sedentary than other Kazakh areas, and were populated by towns-dwelling Sarts
3. in late Ottoman period (19th century), Turkish nationalist writers including Ziya Gokalp, in search of national identities other than "Muslims", "Rumians", "Ottomans", suggested that the Turkish-speaking domain of the Empire be called either "Turkestan" (with a Persian flavor), or "Turkia", a name which Europeans had long employed before it was used by the Turks or Muslims themselves.

Land of Hittites, Anatolia, Asia Minor and Byzantium

Before the peninsula where most of the modern Turkish Republic is located became associated with the Turkish people, it was known by many names. These names reflect the history of the land being occupied by the Hattians, the Hittites (and other "indigenous" Anatolian peoples), Armenians, Caucasian peoples, pre-Hellenic Aegean peoples, Greek communities from the Homeric period till the Byzantine Era, several Persian empires and of course, different phases of the Roman Empire which ended with the fall of Byzantine Constantinople (1453).

Hattia

The oldest name for Anatolia, "Land of the Hatti" was found for the first time on Mesopotamic cuneiform tablets from the period of the Akkadian dynasty (2350-2150 BC). On those tablets Assyrian traders implored the help of the Akkadian king Sargon. This appellation continued to exist for about 1500 years till 630 BC, as stated in Assyrian chronicles.

Anatolia

See: Anatolia and History of Anatolia

The Greek name "Anatolia" means "where it originates, begins". It is thus of the same meaning as the Latin names "Levant", "Orient" and the Arabic name "Mashraq". Of course Anatolia, Orient, Levant and Mashraq today designating different areas in the world. "Anatolia" can thus be understood to be "east to Classical Greek states" or "the Byzantine East".

Asia Minor

See: Asia Minor Also see: Western Armenia, Attalid dynasty,

"Polin" and Byzantine Empire

See: Byzantine Empire

The name "Byzantium", before modern times, was only applied to the pre-Roman period Greek community located in modern day Istanbul. This name was replaced by "Constantinople" after the Roman general Constantine established it as the seat of his future empire. Therefore the name "Byzantium" was never applied contemporaneously to the Byzantine Empire, which always referred to itself as the "Basilleion Roumaion" (The Roman Reign). Contemporary Catholic Europeans tend to refer to it as "The Kingdom of the Greeks" or "New Rome". The name "Byzantium" is a neologism employed first by 19th Century French historians to distinguish this latter phase of the Roman Empire from its earlier phase which ended with the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in 475.

Anatolia was most often referred to as "Rome" by both Arabs and Turks during the Byzantine period. It is interesting to note that, Chinese historical literatures of this period often refer to the domain under Byzantium as either "Da Qin" (大秦) or "Fu Lin" (拂林). While "Da Qin" is of dubious etymology, and may refer to Western Rome, Byzantium and even Persia, "Fu Lin" is only applied to Byzantium. There is no doubt regarding the etymology of the name "Fu Lin", which is derived from the Greek "eis ten Polin" ("into the City," since one would say he/she was going...), which later morphed into "Istanbul". "Polin" being used by the Tang Era Chinese both as the name of the imperial capital Constantinople and the entire imperial domain governed by it, perhaps reflects popular usage by Turks, Persians and Arabs of that time as well.

Turkic migration

Main article: Turkic migration

The Turkic family of languages were spoken by Bulgars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Dingling, Gaoche peoples long before the Gokturk Khanate came into prominence. Many groups speaking "Turkic" languages never adopted the name "Turk" as self identity. Among the peoples that came under Gokturk dominance and adopted its political culture and langua-franca, the name "Turk" wasn't always the preferred identity. In other words, there wasn't a unified movement westward by a culture under one unified ethnic identity, such as that of the Mongol conquest of Eurasia under the Chinggisid political leadership. Rather, Turkic languages, peripheral ones like the Bulgar branch and central ones like the Oghuz and Karluk-Chagatay branches, drift westward by autonomous movements of diverse tribes and migrating traders, soldiers, townspeople, by outnumbering and assimilating non-Turkic indigenous peoples along the way, and by being gradually replaced by other language families that have become prominent in the east, such as Mongolic languages on the Mongolian steppes, Indic languages in India and Persian in post-Timurid Iran.

The tribes that were closely related to the Gokturks and moved into Transoxonia in the 9th century (after the fall of the Uyghur Khanate on the Mongolian Steppes and before their own Islamization under Samanid influence) were affiliated with the Eastern Turk Khanate of the Gokturks, but had names that distinguished them from the Gokturks as described by the Orhun Inscriptions: these were the Oghuz, Karluk, Yagmur, Kangli, Kinik. These ethnonyms took priority when they identified themselves, but Arab and Byzantine historians were more inclined to identify them as "Turks" than Chinese historians. This period saw the participation by Turkic mercenaries and slave soldiers in the expansions and power struggles of Islamic states, among them Mahmud of Ghazna. Also, the Karakhanid state was established by Buddhist Karluks in Balasaghun. This state governs the area between Balasaghun and Kashgar, and became, under Samanid influence the first Turkic state to adopt Islam as official religion. Islamic learning flourished under the Karakhanids. It was a Karakhanid, Mahmud al-Kashgari, who compiled the Dīwān ul-Lughat al-Turk (Arabic: Collection of Turkic words) in 1072. Mahmud Kashgari mentioned in his lexicon that twenty Turkish clans "Kirghiz, Kiptchak, Oghuz, Tokhsi, Yaghma, Çigil and Ughrak, speak only one language, that is, pure Turkish."

While the Karakhanid state remained in this territory until its conquest by Genghis Khan, the Turkmen group of tribes was formed around the core of westward Oghuz. The name "Turkmen" originally simply meant "I am Turk" in the language of the diverse tribes living between the Karakhanid and Samanid states. Thus, the ethnic consciousness among some, but not all Turkic tribes as "Turkmens" in the Islamic era came long after the fall of the non-Muslim Gokturk (and Eastern and Western) Khanates. The name "Turk" in the Islamic era became an identity that grouped Islamized Turkic tribes in contradistinction to Turkic tribes that were not Muslim, such as the Nestorian Naiman (which became a major founding stock for the Muslim Kazakh nation) and Buddhist Tuvans. Thus the ethnonym "Turk" for the diverse Islamized Turkic tribes somehow served the same function as the name "Tajik" did for the diverse Iranic peoples who converted to Islam and adopted Persian as their lingua-franca. Both names first and foremost labeled Muslimness, and to a lesser extend, common language and ethnic culture. Long after the departure of the Turkmens from Transoxonia towards the Karakum and Caucasus, consciousness associated with the name "Turk" still remained, as Chagatay and Timurid period Central Asia was called "Turkestan" and the Chagatay language called "Turki", even though the people only referred to themselves as "Mughals", "Sarts", "Taranchis" and "Tajiks". This name "Turk", was not commonly used by most groups of the Kypchak branch, such as the Kazakhs, although they are closely related to the Oghuz (Turkmens) and Karluks (Karakhanids, Sarts, Uyghurs). Neither did Bulgars (Kazan Tatars, Chuvash) and non-Muslim Turkic groups (Tuvans, Yakuts, Yugurs) come close to adopting the ethnonym "Turk" in its Islamic Era sense. Among the Karakhanid period Turkmen tribes rose the Atabeg Seljuq of the Kinik tribe, whose dynasty grew into a great Islamic empire stretching from India to Anatolia.

It was under Seljuq suzerainty that numerous Turkmen tribes, especially those that came through the Caucasus via Azerbaijan, acquired fiefdoms (beyliks) in newly conquered areas of Anatolia, Iraq and even Levent. Thus, the ancestors of the founding stock of the modern Turkish nation were most closely related to the Oghuz Turkmen groups that settled in the Caucasus and later became the Azerbaijani nation.

Seljuq, Ilkhanid and Ottoman Empires

see: Anatolian beyliks

Anatolia became a frontier opened for colonization by Turkic peoples of the Turkmen/Oghuz branch and other branches. Numerous Turkmen tribes, mainly migrating through Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, also through Iraq and Iran, settled the peninsula gradually from east to west. Besides tribes that remained tribal and nomadic, like their Kurdish fellow colonists, there were also Turkmen chiefdoms that received blessings from the Seljuq suzerains in Iran and Iraq, that they developed into feudal states around a "Bey" or "Atabeg", sometimes incorporating non-Turkmen subjects that may or may not be Muslim. The Seljuq Empire (alongside the puppet Caliphate of the Iraqi Abbasids, count on these small feudal states headed by Muslim Atabeg "marching lords" (see: Ghazi) to expand the domain of Islam (see: Dar al-Islam) at the expense of Byzantium and the Crusader States.

The name "Turkey" as referring to Muslim Anatolia appeared much earlier in Christian, especially "Frankish" (Western Europeans of the Catholic faith) historical literatures than in Muslim ones. The Muslim Turks preferred to refer the land of Anatolia as Rum, implying a separation between the concepts of the "Christian State of Rome" (Byzantium) and the "Land of Rome" (Anatolia). As Byzantine Iconia (Konya) fell to the Seljuq viceroyalty of Anatolia and became the Muslim "Sultanate of Rum" under a Seljuq prince, more and more Anatolian Turks identified themselves as "Rumi", not the least the world famous, Khorasan-born Sufi poet Mevlana Celaleddin now known by this nom de plume, who lived in Konya for half of his life.

Anatolia as the land of "Rum", but not as an ethnically homogeneous country of Turks is a subject of academic curiosity. The Khorasan-born Celaleddin, no doubt of Persian-Turkish heritage, learned not only to speak the local Turkish dialect of Konya, but also the Cappadocian Greek language widely spoken (the majority of the subjects of the Sultanate of Rum could be speaking diverse languages other than Turkish) in Southwestern Anatolia back then.

In early Ming China, the land of Anatolia was still assumed to be a region contested by several states: Ottoman, Timurid, Akkoyunlu etc., rather than a unified Ottoman Caliphate. Things of Ottoman origin was thus identified as "from Rum" or in Chinese, "lu-mu" (鲁木). For example, the Ottoman-improved musket was reimported back to its place of origin, China, during the Yongle era and was called the "niao-chong/bird-bill cannon" (鸟铳). Contemporary historical notes comment that the niao-chong was "originated in Lu-mu", without making reference to whether it was the Ottomans or any other beyliks that improved the gun.

It was only in the late Qing Era, that the name "Turkia" was reintroduced to China through Western writings. It is interesting to note that the first Chinese transliteration for "Turkia" was not the modern "Tu-er-qi", but the Tang era "Tu-jue", which denoted the Mongolian Steppes tribe of Turks, long predating the Turkish colonization of Anatolia. The Chinese reformist Kang Youwei wrote extensively on Ottoman issues, and named two of his major treatises "Journey to Tu-jue" (突厥游记) and "The Imperial Review on History of the Weakening of Tu-jue" (进呈突厥削弱记).

No doubt, West Europeans were the first to refer to the Land of Anatolia under the Ottomans as "Turkia". To them, the entire Ottoman sphere of influence was held under the sway of a barbarian horde of Turkic race and Islamic faith. In this sense, even loyal Wallachian and Phanariot princes and grandees, Muslim corsairs of Greek or Maghrebian origins, Janissary troops of Croat or Albanian birth and Western European converts into the Ottoman fold were "Turks".

However, to the Muslims themselves, the idea of lands of Anatolia, Iraq or Rumelia as "Turkia" was not even established before the Young Turks seized power from Sultan Abdulmecit in the late 19th century.

The Ottoman Turkish language, now academically referred to as "Osmanlica", was then indeed referred to as nothing but "Turki" or "Turkce", just like its close relative spoken by the Timurids, Chagatayids and Uzbeks. However, the vast Osmanlica or colloquial Turkish speaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire had a much weaker sense of common "Turkic" identity. First of all, Turkmen colonists who first entered Anatolia in the 12th century, having assimilated to the local cultures, social structures and gene pools of substratal indigenous populations, adopted entrenched "regional" or "localized" identities in a fashion analogous to the "Creolization" of European colonists in post-Columbian Americas. Secondly, the Ottomans being a beylik that first grew into prominence n the Rumelian (Balkan) Peninsula, naturally saw Anatolia, Caucasus and Iraq as no more "central" in the Ottoman Dar al-Islam than Rumelia. And Rumelia, compared to Anatolia, has hardly ever been a land of majority Turkic population.

After the rather Byzantinizing or Balkanizing court culture of Sultan Bayezid, the Ottoman Caliphate continued to celebrate its nomad heritage. For example, the theory of the Ottoman dynasty as descended from the Turkmen tribe of Kayi migrating from Transoxonia during the Karakhanid period, became the official founding myth during the reign of Murad II, together with adaptation of Central Asian Turken Tamghas (tribal totems) as Sultanic emblems and the title of "Khan" to imply a continuity from the Genghisids to the Ottomans as head of all steppes peoples. The Ottoman Sultanate retained this title till the very last day of the empire in the 20th century.

However, the "Creolized" sedentary people under Ottoman rule of probable Turkmen descent and Ottoman subjects of diverse origins who adopted Turkish as their primary language were not to easily accept "Turk" as their ethnic identity. During the Ottoman era, the ethnonym "Turk" designated nomadic Turkmens much in the same way "Arab" designated "Bedouines" as opposed to Levantines and Egyptians. These Turkmens are to be called "Yoruks" and Iraqi Turkmens in modern times, who have preserved distinctive Turkmen clans and social organizations. Most Turkish-speaking Ottoman subjects, by absorbing or being absorbed by indigenous substrates, had lost much of what defined the "Turkmen".

The Ottoman State, especially with regard to its ruling class, the Askeriya, included many elites from diverse backgrounds. While membership in the Askeriya most certainly required Muslim identity, many of the Ottoman ruling elites were converts of devshirme upbringing. Young, bright boys from Balkan or Caucasus communities, especially non-Muslim ones not protected from legal slavery, became enlisted and enslaved from early age to be trained as "men of the Sultan", or memluks. All had to nominally convert to Islam, but not all lost their peculiar Christian and non-Turkish heritages. This was displayed in the immensely popular Shiite Bektashi sect among the slave Janissary troops, and also the spread of the Croatian, Circassian and Albanian languages among Ottoman elites. Devshirme boys not only contributed to the Janissary in the military, but also the kutub (scribes) in the imperial administration. It was reported that at the height of Janissary power in the 17-18th centuries, the Croatian language was a ubiquitous "secret code language" in the vizieral administrative office of the Sublime Porte. "Croat" then both described Catholic and Muslim Croats. It was not until late that Croatian-speaking Muslims were numerous enough to consider a separate communal consciousness as "Bosniaks". The office of the Koprulu viziers countered the influence of the Janissary, only to wit that the Kopruluzades themselves were originally descended from an Albanian memluk. Founder of the Khedival dynasty of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, was also an Ottomanized Albanian slave soldier.

This is only to illustrate that the Ottoman society and its ruling class were as much "Turkish" as the modern society and elites of the United States of America are "Anglophone" or "English".

In Ottoman Anatolia and Rumelia also lived communities of Greek Orthodox, Armenian Christian, Assyrian Christian and Sephardic Jewish faiths. Many of these communities adopted the colloquial Turkish language of their majority Muslim neighbors, and some of them were even from the very start Turkish speaking, being descended from Turkmens who converted to a non-Muslim faith. The ethnic identity "Turk" were not at all proper to these non-Muslims, until the secularization of the Turkish Republic by Atatürk and the calls of emancipation of non-Muslim communities to facilitate their assimilation into a modern secular "Turkish" nation.

The crumbling of an ethnically and religiously plural Ottoman Caliphate appeared to begin with the rigorous display of ethnic awareness by non-Muslim communities in Rumelia. Nations of the Orthodox Christian faith(s): Greeks, Serbians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Macedonians, became fully independent politically as well as culturally, under the encouragement by European Enlightenment ideals.

The national awakening of the Balkans made Anatolia, Caucasus, Iraq, Levant and Arabia extremely volatile. Throughout most part of the empire, loyalty to the Ottoman Sunni Muslim Caliphate was taken for granted of the Greek, Serbian, Assyrian, Armenian churches and the Sephardic Jews. Nor had the Sunni Levantine Arabs, Bedouines and Kurds any doubt that the Ottoman Caliph and the Askeriya elite he represented, were the leaders of their communities. The only element of dubious loyalty issue were the Shiites: Alevi "Kizilbash" (Red Cap Turkmens) who had strong leaning toward Shiite Persia. But the secession of the entire Balkan changed all that. Now the Caliph had to reconsider what defined loyalty to the Ottoman state. This was during the reign of Sultans Abdulhamit and Abdulmejit. Many mock "congresses" were convened with delegates representing loyal Ottoman Armenian, Arab, Kurkish and Turkish subjects, in order to discuss the a common "Ottoman" identity constructed on modern nationalist mode rather than along sectarian lines. But at the same time, these late Ottoman autocratic rulers also desired to play the role of Sunni Muslim Caliph to all the world's Sunni Muslims. Thus, an "Ottoman identity" during this time was obscured by the ambiguity as to what it meant to be loyal to the Ottoman Caliph, whether it was a religious affiliation or a modern secular nationalist one. Also, parochial, communal and partisan interests slowly pushed the multi-faith, multi-ethnic cooperation under "common Ottoman identity" into bitter bickering among linguistic and religious communities still part of the empire. This sow the seed not only for the later conflict between Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians, but also those among Sunni Muslim Turks, Kurds and Arabs. Indeed, divisions and mutual hostilities like these were unthinkable during earlier times of the empire, when every religious community, or "millet", had a proper place in the Islamic social system, and when Sunni Kurds, Turks and Arabs were part of the same "millet", rather than separate communities.

During the same troubled years of Balkan uprisings and increasing autocratism by the Caliphs, there rose a new Turkish nationalist consciousness among the elite ranks of the Prussian-trained new imperial military. Heavily influenced by the Prussians' "blood and soil" concept on nationhood, these "Young Turks" were acutely aware that they were seen as members of a Turkish nation, rather than a "Ottoman", or "Muslim" one in the eyes of the Europeans. Also rose was the discipline of Oriental Studies championed by Austrian, Prussian, Russian and Hungarian scholars. Ottoman historians such as Namik Kemal became heavily immersed into the subjects on the Huns of Attila, Chinggisid Khanates and nomadic tribes throughout the steppes' history. Ottoman curiosity in Oriental Studies later became the nourishment for both the pan-Turkic Turanism, and Ziya Gokalp's idea of an Anatolian Turkish nationhood.

The Young Turks defeated the Caliph's autocratic reign and brought in an era of increasing consolidation of the centrality of Turkishness as the bedrock of the Ottoman Empire, now under the de facto rule of a military triumvirate rather than the Sultan. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Republican Revolution was, in essence, latest manifestation and the culmination of the Young Turks Movement.

The Chinese reformer Kang Youwei, traveling through Ottoman lands toward Europe, was thus witnessing a "Turkish Nation" (or in his own word, "Tujue Nation") not merely through the slanted lenses of Christian Europe, but through the eyes of the Young Turks themselves.

Republican era

Main articles: Atatürk's Reforms and Turkish Constitution of 1921

The name "Türkiye" was officially adopted as the name of the new republican regime in 1921 in the first constitution prepared by the Turkish parliament. It was confirmed in the constitution of 1924 that was ratified following the official proclamation of the Republic on October 29, 1923.

See also: History of the Republic of Turkey

In different languages

Name of Turkey in different languages derive essentially from the word "Turk", combined with suffixes that give the meaning of "owner", "land of" or "related to".

See also

• Orkhon inscriptions

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Online Etymology Dictionary (2001). "Online Etymology Dictionary – "Turk"". etymonline.com. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Turk. Retrieved 2006-12-07. 
2. ^ American Heritage Dictionary (2000). "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition – "Turk"". bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/61/92/T0419200.html. Retrieved 2006-12-07.