TURCO-MONGOLS. - I. The Turkish peoples have spread across Asia and Europe. In southeastern Europe there are the Ottoman Turks of Anatolia, the only ones who have preserved the Turkish language, but culturally they have undergone Mediterranean influences and are Islamized. Of the ancient Bulgars of the Volga (Russia) and of the Balkans, only anthropological types can be observed, since they have lost their originally Turkish language and culture. In southwestern Asia there are many Turkish tribes: the Kara-Kirghiz (Black Kirghiz), the Kazakhs, the Kirei, the Kara-Kalpaks (Black Berets), the Uzbeks, the Taranchi, the Sarts, the Azerbaijanis and the Turkomans, tribes that speak Turkish languages but have been Islamized, and of which only a part still consist of nomadic shepherds, the others being co-stituted by sedentary farmers. In Chinese Turkestan there were the Uighur Turks, of whom only groups (Yungur) exist today, their great medieval kingdom having been destroyed by the Mongols.
The Turks who have preserved their language and much of their original culture are the Turkic tribes of Central Asia, found to the north and south of the Altai Mountains and in the plains of the upper course of the Yenisei and its tributaries. They have been distinguished into four groups: 1) the Tatars of the southern Altai, also called Telengut, with four subgroups; 2) the Tatars of the northern Altai with five subgroups; 3) the Tatars of the Abam with seven subgroups; 4) the Sojoli or Sojoni-Karagassi, also called Tuba or Uriankhai, with six subgroups. The linguistically purest Turks are the Telengut, who descend from the ancient Tukile Turks and from the Uighurs, including the blond Tingling and the Hakas Kirghiz. Some of these groups are Samoyedic or Yeniseian peoples who have been Turkicized, or crosses of Turkic tribes with Yeniseians, such as the Turks of the Abakan; others are completely Russified, such as the Tšelim Tatars, or Islamized, such as the Baraba Tatars. Originally the economy of the Turks was based mainly on horse breeding, from which they obtained milk, meat, hides and transport; they did not know the breeding of goats and pigs, nor agriculture. Today, by contrast, a large herd of livestock, for example among the Kirghiz, can come to have eight or ten thousand horses, twenty thousand goats and cattle, a thousand camels and fifty thousand sheep. The Turks, devoted to pastoralism, lead a nomadic life in the steppes, a somewhat sedentary one in the abundant pastures of the Altai Mountains, called precisely the paradise of shepherds. They are transhumant; the year is divided into two parts, summer and winter. Formerly they used to make, like the Indo-Europeans, great fires with much smoke, to protect themselves and the livestock from insects (horseflies and mosquitoes) and from diseases. Their weapons were the reflex bow and the arrow; at a later time they developed cavalry and used the war chariot, both of which were of great military and political importance. The house was the underground house, but at the same time, or very soon thereafter, the tent also existed. Turks in general care little for purely bodily labor. The economy, being mainly male and requiring much personnel to develop the great herds, led to the formation of the extended family with unity of direction. The sons, after marriage, remain under the authority of the father, and, when he dies, pass under the authority of the eldest brother, the firstborn son; this is the so-called right of primogeniture. Many male children are desired; the woman is in a situation of social, juridical and economic inferiority, she has no right of property, although her dowry cannot be disposed of without her consent.
There is an accentuation of the patria potestas, which often becomes despotic and gives the patriarch a kind of majestic bearing in the family, even with respect to his wife. Marriage is monogamous, although today not exclusively so, but from the legends of the primitive heroes of the tribe it appears as the ideal marriage. This fully justifies the movement in modern Turkey to bring its people back to this ideal pre-Islamic monogamy. For marriage the integrity of the bride is required, so much so that proof of her virginity is also demanded. If the test should prove the contrary, the marriage is held to be invalid, the family is believed dishonored, the groom, for example among the Kirghiz, in his anger kills his own horse, destroys the nuptial tent and insults the family, but especially the parents of the bride. Marriage is by purchase of the bride, but she receives from her family the dowry, which mitigates this character. Consanguinity kinship is highly developed and exogamy is founded upon it; for example, kinship by affinity may end at the first collateral degree. The Yakut, for example, are grouped into clans (aga-usa), into nasleg and into ulus. A clan is sometimes composed of only a few individuals, at other times of a few hundred. A nasleg comprises from one to more than thirty clans. The ulus is often formed by several nasleg. The whole clan is jointly liable for a homicide committed by one of its members; one is obliged either to blood vengeance or to the payment of damages. Blood vengeance has sometimes been hereditary for many generations. An injury by a person of the clan toward another person of the same clan is not punished: when, however, there is a homicide, the murderer is tied to a tree in the interior of the forest and left to die of hunger. The order of precedence of kinship is strongly felt: the assembly, for example, of an ulus is composed of three circles. In the first circle sit the clan chiefs (bis-nus-toyons) and the sesiny; in the second the nobles (toyons) and the warriors (batirs); in the third the common people and the youth. Each clan is grouped behind its representative of the first circle.
The Turks passed from hunting to livestock breeding; there are no traces among them of matriarchy, nor of totemism. In nomadic Turkic society a division into ranks has been noted, called "white bones" and "black bones." As long as the Turks remained nomadic, they showed no tendencies toward state life and the formation of states, but remained organized in extended families and clans (gentes). Only among the Turks of the Altai has the initiation of youth been noted, which however is reduced to the rite of cutting the forelock of pubescent males and is of an individual character; nothing is done for the girls. The Turks are much inclined to the art of storytelling. They have heroic legends, rhapsodies and epic songs of great breadth. Their religion is based on belief in and worship of God, a supreme personal being, creator of heaven, earth, man and all things, called Tengri (God of heaven) or Heaven, to whom animals, particularly the horse, are consecrated or offered in sacrifice. In spring, which can be compared to harvest time for nomadic shepherds, the first-fruits sacrifice is offered to the God of heaven, consisting in the offering of fresh mare's milk and fresh grass or moss. The God of heaven is held to be in special relations with the sun, the moon, thunder and lightning. Today there is a white and a black shamanism, but originally every form of shamanism was lacking, as was the belief in subterranean deities (la des Terra). Dualism, which consists in the belief in deities of light and benevolent, imagined on high, and in deities of darkness and malevolent, placed below on the earth, came from the south along with shamanism. In ancient times there were two mythological beings, similar to the Dioscuri of the Indo-Europeans, who were conceived in special relations with the stars, the horse and the peg; the east was held to be the sacred cardinal point; there was a particular cult of ancestors and heroes, the cult of the bear was lacking. Among the Turks of the Altai it is customary to make the reproduction of the Somo, which represent the souls of the nine ancestors, charged with protecting their descendants. The monotheistic religion of the God of heaven was so strong and deep that among the present-day Yugur, descendants of the ancient Uighurs, it was not only not destroyed by Buddhist Lamaism, but exercised a great influence upon it.
II. The Mongols, from mong-hol (brave?), a proper name of a horde of Genghis Khan, which in 1189 was given to the whole nation, are divided into many groups, based on blood kinship, of which the main ones are the Buryats, the Khalkha, the Sunit, the Gahar (in the steppes of the Gobi), the Oléd (Eleuths, Oirat, Uroti), the Turgut (Alashan), the Ordos, the Tangut (in the upper basin of the Kuku-nor), the Sciaro (in the Lop-nor). The culture of the Mongols is similar to that of the Turks. From the 13th century they have been Lamaists. There are some groups, especially marginal ones, that are devoted to agriculture. Like the Turks, the ancient Mongols had a religion founded on the belief in and worship of the God of heaven, but today it is observed that they lack the idea of a Supreme Being; they believe in several spiritual beings which, for example among the Buryats, are divided into classes, each having its own chief. The highest spirits dwell in heaven and are called Tengeri; the Tengeri are ninety-nine and each has its own name. Those of the west are called Baruni, those of the east Zuni. The Baruni are good and more numerous than the others, being 55, and are called White Tengeri (Sangani Tengeri); the Zuni are evil, are called Grey Tengeri (Kharun Tengeri), and are forty-four. There is, however, still today some Mongol group that keeps alive the unshaken faith in the God of heaven.
III. The T
M. peoples have remained famous in history as strong, terrible warriors and founders of vast empires and great dynasties. In the Middle Ages they were united in Central Asia into a powerful nation by Genghis Khan, a ferocious leader, described as the scourge of humanity, born ca. 1155-1156. They constituted the terror of Europe, where they reached as far as Germany and Hungary; they invaded almost all of Asia, reaching as far as Japan and dominating peoples of high civilization, such as the Chinese and the Indians. Worthy of particular mention are the three khanates founded by them in Persia, in Turkestan (Chagatai) and in southern Russia (Kipchak). The T.-M. undoubtedly form a group of peoples related by language and culture (today a very complex culture), and are called Altaic peoples. From their very origin, however, the Turks are, as has been said, typical horse breeders; the Mongols appear in an intermediate situation, because on the one hand they are authentic breeders of horses and camels, on the other they have a mythology in which the ox is rooted; the Buryats, for example, recognize as their mythical ancestor a being in the form of a bull, called Bucha nojon babà. Therefore the Mongols present themselves as a composite of various elements of races and cultures. Anthropologically the T.-M. are two distinct races: the Turks are of the Turanid race, belonging to the Europid stock; the Mongols are of the Tungid race of the Mongolids, according to the anthropological classification of Biasutti. Von Eickstedt notes in the Turanid race something Mongoloid, since it was located near the place of differentiation of the races and in proximity to the Paleo-Mongoloids.
Linguistically, the Tungus and the Manchus, the Koreans and the Japanese, the Uralic peoples (Ugro-Finnic) according to Trombetti and others, the Aleutians and the Eskimos according to W. Schmidt, have also been classified with the T.-M. in the Altaic stock, thus forming the Ural-Altaic group. But there are scholars who do not consider sufficiently proven the inner affinity not only of the Ural-Altaic, but even of the Altaic group itself, not deeming it surely proven that Korean and Japanese belong to it.