Inventing the Steppe People

or How Empires Outsourced Turkic Identity

“Nations are born in the imaginations of those who mispronounce other people’s names.”
— a saying that history itself could have coined.

History has a curious habit of turning random words into the destinies of entire peoples. Such was the fate of the term “Turkic” — a word that once referred to a modest political coalition somewhere in Central Asia, but eventually ballooned into a grand, imaginary hyper-ethnonym, sweeping up everything from Eastern Manchuria to the Balkans under its convenient umbrella.

Today, “the Turkic peoples” are perceived as something far more than a linguistic family. Collectively, the term has become a category built out of archaeological shadows, Arabic bureaucratic habits, and the unstoppable inertia of European historiography.

In essence, the word itself emerged not as a self-designation, but as a geopolitical reflection of someone else’s gaze. When Byzantine chroniclers and Crusaders of the 11th century first encountered the Seljuks, they took the Arabic al-Turk not as a general label for steppe dwellers, but as an ethnic name. From that moment on, “Turks” became a catch-all tag for anyone arriving from the east — a handy simplification that Europe adored.

The Ottomans later inherited this label and—never ones to waste a good exonym—rebranded it as a political self-name. Convenient for Europe, yes, but hardly accurate for the diverse peoples who actually spoke those languages or shared those cultures. Incidentally, several sources suggest that within the Ottoman Empire itself, the word “Turk” could carry a faintly derogatory undertone — at least when uttered by certain members of the elite, and in certain contexts.

Long before any “Turks” or “T;rks” ever appeared, there existed a far older and more intricate web of peoples whose languages began forming in the Liao River valley — among millet growers and herders navigating the social shifts of the post-glacial age. From this trans-Eurasian continuum branched off the ancestors of the Mongolic, Tungusic-Manchu, Korean, Japanese, and yes — those who would much later be retroactively dubbed “Turks.”

So, “Turkicness” was never a beginning — it was a late, peripheral form of a much older continuum, artificially isolated after the fact and inflated into an identity complex so grand that entire linguistic worlds have spent the last century and a half peering anxiously into the mouths of foreign historians.

This essay explores how one small word — “Turk” — evolved from a local self-designation of a khaganate into a universal label for a sprawling and heterogeneous civilizational zone, and why this nominal fiction still shapes historical and political self-identification across Eurasia.

The problem statement:

The entire construct of “the Turks” as a collective ethnonym is a retrospective Euro-Arabo-centric reconstruction — not an authentic self-ascribed or linguo-historical reality. Which, of course, calls into question the very validity of the so-called “Turkic hyper-ethnonym.” And that’s not just a bold claim — it’s a necessary step toward revising the entire historiography of Eurasia. Let’s unpack this logic — and add some scholarly muscle — so it can stand firm in debate, in essays, or on the lecture stage.

On the origins of “Turk” as a category

The term “Turk” first appears only in the 8th century (in the Orkhon–Yenisei inscriptions), and even then, it referred to a specific military-political confederation — not to a linguistic or ethnic family.

The first known appearance of the term “T;rk” comes from the 8th century — in the Orkhon–Yenisei inscriptions — and even then, it referred not to a vast family of languages or peoples, but to a very specific military-political confederation. A name of circumstance, not of essence.

Over time, as Perdian imperial scribes, Arab geographers, and Chinese chroniclers each needed their own shorthand for “those people over there,” T;rk mutated into a convenient geopolitical tag. The label migrated faster than the people it was supposed to describe. By the time it reached the hands of Persian poets, Byzantine clerks, and later European historians, the word had already become a kind of historiographical suitcase — endlessly repacked, rarely opened.

In that process, the meaning of “Turk” was stretched, kneaded, and embroidered until it could fit almost anyone with a horse, a steppe, and a vaguely agglutinative language. The result was not an ethnonym but an optical illusion: a mirage of unity projected across a continent of contradictions.

Yet such mirages are precisely what empires and nation-builders adore. A tidy label saves you from the messy business of diversity. It turns the buzzing mosaic of steppe tribes, city-states, and linguistic frontiers into a single legible narrative — one that conveniently aligns with the imperial gaze.

The irony, of course, is that this simplification did not merely rewrite history; it created it. Once the word “Turk” acquired a civilizational capital of its own, generations of scholars, statesmen, and modern ideologues would spend centuries polishing it — until the fiction hardened into a fact.

In other words, “T;rk” was originally the self-designation of just one confederation within the Khaganate — a name that, thanks to Chinese, Persian, Arabic, and Byzantine chroniclers, gradually mutated into a universal tag for every nomadic group in Central Asia that happened to speak something “similar enough.”

It’s a familiar story: the same fate befell the “Scythians,” “Sarmatians,” “Tartars,” and “Huns” — collective exonyms that rarely matched the self-perceptions of the peoples so labeled.

The problem of linguocentrism

Here lies the core distortion: the “Turkic language family” was named after a late and accidental ethnonym rather than after any genuine ancient linguistic foundation. In fact, there is no way to identify a single unifying proto-source, because the languages themselves began diverging long before any historical “Turks” appeared.

Thus, any supposed self-designation of early groups becomes, by definition, a case of postdated identity — a name applied after the fact, or simply borrowed from others.

Modern genomic and archaeolinguistic research paints a much older and more complex picture. The proto-speakers of the so-called Trans-Eurasian languages — encompassing the ancestors of what we now call Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic-Manchu, Korean, and, through deeper strata, Japanese — originated in the Liao River basin, the valley of the Liaohe, where some 7–6 millennia ago a culture of millet cultivators and herders emerged.

In other words, the Trans-Eurasian continuum predates the Turks by millennia, serving as the substrate for what was once (rather quaintly) called the Altaic language family. Its regional offshoots only later crystallized into proto-Turkic, proto-Mongolic, proto-Tungusic-Manchu, proto-Korean — and several other proto-communities politely ignored by mainstream scholarship, mostly out of convenience and the inertia of old academic pipelines.

In fact, the so-called “Turkic languages” represent one of the late, peripheral branches of this trans-Eurasian continuum — not its point of origin. This linguistic environment existed long before the K;k T;rks ever carved runes into stone.

It is quite evident that groups such as the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, and possibly even the Dinlins, Yeniseians, and others already spoke related linguistic forms — later retroactively folded into the “Turkic” family by 19th-century classification habits. So why is the hyperethnonym now not Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, Dinling and Yeniseians?

Once “Turkic” had been wrongly enshrined as the flagship ethnonym of an entire linguistic zone, Eurocentric scholarship simply kept sailing in the same direction, compounding the interpretive errors it had inherited from medieval Arab chroniclers.

The Arab–Persian framing and the fixation of “the Turks”

The logic of a “secondary label through the Arabic chronicling tradition” is impeccable — because that is precisely what happened. Arab historians of the 9th–10th centuries recorded al-Turk as a geopolitical designation for all steppe peoples northeast of Khorasan. It was never meant as an ethno-linguistic category.

They attributed “Turkic origin” to the Seljuks simply because the Seljuks came from territories once occupied by tribes of the old Great Turkic Khaganate. And that, essentially, was the whole “genealogy.”

In Islamic historiography, therefore, “Turkic” was a term of territorial tradition, not of biological or cultural kinship — and certainly not of linguistic lineage. The Arabs had no reason to engage in linguistic taxonomy; that was neither their aim nor within the conceptual framework of their scholarship at the time.

By contrast, in China and Eastern Inner Asia, the term “T;rk” was used primarily for the K;k T;rks and their immediate kin. But within the Islamic world, the same term expanded dramatically in scope. Medieval Muslim authors, while sometimes using “Turk” narrowly, generally applied it to all nomadic peoples north of the Syr Darya — regardless of linguistic or cultural background.

Muslim geographers, in fact, described entire northern regions, including some Finno-Ugric and Slavic groups, as “Turkic.”
It’s the historical equivalent of calling an English-speaking Hong Konger a “Brit” — for convenience, not accuracy.

The European re-interpretation

When Crusaders, Byzantines, and Latin chroniclers first met the Seljuks (whom they referred to as Turci, Turkoi, or Turcomans, borrowing the Arabic–Persian usage), they, too, mistook the label for an ethnic identity. Thus, the error was canonized: “Turks” and “T;rks” became a generic image for all eastern nomads who spoke somewhat similar dialects — or merely seemed to share a steppe aesthetic.

By the 19th century, this inherited misconception provided fertile ground for Pan-Turkism — an ideological rebranding of a fictitious ethnonym, now endowed with mythological “unity.” The term became politically convenient: useful for Pan-Islamism on one hand, and for European historiography on the other, both seeking neat systems of balance and opposition.

Paradoxically, the “mythical Turks” turned out to be equally profitable to both — the Muslim reformists seeking solidarity, and the Christian civilization that, when expedient, borrowed the Arab interpretive template wholesale.

The consequence: the fiction of the “Turkic” category

What we are left with is not a lineage but a linguistic mirage — a historical convenience turned into a civilizational premise. A category born from exonyms, perpetuated by habit, and sanctified by repetition.

Pan-Turkism: A Phantom Built on Methodological Fog

Pan-Turkism rests on a methodological phantom.
The very term “Turkic family” was coined according to the convenient rule of “naming by the most visible group” — in this case, the one most familiar to 19th-century European scholars. It is rather like calling the entire Indo-European family “English” simply because the Anglophone world happens to dominate global discourse.

Similarly, Soviet citizens were once collectively labeled “Russians” — even when they spoke different languages and, let us say, displayed notable variation not only in epicanthic folds but sometimes in skin tone as well, much to the potential bewilderment of fair-haired Slavic self-perception.
Such nominal inertia tends to ossify into dogma — as happened in the case of the “Turks.” And now that dogma obscures deeper, older layers of connection.

It bears emphasizing that the term used by the K;k T;rks applied only to themselves — to the G;kt;rk khaganates and their immediate subjects. The K;k T;rks never considered other Turkic-speaking groups such as the Uyghurs, Tiele, or Kyrgyz to be T;rks. In the Orkhon inscriptions, the Toquz-Oghuz and the Yenisei Kyrgyz are not described as T;rk at all. Likewise, the Uyghurs called themselves Uyghur and used the word T;rk solely in reference to the K;k T;rks, whom they depicted as hostile outsiders in their royal inscriptions.

The Khazars, possibly (and only possibly), preserved a vestige of K;k T;rk tradition by claiming descent from the Ashina clan. But the pattern is clear: when tribal leaders built their khanates, ruling over various tribes and alliances, the resulting political identities aligned with the ruler or his ideology, not with a shared ethnonym.

Even when the word “T;rk” became an administrative term for the subjects of Turkic empires, many of those subordinate groups retained their own names, identities, and internal hierarchies.

By the early first millennium CE, the memory of the K;k T;rks and the Ashina lineage had faded. The Karakhanids, the Kocho Uyghurs, and even the Seljuks never claimed descent from the K;k T;rks. The label “T;rk”, however, was neatly attached to them by the Arabs — and from there, through the Crusaders and Byzantine intermediaries, it drifted into the European noosphere.

A brief schematic outline illustrates the stages — and the rather modest place — of the “so-called Turkic people,” who, through Eurocentric ethnographic prisms, have been granted far more prominence than the evidence permits:

Stage: Liaohe Basin, 7000–4000 BCE
Reality: Formation of the Trans-Eurasian community (millet cultivators and proto-languages).

Stage: Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, and others
Reality: Divergence of areal dialects.
Ideological projection: Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Tungusic-Manchu, Proto-Korean “shadows.”

Stage: 6th–8th centuries CE
Reality: The Ashina Confederation (“Turkic Khaganate”).
Ideological projection: The ethnonym T;rk remains strictly local.

Stage: 9th–11th centuries CE
Reality: The Seljuks and Turkic-speaking Islamists over the Great Steppe.
Ideological projection: al-Turk in Arab chronicles.

Stage: 15th–19th centuries CE
Reality: The Ottomans, Chagatais, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tatars and others.
Ideological projection: The European generalization “Turks.”

Stage: 19th–20th centuries CE
Reality: Pan-Turkism and Turkology.
Ideological projection: The construction of a “unified” identity.

Why did all this happen — and why does it continue, propelled by inertia, among peoples speaking related dialects to whom, long ago, the convenient label of “Turkic” was arbitrarily affixed?

The so-called “Turkic world” is less an ethnological reality than a long-standing historiographical habit — one that has mistaken convenience for continuity, and repetition for truth.

For the Arabs, the term was useful: it offered a taxonomy for managing trade routes and frontier auxiliaries. For the Europeans, it was a reconnaissance tool — a neat conceptual bracket to install within the mental cartography of the noosphere. And for the so-called “Turks” themselves — whose original meanings were long swept away by the twin tides of Islamic coercion and colonial framing — there remained little choice but to seek out unifying ideological myths.

Thus, the enormous diversity of the Great Steppe and the Liaohe Basin was reduced to a quest for a “common denominator.” Eurocentrism, as always, pulled the historiographical blanket toward itself and proceeded to polish what was never meant to shine. The potential claim of the so-called “Turks” to be Scythians was conveniently neutralized in advance: the Scythians, we are told, were “Eastern Iranian tribes” (in other words, Aryans) later vilified by the Western canon. The “Turks,” however epicanthic and otherwise non-Aryan their appearance, were expected to embrace this mythological design with due reverence. In other words, any attempt to assert kinship with the Scythians must automatically entail a xenophobic recoil from anything that happens to be geographically— and inconveniently—Chinese, which the Liao River basin, of course, is.

Meanwhile, Islamophilia demanded another kind of loyalty: that the rest of the “Turks” follow the respectable example of the Seljuks and the khans of the Golden Horde — those who had embraced Islam and, in doing so, gained access to the trans-Eurasian economy.

In truth, the Pan-Turkism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not an organic awakening but a conceptual re-import: a product of Eurocentric and Abrahamic paradigms, designed to tug the so-called “Turks” out of their authentic Liaohe continuum and into the “Western” geosphere.

Yet no amount of semantic gymnastics can erase the gravitational center of trans-Eurasian civilization — which lies unmistakably in the Liaohe complex. Even those peoples whom European and Arab historiographies later decided to rebrand as “Turks” trace their civilizational roots there.

The real success of the trans-Eurasian concept lies precisely in its refusal to obey the templates of Abrahamic and Eurocentric dogma. It seeks instead an ethno-historical identification grounded in empirical research — not in scripture or imperial cartography.

The degree to which we can comprehend the fractal entanglement of human communities from the Late Mesolithic to the Eneolithic — and across the geography from the Pacific coast to the English Channel — increases dramatically once we stop “looking into the mouth of historians.”

There were, and still are, many players in this continuum — though not all possess the critical capacity to perceive who benefits from particular interpretations of linguistic, historical, and archaeological data.

But life, fortunately, persists — and not everything yields to ideological manipulation through partisan readings of the past.

The sources cited in this study are provided in the attached illustration because the Proza(dot)ru portal does not allow posting internet links.