Narrating mythical genealogy: examples from the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on mythico-historical texts belonging to the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex, an oral and written tradition that emerged over the course of seven centuries in post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East. It disentangles the narrative strategies creatively employed by authors and tradents who deconstructed and re-constructed narratives that blend the genealogy of Chingiz Khan with the epic story of Oghuz Qaghan, showing how they mobilized and developed the plots and motifs at their disposal to meet the political, ideological and communal requirements of their times. Focusing in particular on the changing ways in which the texts foreground particular mothers and the maternal line over nobility granted through paternal descent, the article highlights narrative traces of multiple religious beliefs and postulates – Jewish and Christian, as well as Inner Asian theistic and Islamic. It also demonstrates that some later texts refute claims to descent-based continuity in power and rule altogether.

KEYWORDS:

• Chingiznāma
• Oghuznāma
• genealogy
• narratives
• legitimacy

Introduction: a word of caution

While genealogies might be of limited value for historians in terms of the factual information they provide, their very existence, formulation and (in some cases) fabrication can provide significant historical insights.¹ Genealogy is an important element of the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex, a broad oral and written historical, literary and ‘popular wisdom’ tradition of Central and West Asia. This article focuses on narratives in the mythico-historical branch of that archipelago of texts dealing with ‘Oghuz’/Chinggisid genealogies – narratives that combine historical facticity and fabrication and are creatively enhanced with a mythical dimension. They are a fascinating object of investigation into the intellectual and political history of those communities – and in particular their famous and nameless thinkers – whose keen interest in noble descent as a prime source of legitimacy brought the texts into being. Deeds and achievements of the figures included in the pedigree, and how these are discussed, shed light on imaginations of ideal rule, making the texts partly readable as exempla. However, the basic prerequisite for a person’s inclusion is appropriate descent. Since imaginations of the ideal pedigree vary over time, along with the ideologies with which such imaginations interdepend, these texts give us an insight into how genealogical narratives shifted – and were even deconstructed – through the encounter between the Abrahamic book religions and earlier Inner Asian beliefs in the multireligious society of the Mongol Empire, and the changing political contexts of different times.

Descent, in a constructivist rather than biological sense,² is the core concern of all historical Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma texts. Their authors and tradents apply multiple discursive strategies to compose the genealogy of Chingiz and blend it with the myth of Oghuz in order to establish a grand narrative of nobility and legitimate rule. The proliferation in space and time of this narrative is amazing: textual vestiges have been recovered from the past seven centuries and from an area that includes all of Central Eurasia and large parts of the Middle East. I assume that what secured this narrative such a special rank was the coincidence of its relevance to identity-making, political ideology and power struggles, and the ingenuity of the motifs and plots in which these issues were cast.

While ‘making history,’ neither the bearers of oral tradition nor authors of written texts seemed to differentiate between the mythical and the historical. They were clearly aware of flaws in the plausibility of events, which they tend to relegate to God’s omniscience, and of inconsistencies in the computation of time; for example, the anonymous author of the ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan’ (a late eighteenth-century compilation) skeptically invites his readers to ‘calculate for yourselves how many thousand years are between [two major figures of mythic “Oghuz” history],’³ thus identifying the ‘floating gap’ in historical accounts of earlier periods long before Vansina coined this term.⁴ Yet similar to European historiographers of the middle ages, whose work was geared towards affirmative interpretation rather than systematic exploration of history,⁵ authors and tradents of Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma texts accepted and integrated the extraordinary and miraculous, as well as the everyday and trivial, throughout the imagined timeline.

This article focuses on narrations concerning the mythical background and emergence of the texts’ eponymous heroes Chingiz and Oghuz since these contain the essential legitimatory elements, both ontological (like filiation) and performative (such as governance). All of the texts share a narrative core, but almost every narrator modifies the narrative by adding, highlighting, backgrounding, changing or removing elements, which range from minute details to substantial parts of the plot. I discuss how this was done. I also suggest a few reasons as to why, mostly inferring from evidence in the texts since we have little paratextual and contextual information on the creation and updating of narratives over the centuries.⁶ The texts themselves yield little explicit information; some contain paratextual elements, such as an introductory or interspersed sabab-i ta’līf/taḥrīr ‘reason for authoring/reworking/editing’, but these only tell us at whose behest the work was composed or what the author has to say about his forerunners. Even the relatively forthright princely Khorezmian genealogist Abūlghāzī remained silent on the political goals behind his composition of his Shajara-i Tarākima, ‘Pedigree of the Turkmens’; scholars have had to infer these from circumstantial evidence,⁷ and their conclusions have been disputed.⁸ Nevertheless, we can make some inferences from the products of narrative adaptation over time, albeit keeping in mind the danger of circular thinking: the archipelago of Chingiznāma/Oghuznāma texts might be wide, but it is still only one matrix that we are navigating.

Beyond the paternal line: genealogy and sociality

Chingiznāma and Oghuznāma stand for two entangled textual traditions of auctorial and anonymous works handed down orally and in writing.⁹ The forerunner of the Chingiznāma tradition is a cluster of texts that culminated in the Secret History of the Mongols, put down in writing in the second quarter of the thirteenth century during the succession struggle following Chingiz Khan’s death.¹⁰ The historical branch of the Oghuznāma tradition seems to have been shaped no earlier than this,¹¹ although the development of its literary branch has been dated back as far as the sixth century C.E.¹² By the fifteenth century at the latest, both narrative traditions were well established. While the Chingiznāma remained alive, yielding auctorial textual manifestations until as late as the nineteenth century, the Oghuznāma soon lost most of its vitality.

Most Chingiznāma texts are genealogies fleshed out with narrations about historical and mythical personae of Chingiz’ pedigree, written down in order to legitimize the rule of a given Chinggisid dynasty.¹³ The texts ultimately concern the line of Jöchi, the non-biological son among Chingiz Khan’s four great sons. Although his name – Jöchi, ‘Guest’ – points to his foreign origin in terms of paternal descent,¹⁴ his inclusion in the pedigree highlights the character of genealogy as an artefact defined by agreement rather than naturally given through biological parentage. Our texts do not tell us if consensus was reached in all cases,¹⁵ but they do demonstrate which criteria for nobility of descent and thus legitimacy of rule were deemed compelling enough for a figure to be put forward. These criteria vary significantly from one text to another and sometimes even within the same text. An interesting case in point is the paternal line.

In Central Eurasian contexts agnatic kinship is predominant in normative discourses about affiliation and identification and resulting claims to wealth and power. Ethnography, however, has shown that uterine kinship and the ‘milk line’ is often considered more relevant when it comes to practical concerns requiring loyalty and benevolence, and also for ‘the life process itself.’¹⁶ The Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma texts demonstrate that patriarchal discourses are questioned not only in everyday life, but also in highly normative contexts where they can be overruled by supreme interference or subverted by maternal affiliation – and rendered obsolete when these two come together.

It is clear from the Secret History of the Mongols (SHM) that ‘in the Mongol conception of their own ancestry, the mythical past and the historical presence of the Chinggisids were linked by a woman,’¹⁷ Alan Qo’a, a widow who ‘although she had no husband, bore three sons.’¹⁸ The youngest, Bodonchar, came to be the founder of Chingiz Khan’s lineage, the Borjigin. Alan Qo’a also had two older sons from her deceased husband Dobun Mergen – Belgünütei and Bügünütei – who suspected that a foreign ethnic servant had fathered their younger brothers. Their father, Dobun Mergen, had himself fallen victim to such a suspicion. A young male servant had been part of his parents’ household and his nephews had doubted Dobun Mergen’s legitimacy. When their father – the far-sighted cyclops Du’a Soqor, who had secured his brother the superb bride Alan Qo’a – died, they ‘no longer regarded their uncle Dobun Mergen as a member of the family but, looking down on him, they left him and moved away.’¹⁹ In the steppe, abandoning others was a ‘method of social division’ from unwanted persons,²⁰ which put the left-behinds at high risk. Therefore, when Belgünütei and Bügünütei attempted to delegitimize their brothers, Alan Qo’a summoned all five sons and made them first break a single arrow and then a bundle of five, which of course they failed to. She admonished them that unity of purpose grants strength. Alan Qo’a did not explicitly deny the relevance of the paternal line as a binding force, but she clearly changed the order of priorities when she stressed that the sons were ‘born of one womb’²¹ after having explained that the younger boys had come into being through the intervention of a ‘resplendent yellow man’ who ‘entered by the light of the smoke-hole’ and departed ‘in the guise of a yellow dog.’²²

Why did the ‘Secret Historian’²³ make this parable so prominent and render it in such detail? According to its colophon, the SHM was completed in 1228,²⁴ situating it amidst the bitter struggle for supremacy among Chingiz Khan’s surviving three sons and their respective followers. If the text was recited to the assembly convened in the fall of 1229, Alan Qo’a’s emotional words, at the very beginning of the recital, must have appealed to whatever sense of unity was left among those present.²⁵ Later passages quoting Chingiz Khan and his mother, Lady Hö’elün, repeated the admonition that brothers born from the same womb are united by a very special bond.²⁶

This unmistakable claim in the SHM that mothers make humans into social beings is, however, supplemented by the claim that the father determines an individual’s identity. Alan Qo’a ultimately appeases her two elder sons by naming the progenitor of their younger brothers: ‘They are the sons of Heaven.’²⁷ Intrusion into the lineage by alien human fathers is intolerable, but Alan Qo’a’s impregnation by a numinous being simultaneously relieves her of suspicions of immorality and grants her offspring an outstanding rank, which passes undisputed in the SHM. The SHM makes the woman Alan Qo’a the ‘ancestor on top of the genealogy’ of Chingiz Khan, an ancestor who is ‘ordained to proceed to the mythic locus where divine power was successfully attracted to the lineage.’²⁸ According to Beffa,²⁹ the formulation ‘sons of Heaven’ does not occur anywhere else in the SHM, rendering it all the more conspicuous and lending plausibility to Denise Aigle’s claim that ‘the legend of Chingiz Khan’s origins has inherited something from the Chinese imperial model.’³⁰

Negotiating pure descent

While in the Secret History the supernatural conception experienced by Alan Qo’a seems to pose no problem – the sons accept their mother’s explanation and the narration continues – for many later authors it remained a bone of contention or cause of deep irritation.

Roughly a century later, the Mamluk historian Ibn Faẓlallāh al-ͨUmarī (d. 1348) quotes Alan Qo’a’s story. He adds that the three sons were called Nūrāniyyūn because of the light (ar. nūr) that penetrated their mother’s womb, but also remarks that Alan Qo’a probably invented the story to save her life.³¹ As a Mamluk state official, al-ͨUmarī was at liberty to speak his mind about the ancestry of his lords’ great political rival, Ilkhan Ghāzān. Rashīduddīn ibn Faẓlallāh (d. 1318), however, as a statesman and historian in the service of Ghāzān, had to mind how he told the story. In his Jāmi ͨat-Tavārīkh he cannot totally avoid mentioning it, but he keeps it short, simply citing Alan Qo’a as having recounted a bright and shiny³² person ‘softly-softly’ approaching her and ‘slowly-slowly’ drawing back, ‘as if [she were] asleep/in a dream’ (pe. čunān dar xwāb), and remarking that there was much controversy about this extraordinary event.³³

Rashīduddīn, whose efforts to harmonize Mongol/Turkic mythology and mores and the Islamic creed have been elaborated on elsewhere,³⁴ is obviously no less at odds with the Alan Qo’a story than al-ͨUmarī. Yet for him to have doubted her chastity would have been tantamount to challenging the acknowledged genealogy of Chingiz Khan and by extension his own Ilkhanid lord.³⁵ The furthest he can go within the boundaries of Islamic ethics is to allege a sleep/dream-like condition in which the woman is not in control of herself, which allows him to take the non-judgmental stance³⁶ for which he is renowned. Etymology comes to his assistance: Rashīduddīn explains that ‘Nirun’ (the name of the Mongol tribes that descended from Alan Qo’a’s third pregnancy) means ‘pure’ (pāk), which for him is obvious because they ‘emerged from light (nūr).’³⁷ It is safe to assume that Rashīduddīn’s Muslim readership understood his allusion to the Sūrat an-Nūr,³⁸ a sura that deals extensively with immoral women (and men), fornication and allegations of it, and the rigid regulations for bearing witness.

This ingenious etymologic bond that brings into accord a Mongol concept and an Islamic ḥadd issue must have been persuasive. It still resounded over a century later in Arabic inscriptions on Timur’s marble tombstone slab and cenotaph in the Gūr-i Amīr in Samarkand. The inscriptions, commissioned by Ulughbek in 1425, include a reference to the chaste mother ‘Alanquvā’ (Alan Qo’a) of Timur’s ancestor ‘Būdhunjar’ (Bodonchar) whose father ‘nobody knows of,’ and quotes words from the Sūrat Maryam.³⁹ That same year, the Ta'rīkh-i Arba ͨUlus was finalized, also under Ulughbek’s supervision.⁴⁰ This genealogy of the Turks and Mongols dedicates seven pages to an apology of Alanquvā, asserting that her offspring are called ‘Nayirun’⁴¹ because they were fathered by a shiny and enlightened (nūrānī) person.⁴² Alanquvā, widowed at age seventeen and still yearning for her deceased husband years later, is described as torn by bodily desires; no matter how hard she tries, she cannot resist the invasiveness of the shiny young man, who after some ‘conversation’ (ṣuḥbat, euphem. for intercourse) leaves in the guise of a quail. When her pregnancy becomes evident, people threaten to kill her. She invites ‘the nobility of the Mongols’ to see for themselves.⁴³ After three or four days’ observation of the nūr arriving through the smokehole, being transformed into an anthropomorphous being who shares her bed, and leaving again (see figure 1), they acknowledge the veracity of her claim and everyone ‘bowed their heads to Alanquvā.’⁴⁴

Figure 1. The canine leaving Alan Qo’a’s yurt. Picture source: Ivanics, ‘Memories of Statehood,’ 572, who cites earlier publications by Emel Esin and Zeki Velidi Togan

In the SHM the woman’s word suffices to establish the mythic truth of numinous intervention in the pedigree, but Islamic legalism demands procedure. While Rashīduddīn alluded to this, the Ta’rīkh-i Arba ͨUlus spells it out: Alanquvā is ‘tried,’ the cause is monitored by a sufficient number of able witnesses, proof of her innocence is established, and she is counted as the rightful ancestress of her sons. However, the authors do not seem fully convinced and make it clear that those who are ‘ḥaqq-shunās,’ that is, aware of the law, truth, or plainly, God, would not compare Alanquvā with Maryam – Mary, the mother of Jesus.⁴⁵ A pedigree with Alanquvā at the top seems to have been less than good enough. Why else did the authors present the youngest triplet Būdhunjar (Bodonchar, ancestor of Chingiz) as a ‘lord of the lucky constellation’ (ṣāḥib-qirān), whose bodily and mental properties in West Asian-Islamic terms would identify him as chosen,⁴⁶ if not to enhance his credentials? That claim is absent from earlier and later texts, but in this genealogy created one-and-a-half generations after Timur, another ṣāḥib-qirān of second-best descent, it must have had a special flavor. Interestingly, an Inner Asian indicator of chosenness, the canine motif, was removed from the narration.⁴⁷ In the SHM, the numinous progenitor vanishes from Alan Qo’a’s yurt in the shape of a canine, but our early fifteenth-century Muslim authors mention a quail instead, a being otherwise unheard of as part of a symbolic pedigree.

This narrative of numinous interference and, hence, impeccable conception and pure descent continued to trouble the minds of authors of Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma texts. Sharafuddīn ͨAlī Yazdī in his Ẓafarnāma, roughly contemporary with the Ta'rīkh-i Arba ͨUlus,⁴⁸ tells his readers: ‘If you believe in the story of Maryam, also believe in (the story of) Alānqavā!’⁴⁹ This, however, can be read as an admonishment not to believe in either. Mīrkhwānd, in the late fifteenth century, resorted to drawing on the example of the prophet Adam to explain the extraordinary God-willed emergence of a fatherless (and motherless in that case) human ancestor.⁵⁰ The desire to at least normalize, if not rationalize, the nonrational is also evident in the late eighteenth-century so-called ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan,’⁵¹ a hybrid of Ilkhanid/Timurid historiography, epic folk narration and other textual genres. For his history of the Chinggisids, the compiler provided a preface of ‘strange and astonishing’ narrations (al-ͨajā’ib qiṣaṣ vä gharā’ib akhbār [sic]) about God’s omnipotence, which elaborated on Mīrkhwānd’s motifs: Adam came into being without father or mother; Jesus was ‘created without [his mother] being touched by a human’; and the female islanders ‘somewhere in the far East’ procured their offspring by bathing in a particular spring and gave birth in a virgin condition (tu. qız oghlan).⁵² All of these ‘prove the veracity’ of the claim of ‘Alānqavā, from whom three sons were born without marital bonds or (sexual) relations.’ The author not only preserves the motif of the wolf who exits the yurt, but even reinforces its relevance to the genealogy of Chingiz by etymologizing the name Yuzanjar (Bodonchar) as ‘meaning qurd ‘wolf’ in the Mongolic language.’⁵³

A ‘Christian’ alternative of purity

All texts discussed so far, from Rashīduddīn’s work to the anonymous eighteenth-century ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan,’ share one important feature: they are based in the realm of the offspring of Tolui, Chingiz Khan’s fourth son. The Ulus Jöchi and its follower polities are home to a related yet different sort of text in praise of Chingiz’ origin – anonymous works, many of which bear a generic title such as Chingiznāma.⁵⁴ The vivid tradition of this genre continued until the recent past, as can be seen both from the relatively high number of popular copies that have come down to us and from the derivatives, under the (no less generic) titles Shajara-i Turkī and Shejire, respectively authored by Abūlghāzī in the mid-seventeeth century,⁵⁵ and the Khorezmian poet Berdaq as late as the nineteenth century.

While Alaŋghū (Alan Qo’a) is part of these texts, in many Chingiznāmas her story is preceded by another narration about numinous intervention: the story of ^ͨUlamālik Körkli, the daughter of a royal couple who is ‘so beautiful that when she laughed, parched trees would blossom and when she trod upon barren ground, it would sprout green grass.’⁵⁶ From her name, we understand that this princess was not only ‘beautiful’ (tu. körkli, compare mo. qo’a) but also ‘qualified as a savant’ (ͨulamā-lik).⁵⁷ Alas, she was not meant to see the sun; according to different variants, her father locked her away in a splendid castle behind closed window shades out of jealousy or a desire to dedicate her to God. After reaching maturity, she talked her nanny into opening a window and was promptly impregnated by a beam of light. Her mother briefly considered marrying her off but, fearing gossip that would bring the truth of her pregnancy to light, her parents decided to send her away in a golden vessel to find her rightful owner elsewhere. Tomavıl Mergen, a prince who had broken off with his father, and the cyclops Siba Soqur, who spotted the golden vessel from afar, agreed that the master archer (mergen) would own its contents while his one-eyed friend would get the shell. Thus, Tomavıl got the girl. Despite ^ͨUlamālik Körkli’s request to wait for her delivery, he consummated the marriage immediately, finding out that: ‘She is pregnant and she is a virgin! [Only] lucky servants [of the Lord] encounter [this]! She is pregnant and she is a virgin, [that is how it] was. And the child in [her] womb was born and because he was the duyınlıq given by täŋri, they named him Duyın Bayan.’⁵⁸

^ͨUlamālik Körkli later bears her husband two more sons, Büdäntäy and Bürkältäy, but out of fear that they will cut off Duyın Bayan, ‘who had been born from light’ (tu. nūrdan yarughan⁵⁹), she presses her husband to send them away ‘to the Mongols.’ Then they find Duyın a bride from the city of Almalıq – ‘Alaŋghū’ – and the story goes on with Alaŋghū’s miraculous pregnancy. However, the exceptional character of that pregnancy is somewhat downgraded. Before he dies, Duyın Bayan declares their three sons unworthy of ruling and predicts that after death he will father another child: ‘I will descend as sun (kün) and go out as a wolf.’⁶⁰ When Alaŋghū has to justify her pregnancy, she reminds skeptics of this prediction and is rehabilitated. In a narrative shortcut that skips Bodonchar and the other intermediates, a single additional son comes into being – ‘Chıŋqız’ – for whose advent the oppressed people have long been yearning. While his postmortem conception is still extraordinary, there is no supernatural progenitor involved. That particular mystery had happened before, not to the accomplished housewife and widow Alan Qo’a, but to ^ͨUlamālik Körkli, a girl who had not known a man when the beam of light came down on her.

Manuscript illustrations from the region show that the Annunciation of Virgin Mary repeatedly inspired Central Asian artists, who imagined the immaculate conception through the Qur’anic tradition.⁶¹ As already mentioned, the Qur’anic story of Maryam was associated with Alan Qo’a by a number of Muslim authors. Yet in the story about ^ͨUlamālik Körkli, the biblical references are striking.⁶² It is Tomavıl Mergen, whose ‘lot’ or rightful share (naṣīb) was ^ͨUlamālik Körkli, who establishes proof of her virginity. Berdaq’s nineteenth-century poem Shejire relies on a version in which the postulate of the virgin birth is even more obvious: the girl delivers her son on board the vessel before she is recovered by the archer, that is, while she is without doubt a virgin. By postponing the marriage until after delivery, Berdaq also reconciles the story with his contemporary Islamic assumption that the insertion of sperm by a new husband during pregnancy would ‘alter the agnatic identity of the child.’⁶³ Since Berdaq’s Shejire does not contain any Alan Qo’a element at all, this is a particularly delicate issue: the son delivered on board is ‘Shıŋghıs’ himself.⁶⁴ The most remarkable phrase, however, is ‘he was the God-given duyınlıq.’ Ivanics and Usmanov interpret duyın as ‘sediment, seed/semen’ without explaining the etymology,⁶⁵ but in Turkmen dialects düwinji is established as ‘firstborn child.’⁶⁶ Hence, I suggest reading the phrase as an echo of Luke 2:7: ‘and [Mary] gave birth to her firstborn.’

Although the Duyın Bayan story resonates with Christian phrases relating to Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the narrative of ^ͨUlamālik Körkli as a whole is even more evocative of another prominent virgin of Christianity, Catherine of Alexandria. The openings of the Chingiznāmas tell that ^ͨUlamālik’s princely parents live on ‘the island of Mālta in the White Sea.’⁶⁷ Malta in the Mediterranean was the center of veneration of the martyred virgin Catherine. By the mid-fourteenth century, she rated second only to the Virgin Mary as a female saint in Europe,⁶⁸ and her legend had spread as far east as Yangchow through Italian travelers.⁶⁹ According to the legend, Catherine was a learned maiden who outwitted the philosophers of her day. Her exceptional beauty led her jealous father to seclude her, a motif that reverberates in the story of the secluded ‘Savant Beauty’ ^ͨUlamālik Körkli. Some Chingiznāmas mention Mount Tūr/Tūra as the place from which the vessel with the pregnant girl was launched⁷⁰; Ṭūr on Sinai was a prominent place of the Catherine cult, where her remains are allegedly kept.

I am not suggesting that ^ͨUlamālik Körkli’s story reproduces the Annunciation or the Catherine legend, but its wealth of narrational motifs in line with the Catholic and East Syriac creed does indicate that Chingiz Khan’s genealogy was not only ‘Islamized’ by interested parties in the wake of Rashīduddīn, but was also ‘Christianized’ by others through stylization of savior-like Chingiz as the grandson or son of a woman whose story recalls the two most prominent Christian female saints. The insight that Alan Qo’a’s drama, which in the SHM draws on the Chinese concept of the ruler as ‘Son of Heaven,’ was brought in line with Islamic mores is compelling. Yet no less so is the idea that out of the many Syriac Christians related to Chingiz Khan by blood or marriage, who were competing for supremacy in the mid-thirteenth century and would later insist that their lineage was entitled to rule, quite a few may have pushed the story of ^ͨUlamālik Körkli with its insinuated analogy between Chingiz’ emergence and that of Jesus. So far I have only been able to identify the ^ͨUlamālik Körkli story in written and oral⁷¹ genealogical narrations from former Jöchid territory. Powerful Christians, however, were also acting on behalf of other Chinggisid lineages.⁷² Thus it may be mere coincidence that updated versions of Chingiz Khan’s genealogy in a pro-Christian vein have not yet been recovered from other territories, or if recovered, have not received as much attention as have the ‘Islamized’ ones.

Mothers count

The ‘Sinicized-Mongolian,’ ‘Islamized’ and ‘Christianized’ genealogies all link Chingiz Khan to a numinous progenitor – tänggeri, a beam of light, a wolf, the sun(light) – or leave the question of his forefathers open, since his male ancestor was Bodonchar, whose father ‘nobody knows of.’ In the Secret History, the conspicuous absence of a human male as a biological or even social founding father is balanced out by no more than the mother’s word, reflecting a proverb in one of the ‘popular wisdom’ texts of the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex: ‘the mother is the one who knows the father of the son.’ However, when this epic scene of numinous interference in the heroic pedigree meets with the book religions, maternal purity is foregrounded. The word of the ‘Islamized’ widow Alanquvā, along with her impeccability, has to be proven by eyewitnesses, while the nobility of the ‘Christianized’ ^ͨUlamālik Körkli’s first-born son is proven by the mother’s persistent virginity which a lucky outsider bears witness to – a constellation bringing to mind the Theotokos debate which had shaken the Christian East centuries earlier. The most striking example of such interference in conceptions of noble genealogy, however, is provided by Rashīduddīn.

Rashīduddīn has been credited with reconciling the Inner Asian epic tradition with the Islamic creed by merging the narratives of Chingiz Khan and Oghuz Qaghan and coining the latter as the first Muslim after a lengthy period of reversion into paganism among his ancestors. In his History of Oghuz and his progeny and mention of the Sultans and Kings of the Turks,⁷³ Rashīduddīn ‘supports the Islamising programme of Ghāzān Khan’ by ‘casting Oghuz as a proto-Muslim monotheist.’⁷⁴ He narrates Oghuz just as the prophet-forerunners of Muḥammad were narrated in the Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ literature that was hugely popular in Iran and Central Asia of his day. Genealogy plays an important role in Rashīduddīn’s narrative in a surprising but not quite unpredictable way. He tacitly gives up the Turko-Mongol prioritization of the paternal line, which would have secured Oghuz nothing better than an apostate origin, since his forefathers, starting seven generations after Yāfath and continuing down to his father, Qara Khan, had given up monotheism for savage and fierce polytheism. Later, in the fifteenth century, Yazdī introduces a post-Yāfath ‘Tatar (kāfir) versus Moghul (Muslim)’ split in Chingiz’ genealogical line,⁷⁵ and he and writers who draw on his work elaborate on Oghuz/Chingiz’ ancestors’ wavering adherence to the right religion (and thus to a sown rather than steppe way of life) in stilted words, trying to side with the line of Moghul without showing too much disdain for the line of Tatar.⁷⁶ However, Rashīduddīn passes over this delicate issue in silence, probably because the recent conversion of his own patron Ghāzān did not warrant that ruler and populace would necessarily hold on to Islam for good.

Having evaded the deficient paternal line of Oghuz/Chingiz (according to an Islamic understanding), Rashīduddīn, in an ingenious narrational twist, enhances a motif of the Oghuz Qaghan epic to harmonize Central Asian mythology with monotheistic ideology. In many folk narratives the exceptionality of the hero manifests in his rapid growth into manhood. Likewise, the epic pre-Islamic Oghuz demands solid food after one single nursing and in a matter of days learns how to speak and walk.⁷⁷ Rashīduddīn takes up the nursing motif but turns it into the symbol of maternity. His newborn Oghuz refuses to suckle his mother’s milk for three days, only accepting it – and thus his mother which it symbolically stands for – after she embraces monotheism, something he has suggested to her in a dream. Later in the story the motif is re-enacted: adult Oghuz refuses intercourse with two brides steadfast in paganism but readily consummates his marriage with an obedient bride who follows him into monotheism. By first proselytizing his mother and then converting his wife,⁷⁸ Oghuz ensures that both he and his future progeny will, in genealogical terms, be in the ‘right’ religion. We may assume that Rashīduddīn’s personal background in Judaism caused him to attribute such importance to Oghuz’ mother and the mother of Oghuz’ sons. While the epic Oghuz secured his sons a supreme patriline by impregnating the most radiant heavenly and the most beautiful earthly girls,⁷⁹ Rashīduddīn’s Oghuz counted on the uterine/milk line through which religious affiliation is handed down.⁸⁰ Almost five centuries after Rashīduddīn, the anonymous author of the ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan’ would still go as far as to call Oghuz the mādarzād valī, ‘saint by birth,’ which literally means ‘Allah’s friend procreated by [his] mother.’⁸¹ Paternal nobility and maternal chastity momentarily recede into the background in this understanding of affiliation.

Deconstructing the genealogical myth

Genealogy is a serious matter. Myth-like narratives are woven around the enduring importance of the pedigree, supporting distinction grounded in noble descent. However, human reason can also deconstruct such myths when the nobility of a particular descent line unravels over the course of time. In this final section, I will show how this happened to the core myth of ‘the Oghuz’ as a tribal federation with a clear internal hierarchy, which was constructed around the ‘Bow-and-Arrows’ motif.

The epos of Oghuz Qaghan, as we know it from the non-Islamized ‘Uyghur’ version,⁸² tells that Oghuz’ wise counselor and dreamer/oneiromancer (tu. tüshimel), Ulugh Türük, had an auspicious dream upon their return to their home territory following Oghuz’ conquests. In the dream, a golden bow spans from East to West and three silver arrows fly to the North. On the counselor’s advice, Oghuz arranges a festive assembly for his following and sends his sons out for a hunt. The elder sons Kün, Ay and Yultuz – whose mother was an unearthly beauty first encountered by Oghuz while she was sitting in a beam of light – go hunting and bring back a golden bow that they find ‘on the way.’ Kök, Tagh and Tengiz – Oghuz Qaghan’s sons from a sublime earthly beauty – bring back three silver arrows. Oghuz seats his elder sons to his right, breaks the bow into pieces, and tells them to ‘shoot the arrows as far as the sky.’ He thereby assigns his elder sons supremacy over their younger brothers, seated to his left, to whom he deals out the arrows. Oghuz bequeaths his lands to his sons (the incomplete text ends before the details of that bequeathal are told).⁸³

Rashīduddīn provides an almost verbatim account of this story in his History of Oghuz. Upon his victorious return home Oghuz arranges a feast. His sons go for a hunt and ‘by coincidence’ find a golden bow and three golden arrows, which their father then deals out to them, bestowing upon them the federation names of Bozuq and Üch Oq respectively. Oghuz assigns his sons their respective ranks and territories and ‘settles the matters of each people.’⁸⁴ However, Rashīduddīn’s version differs from the non-Islamized text in a small but important detail: the shamanic motif of the dreamer, who foresees the future of the pedigree initiated by Oghuz and advises the ruler on how to eternalize himself, is conspicuously missing. Rashīduddīn instead highlights Oghuz’ capacities as an accomplished conqueror and ruler, and acknowledges no transcendental intervention in the aftermath of his rule. The Ta’rīkh-i ArbaͨUlus from 1425 tells a similar story.

Abūlghāzī’s seventeenth-century Shajara-i Turkī and the eighteenth-century ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan’ deviate from Rashīduddīn’s version of the Bow-and-Arrows event in one remarkable detail. When Oghuz has conquered his westernmost territory, he orders a soldier to take a golden bow and three arrows to distant places in the East and West ‘where man does not set foot’ and to bury them there, leaving an edge sticking out. A year later, Oghuz arranges a hunt and sends off his elder and younger sons, who bring back the bow and arrows. The elder brothers break the bow and the younger sons distribute the arrows among themselves. They take the retrieval of the bow and arrows ‘for an omen’ (tu. ırım qıl=) and return to their respective territories (vilāyat), while Oghuz continues to rule over his lands, which extend ‘from Sayram to Egypt.’ Only after more time has passed and Oghuz returns home for good, does he make a feast and give advice to his following and his sons. He reminds them that ‘you have found the bow and arrows; this was not by man [but] by God’ (tu. kishidin bolmadı täŋridin boldı).⁸⁵ But the readers/listeners know better: they are aware that the Bow-and-Arrows play had been staged by Oghuz Qaghan himself! It was Oghuz’ anticipation of what would be necessary to eternalize the supremacy of ‘the Oghuz’ and prevent internal strife that had caused his six sons to come across the symbols of their respective lineages’ hierarchical positions and entitlement to rule – not numinous intervention in the guise of a dream, nor an unspecified ‘coincidence’ that could be read as providential, nor täŋri’s direct intervention, as claimed by Oghuz when he spoke to his sons.

Were later-day authors such as Abūlghāzī and the writer of the ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan’ teaching the readers/listeners of their day a lesson in paternal hoax? Not quite, but they apparently felt the need to alert their audience to the vanity of far-reaching political claims grounded in nobility established through genealogy. By their time it had become evident that Oghuz’ desire to eternalize his offspring’s rule and prevent strife among his descendants was fruitless. Rashīduddīn cuts short his ‘mention of the sultans and kings of the Turks’ after a brief account of the troubled history of Central Asia in Seljuq times; probably for lack of interest, he does not go into detail about what happened to Oghuz’ offspring after that. Later genealogists and historians of western Central Asia and neighboring regions, who were very interested in the fortunes of ‘the Oghuz,’ knew about the ensuing yet contested rise of the Qayı/Ottoman offspring of Kün Khan, while the ‘Oghuznāma from Qazan’ proudly narrates the rise to supreme power of the Afsharids whose ancestor was Yultuz Khan. But it would have been impossible to argue away the many historical developments inconsistent with the admonitions of Oghuz, from the general historical insignificance of the lineage of Ay Khan to the devaluation of the ‘Oghuz’ credentials of the Qayı and the continuous internal strife among major and minor polities in the western parts of Central Asia, whose leaders drew their legitimacy from ‘Oghuz’ descent. How could God have overlooked those failures if historians and genealogists knew them so well? Updating the grand narrative of Oghuz Qaghan in the sense of ‘look what happens if a man advertises his own will as God-given destiny’ sounds very appropriate to the life experience of a man like Abūlghāzī, whose own father might have dreamed of bequeathing different parts of his empire to the sons of his different wives – a bright future which never happened.

Conclusion

The mythico-historical parts of texts from the Oghuznāma/Chingiznāma Complex mainly consist of genealogical information occasionally enhanced with narrations about selected members of the pedigree. Ideally, the genealogy is about the agnatic line leading down to Temüjin (Chingiz) and ramifications that are meant to represent ‘minor’ agnatic lines. However, in several parts of the genealogy biological fathers are replaced by other trivial human males (violators, the young servant), an animal (canine, quail), or a numinous being (sunray, beam of light, shiny young man, Heaven). Many of the stories that fill the genealogical structure highlight the significance of particular mothers and of the maternal line. Mothers make the sons into social beings (daughters do not seem to exist), as is proven by the mythical Alan Qo’a and historical Hö’elün alike.

With the new and increasing influence of the Abrahamic book religions in the multireligious society of the Mongol Empire, the position of selected female protagonists is further elevated, but they are simultaneously confronted with elusive symbolic demands as guarantors of the continuity of proper genealogy: chastity that needs to be legally proven, in the case of Alan Qo’a; sublime beauty, wisdom, and virgin conception/birth in the case of ^ͨUlamālik Körkli; and adherence to monotheism in a polytheist society in the case of Oghuz’ mother and wives. From the mid-thirteenth to the early fifteenth century, when major ideologically underpinned rivalries were ongoing, Oghuznāma/Chingiznāma texts underwent significant updating to accommodate the demands and support the cause of particular interest groups.

Power and rule were no doubt contested for as long as dynastic continuity seemed possible and desirable, well beyond the disintegration of the Mongol Empire and its immediate follower empires. However, the suggestive power of the grand narrative of nobility through genealogical superiority, tied to Chingiz Khan and mythic Oghuz, seems to have faded away together with the factual decline of the Chinggisid lineages. Only where these remained in place – in parts of the former Ulus Jöchi territories – did the Chingiznāma tradition stay in common currency; even there, however, its narrative gist does not appear to have been significantly updated after the fifteenth century. The Oghuznāma seems to have returned to orality, only to be picked up again in rare auctorial texts (Abūlghāzī’s Shajara-i Tarākima) and anonymous history writing (‘Oghuznāma from Qazan’). However, even in those writings the historico-mythical background of the genealogical grand narrative was cast into doubt. Deconstructing the ideology of genealogy as a tool to legitimize claims to continuous power and rule sounds like a rational and ‘proper’ Muslim response to the hubris of great ancestors – a response worthy of seventeenth and eighteenth-century narrators who appreciated the story but no longer shared the belief.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingeborg Baldauf

Ingeborg Baldauf is a Turkologist specialized in the languages, literatures and folklore of Central Asia. She is currently working on literary aspects of the Chingiznāma-Oghuznāma Complex.

Notes

1. DeWeese, “The politics of sacred lineages,” 519; and Penrose, “The Politics of Genealogy,” 6.

2. On a sub-genre of constructivist genealogy, nasab-nāma, important in the Central Asian historiographic tradition, see DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion, 511. For a critique of the biological/constructivist distinction in kinship studies, see Shapiro 2010.

3. “Oghuznāma from Qazan,” fol. 65b. On this text, see also note 51.

4. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History.

5. Buck, “Vergangenheit als Gegenwart,” 219.

6. For an impressive example of how claims to legitimacy of rule can be mined from a variety of discursive and non-discursive materials, see Broadbridge, Kingship and ideology.

7. Penrose, “The Politics of Genealogy”; and Koroglı, Oguzskii geroicheskii epos, 28. Penrose argues that Abūlghāzī was seeking to further dissent among Turkmen tribes while strengthening his economic ties with the Ersarı Turkmens by supporting their claims to authority.

8. See Poullada, Russian-Turkmen Encounters, Chapter 3.

9. For a comparison of historical Oghuznāma texts and partial overview of the tradition (with no consideration of its literary and “folk wisdom” branches), see Danka, The ‘Pagan’ Oγuz-nāmä. As yet there is no overview of the Chingiznāma elements. This article takes the “Chingiznāma-tradition” to cover only the “Western” (Persian, Turkic) branch of epico-historical narrative(s) on Chingiz Khan; other extensions of the narrative are beyond my capabilities and this article’s scope. The “Western” branch differs from the Persian ‘mirror-for-princes’ branch, early representative texts of which are mentioned by Melville, “Creating an Image”; and Melville, “Between Firdausī and Rashīd al-Dīn,” 53–54. On the “literary epic genre,” the “historicized Shāh-nāma,” which flourished in the Ilkhanid period, see Aigle, The Mongol Empire, Chapter 1. For an overview of the “Eastern” (Mongolian, Chinese) branch, see Atwood “How the Secret History,” 24–25.

10. For a comprehensive discussion of the writing of the SHM, see Atwood “How the Secret History.”

11. See Danka, The ‘Pagan’ Oγuz-nāmä, Chapter 8.

12. Zhirmunskii, Tiurkskii geroicheskii epos, 515.

13. For a preliminary edition of three texts in this genre collected in Tatarstan, see Ivanics and Usmanov, Das Buch der Dschingis-Legende. See also note 54 below.

14. De Nicola, Women in Mongol Iran, 58n25.

15. For example, on the question of Jöchi’s status and his mother Börte’s chastity, see Atwood, “Date of the “Secret History”,” 27ff.

16. Pfluger-Schindlbeck, “Kinship, Descent System and State.”

17. De Nicola, Women in Mongol Iran, 36, following Allsen 1994.

18. SHM, § 17.

19. SHM, §§ 3 and 11.

20. Togan, “Genghis Khan Emerges,” 92.

21. SHM, § 22.

22. SHM, § 21.

23. For a discussion about the authorship of the SHM see Street’s introduction to Rachewiltz’s translation: SHM, xxi-n10. The term “Secret Historian” is borrowed from Atwood, “How the Secret History,” 23.

24. Rachewiltz, “Dating of the Secret History.”

25. Parts of the text could have been presented to that audience even if the SHM was finalized as late as 1251, as one contesting theory claims. See Atwood, “Date of the “Secret History.”“

26. SHM, §§ 18ff., 74ff., 246–247, and 254–255. Atwood also points to this “recurring narrative complex” but highlights the motifs of maternal sacrifice and fratricidal conflict, rather than the appeal to unity. See Atwood, “How the Secret History,” 29; and id., “The Indictment of Ong Qa’an,” 267.

27. SHM, § 21.

28. Czerwinski, cited in Peters “Postmodernes Mittelalter,” 389 [translation mine].

29. Beffa, “Le concept de tänggäri,” 228.

30. Aigle, “Les transformations d’un mythe d’origine,” para. 21.

31. al-ͨUmarī, Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār, cited in ibid., para. 15.

32. Rashīduddīn also uses the term ashhal in his explanation of the etymology of “Borjiqin,” Chingiz’ paternal line, as ‘ashhal-eyed.’ Berezin, Sbornik Letopisei, 12 pers. [translation mine].

33. Cited in Aigle, “Les transformations d’un mythe d’origine,” fn. 27 [translation mine].

34. See, for example, Kamola, “History and Legend.”

35. On Rashīduddīn’s positionality as a recent convert in the service of the convert Ghāzān, see Jackson, “Mongol Khans and Religious Allegiance.”

36. Melville, “Jāme ͨal-Tawārīḵ,” para. 14.

37. Berezin, Sbornik Letopisei, 173.

38. Another association Rashīduddīn’s words may have prompted is to the nūr muḥammadī (ar.) “Muḥammadan Light,” the “primal matter,” which the Shiite tradition relates to the miraculous conception of Fāṭima; see Clohessy, Fatima, Daughter of Muhammad, 76, 81.

39. Herzfeld, “Alongoa,” 319; see also Aigle, “Les transformations d’un mythe d’origine,” para. 4ff.

40. Ahmedov, Norqulov and Hasaniy, Mirzo Ulug’bek, p. 2.

41. For this reading I rely on Ahmedov, Norqulov and Hasaniy’s Uzbekicised edition of the Ta’rīkh-i Arba ͨUlus, which follows ms. Add. 26,190 of the British Museum. Generally, this Uzbek adaptation needs to be handled with care.

42. Ibid., fol. 27a-30a.

43. Rashīduddīn has the deceased husband’s ‘brothers and relatives’ question Alan Qo’a’s chastity; Atwood reads this as evidence of a background genealogy known to Rashīduddīn which knows only the three sons born out of wedlock (“Six Genealogies,” 35). I should rather assume that since minors cannot raise accusations in a ḥadd cause, noble adult men take on that duty, although young conjugal sons may be around.

44. Ta'rīkh-i Arba ͨUlus, fol. 29a. Eastern Turkestani popular narratives tell a remarkably similar story about Satuq Bughra Khan, the first Kashgar ruler who had converted to Islam, and his daughter Ālā Nūr Khanım who was ‘noted for her beauty, piety and chastity.’ Impregnated by a drop of light which Gabriel put in her mouth, she later gave birth to an extraordinary son. After standing an examination like Alan Qo’a, she was pronounced innocent. See also Bellew, “History of Kashgar,” 126.

45. Ibid., fol. 29b.

46. Ibid., fol. 30a-b.

47. On the canine motif, see Drompp, “The Lone Wolf.”

48. Binbaş suggests 1436 as terminus post quem non for completion of the Ẓafarnāma. Binbas, Intellectual Networks, 240ff.

49. Herzfeld, “Alongoa,” 319.

50. Aigle, “Les transformations d’un mythe d’origine,” fn. 28.

51. A facsimile of this anonymous and untitled work, composed on behalf of the Afsharids of Andkhoy, was published in 1998 under the title Oğuzname Destanı, but is more generally known as the “Oghuznāma from Qazan” after the provenance of the copy. The copy, if not the text itself, was completed no earlier than 1204 h.; see also Ercilasun, “Oğuznamelerle uğraşırken,” 9.

52. Oğuzname Destanı, fol. 90a.

53. Ibid., 90a-91b.

54. See note 13 above; on the Qara Tavārīkh cluster, see Utemiš-xadži; DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion; Mirgaleev, Utemish Khadzhi; and Belyakov, “O vremeni.” The relation of Kāshānī’s Chingiznāma (see Melville, “Creating an Image”) to this genre has not yet been determined. Rashīduddīn’s Oghuznāma text has also been called Chingiznāma, showing that both sub-genres were understood by many as essentially one.

55. Abūlghāzī’s rationalized version (I have used Ms. Diez A quart. 14, Staatsbibliothek Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz) initiates right with Temüjin’s birth.

56. Chingiznāma, Ms. Diez A quart. 137, Staatsbibliothek Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, fol. 1b. Some popular Chingiznāma manuscripts and Berdaq’s Shejire include a laconic enumeration of Chingiz Khan’s genealogical tree as a prelude, but Ms. Diez A quart. 137 opens with the ^ͨUlamālik Körkli story.

57. In his Shejire, Berdaq seems to miss the point; he names her “Almalıq Körkli,” which can be understood as ‘the beauty with [cheeks like] apples’ or an allusion to her city of birth, Almalıq, which makes little sense since her parents allegedly resided elsewhere.

58. Ms. Diez A quart. 137, fol. 3a-3b: özi buaz özi qız urazlı qulġą yoluġır özi buaz özi qız | boldı ul qurṣaqdaġı valad ṭuġdı adın tängri bergän duyınlıqdur deb duyın bayan atadılar.

59. Ibid., fol. 3b. The verb [közi] yaru= ‘to give birth’ ~ ‘to be born’, obviously the basis for the well-attested yaruq ‘light/beam’, appears in the Uyghur-script Oghuz Qaghan story. See Ağca, Uygur Harfli Oğuz Kağan Destanı, 63 line 4: yarudı üč oghul kördi.

60. Ms. Diez A quart. 137, fol. 4b.

61. For examples, see Hillenbrand, “The Edinburgh Biruni Manuscript.”

62. Bernardini highlights the Christian references in the Alan Qo’a story, which have hitherto attracted little scholarly attention. Bernardini, “La descendance matrilinéaire,” 106.

63. Fortier, “Le lait, le sperme,” 110.

64. Berdaq, Shejire, 10.

65. Ivanics and Usmanov, Das Buch der Dschingis-Legende, 142.

66. Rasekh, “A Study of the Turkmen Dialects,” 253. Since the lexeme has been found in all Afghan-Turkmen dialects we may safely postulate it for neighboring Khorezm, where some Chingiznāmas come from. Front~back vowel quality is unstable in all Turkic idioms of the area, so I see no contradiction in duyın vs. düwin. Tkm. – jI overlaps with Turkic – lI(Q) in rendering the general meaning ‘attachment to x’.

67. Diez 137 fol. 1b and some of the manuscripts used by Ivanics and Usmanov, Das Buch der Dschingis-Legende, have Māla instead, with overwritings by scribes to whom the name was unknown.

68. Schill, “Ikonographie und Kult,” 239.

69. Song, “The Many Faces,” 309.

70. Ivanics and Usmanov, Das Buch der Dschingis-Legende have Tura (fol. 4b.5) and Tur (34n12); Ms. Diez A quart. 137, however, has Toghu/Tughu Taghı.

71. Kuzeev, Proiskhozhdenie, 129.

72. See Dunlop, “The Karaits of Eastern Asia”; De Nicola, “The Economic Role”; and Kadırbaev, Ocherki istorii srednevekovıkh uygurov, 152–153.

73. I follow the translation by Jahn, Die Geschichte.

74. Kamola, “History and Legend,” 563.

75. See Binbas, Intellectual Networks, 209ff.

76. See, for example, Oğuzname Destanı, fol. 34b-36a.

77. Ağca, Uygur Harfli Oğuz Kağan Destanı, 63–64.

78. Jahn, Die Geschichte, 18–19.

79. Ağca, Uygur Harfli Oğuz Kağan Destanı, 69ff.

80. For a meticulous compilation of the motifs in which Rashīduddīn’s narration differs from the heroic epic, see Kincses-Nagy, “Islamization of the Legend of the Turks,” 129ff.

81. Oğuzname Destanı, fol. 37a.

82. The undated singular manuscript (Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Suppl. Turc 1001) is written in the Uyghur script. See Ağca, Uygur Harfli Oğuz Kağan Destanı; and Danka, The ‘Pagan’ Oγuz-nāmä.

83. Ağca, Uygur Harfli Oğuz Kağan Destanı, 104.

84. Jahn, Die Geschichte, 43–44.

85. Oğuzname Destanı, fol. 49a; and Shajara-i Turkī fol. 37a.