The Ashina (; Middle Chinese: (Guangyun) ) were a Turkic lineage and the ruling dynasty of the Göktürks. They rose to prominence in the mid-6th century when the leader, Bumin Qaghan (died 552), revolted against the Rouran Khaganate. The two main branches of the family, one descended from Bumin and the other from his brother Istämi, ruled over the eastern and western parts of the Göktürk empire, respectively, forming the First Turkic Khaganate (552–603).
Origin Primary Chinese sources ascribed different origins to the Ashina tribe. They were first attested to 439, as reported by the Book of Sui: on the 18th day of the 10th month, the Tuoba ruler Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei overthrew Juqu Mujian of the Northern Liang in eastern Gansu,Wei Zheng et al., Book of Sui, Vol. 84. Wei Shou, Book of Wei, Vol. 4-I. Sima Guang, Zizhi Tongjian, Vol. 123. 永和七年 (太延五年) 九月丙戌 Academia Sinica and 500 Ashina families fled northwest to the Rouran Khaganate near Gaochang.
According to the Book of Zhou, History of the Northern Dynasties, and the New Book of Tang, the Ashina clan was a component of the Xiongnu confederation,Linghu Defen et al., Book of Zhou, Vol. 50. New Book of Tang, vol. 215 upper. "突厥阿史那氏, 蓋古匈奴北部也." "The Ashina family of the Turk probably were the northern tribes of the ancient Xiongnu." translated by Xu (2005)Xu Elina-Qian, Historical Development of the Pre-Dynastic Khitan, University of Helsinki, 2005 but this is contested. The Göktürks were also posited as having originated from an obscure Suo state (索國), north of the Xiongnu.Li Yanshou (李延寿), History of the Northern Dynasties, Vol. 99. According to the Book of Sui and the Tongdian, they were "mixed barbarians" (; záhú) from Pingliang.杜佑, 《通典》, 北京: 中華書局出版, (Du You, Tongdian, Vol.197), 辺防13 北狄4 突厥上, 1988, , p. 5401.
According to some researchers (Duan, Xue, Tang, and Lung) the Ashina tribe descended from the Tiele confederation,Duan: Dingling, Gaoju and Tiele. 1988, pp. 39–41Xue, Zongzheng History of Turks (1992). 39–85Rachel Lung, Interpreters in Early Imperial China, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011, p. 48 "Türk, or Türküt, refers to a state of Ašina clan (of Tiele [鐵勒] tribe by ancestral lineage)"Duan: Dingling, Gaoju and Tiele. 1988, pp. 39–41 who were likewise associated with the Xiongnu.Old Book of Tang Vol. 199 lower "鐵勒，本匈奴別種" tr. "Tiele, originally a splinter race from Xiongnu"Suishu, Vol. 84 "鐵勒之先，匈奴之苗裔也" tr. "Tiele's predecessors are Xiongnu's descendants." Like the Göktürks, the Tiele were a Turkic tribal confederation on the steppe.Suribadalaha, "New Studies of the Origins of the Mongols", p. 46–47Cheng, Fangyi. "The Research on the Identification Between Tiele and the Oghuric Tribes". However, Lee & Kuang (2017) state that Chinese histories did not describe the Ashina-led Göktürks as descending from the Dingling or belonging to the Tiele confederation. The name "Ashina" was recorded in ancient Muslim chronicles in these forms: Aś(i)nas (al-Tabari), Ānsa (Hudud al-'Alam), Śaba (Ibn Khordadbeh), Śana, Śaya (Al-Masudi).Гумилёв Л. Н. Древние тюрки. М.-Л., Наука, 1967.P. B. Golden, "Irano-Turcica: The Khazar sacral kingship revisited," in Acta Orientalia Hungarica 60:2 (2007) p. 165, 172, n. 33
Etymology
Indo-European
Several researchers, including Peter B. Golden, H. W. Haussig,Haussig Н. W. "Byzantinische Qullen über Mittelasien in ihrer historischen Aussage" // Prolegomena to the sources on the history of pre-Islamic Central Asia. Budapest, 1979. S. 55–56. S. G. Klyashtorny,Кляшторный С. Г. Проблемы ранней истории племени тÿрк (ашина). // Новое в советской археологии. / МИА № 130. М.: 1965. С. 278–281.Kjyashtorny S. G. The Royal Clan of the Turks and the Problem of its Designation // Post-Soviet Central Asia. Edited by Touraj Atabaki and John O'Kane. Tauris Academic Studies. London*New York in association with IIAS. International Institute for Asian Studies. Leiden-Amsterdam, p. 366–369. Carter V. Findley, D. G. Savinov,Савинов Д.Г. Владение Цигу древнетюркских генеалогических преданий и таштыкская культура. // Историко-культурные связи народов Южной Сибири. Абакан: 1988. С. 64–74. B. A. Muratov,S. P. Guschin,Wen S.-Q., Muratov B.A., Suyunov R.R. The haplogroups of the representatives from ancient Turkic clans – Ashina and Ashide // BEHPS. , Volume 3, No. 2 [1,2]. March 2016. p. 154–157. R.R. Suyunov, Муратов Б.А., Суюнов Р.Р. Саки-динлины, аорсы, Ашина и потомки кланов Дешти-Кипчака по данным ДНК-генеалогии // Вестник Академии ДНК-генеалогии (Бостон, США) → Том 7, №8, Август 2014, стр. 1198–1226., Muratov, Муратов Б.А. ДНК-генеалогия тюркоязычных народов Урала, Волги и Кавказа. Том 4, серия «Этногеномика и ДНК-генеалогия», ЭИ Проект «Суюн». Vila do Conde, Lidergraf, 2014, илл. . and András Róna-Tas have posited that the term Ashina ultimately descends from an Indo-European root, possibly Tocharian or one of Eastern Iranic languages, such as the Saka. Jonathan Ratcliffe also supports this theory.
Carter V. Findley assumes that the name "Ashina" comes from one of the Saka languages of central Asia and means "blue" (which translates to Proto-Turkic *kȫk, whence Old Turkic 𐰚𐰇𐰚 kök, and same in all Modern Turkic languages). The color blue is identified with the east, so that Göktürk, another name for the Turkic empire, meant the "Turks of the East"; meanwhile, Peter Benjamin Golden favours a more limited denotation of Göktürks as denoting only the Eastern Turks.C. V. Findley 39.Golden, P.B. (1992) Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Series: Turcologia, Volume 9. Otto-Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden p. 117 Findley also said that the term böri, used to identify the ruler's retinue as 'wolves', probably also derived from one of the Iranian languages.
H. W. Haussig and S. G. Kljyashtorny suggest an association between the name and the compound "kindred of Ashin" ahşaẽna (in Old Persian). This is so even in East Turkestan; then the desired form would be in the Sogdian 'xs' yn' k (-әhšēnē) "blue, dark"; Khotan-Saka (Brahmi) āşşeiņa (-āşşena) "blue", where a long -ā- emerged as development ahş-> āşş-; in Tocharian A āśna- "blue, dark" (from Khotan-Saka and Sogdian). There is textual support for either of these versions in the Göktürk Orkhon inscriptions, in which the Göktürks are described as the "Blue Turks"; being descended from the marriage between Blue Sky and the Brown Earth.
According to Kuastornyj, the perfect translation of "Ashina" as an Indo-European word meaning "blue" indicates that the Türks of the First Turkic Khaganate period may aware of the non-Türkic origin of the name "Ashina." In this hypothesis of Louis Bazin, this knowledge was being suppressed in the Second Turkic Khaganate period by the Türkic nationalist policies of Bilge Qaghan. "Dans le recit relatif aux premiers kagans, les grandes inscriptions de l'Orkhon dèsignent le peuple qui avait créé l'empire et habité le pays par le terme kök türk, ce que l'on traduit habituellement les "Turcs bleu chair (bleus)". Sans aborder les nombreuses interprétations du mot kök dans cette combinaison, notons sa convergence sémantique parfaite avec la signification, reconstituée ici, du nom A-che-na: "bleu". Un calque èvident du nom suppose la connaissance conservée de sons sens primitif et de son origine étrangère (tout à fait compatible avec les composantes poly-ethniques de la culture du premier Kaganant turc), lesquels perdirent toutefois leur popularité dans le milieu culturel et politique "nationaliste" (selon l'expression de L. BAZIN, qui caractérise à l'époque de Bilgä-kagan le milieu dirigeant d'Ötükän, centre de pourvoir dans la région de l'Orkhon)."
Turkic or East Asian
Peter A. Boodberg reconstructs the Chinese transcription 's Middle Chinese pronunciation as *’âṣinâ, which he derives from Turkic *ašïn, further from Proto-Turkic root *aš- ("to cross a mountain"), referring to the origin legend wherein the wolf-descended Turks had to cross mountains. Boodberg additionally derives the Middle Chinese transcription *’âṣitək (whence standard Chinese Āshǐdé) from this same root *aš-, immediately through *aşıd-.
Japanese Sinologist and historian Kurakichi Shiratori suggested that Ashina comes from *Esh- in Proto-Turkic. Christopher I. Beckwith reads the word Ashina as a Turkic name Arslan, based on Byzantine historian Menander Protector's record that “the name of the earliest rulers of the Turks was Arsilas” meaning that Ashina may have been an earlier form or a Chinese corrupted form of Arslan.
Based on Chinese sources' testament that the Ashina, upon becoming the head of Turks, exhibited a tuğ banner with a wolf head over their gate in reminiscence of its origins,Bichurin, 1950, p. 220–221Zhoushu, vol. 50: quote: "旗纛之上，施金狼頭。侍衞之士，謂之附離，夏言亦狼也。蓋本狼生，志不忘舊。"Suishu vol. 84. quote "故牙門建狼頭纛，示不忘本也。" the name "Ashina" is translated by Boodberg as "wolf", cf. Tuoba 叱奴 *čino, Middle Mongol činua, Khalkha čono.Boodberg, 1936, p. 182 Gumilev, on the other hand, considered 阿 (A) as a prefix, a respect marker placed before a name, and accepted 'shih-na' as činua, just as Boodberg did; thus, he concluded that A-shih-na means "noble wolf."Gumilev, 1967, p. 23 Nevertheless, Golden contends that derivation from Mongolic is mistaken.Golden, Peter B. (August 2018). "The Ethnogonic Tales of the Türks". The Medieval History Journal, 21(2). 21 (2): 292.
On the Khor-Asgat inscription, the form Ašїnas is written and is similar to the Sogdian form Ašinas from the Bugut and Karabalgasun steles and the Arabic forms Ašinās and Ašnās from medieval Islamic sources. Reasoning that Chinese editors usually avoided the coda /-s/, Takashi Ōsawa hypothetically derives the family name Ašїnas from their tribal ancestress's name *A-ši-na and the final element -as, which he explains as a plural suffix (similar to the Turkic Käŋäräs < Käŋär "(Kangar / Kangly)" + suffix -(ä)s) as proposed by Marquart, Melioranskii and others.
He further links *A-ši-na to the Xiongnu title 閼氏, which was pronounced *′ât-zie in Late Middle Chinese, meant "wife of a ruler", and might be derived from *aš / eš, *azhi / *ezhi < *ašïn / *ešin, and *azhïn / *ezhin, further from Tungusic *Aši < *asun / *asi < *hasun < *khasu < *kasun < *katsun and Turko-Mongolic *Ači < ačun < *hatun < khatun < katun.Takashi Ōsawa, “A hypothesis on the etymology of the Old Turkic royal clan name Ašina/Ašinas and the transformation process in the early Abbasid period”, Chronica, S. 11, (2011), pp. 145-153.
Legends
Chinese chroniclers recorded four origin tales, which Golden termed "Wolf Tale I", "Wolf Tale II", "Shemo (Žama) and the Deer Tale" and "Historical Account", of the Turks in dynasty histories and historical compilations "based on or copied from the same source(s) and repeated in later collections of historical tales".
Wolf Tale I: Ashina was one of ten sons born to a grey she-wolf (see: Asena) in the north of Gaochang.Zhoushu, vol. 50 Wolf Tale II: The ancestor of the Ashina was a man from the Suo nation (north of Xiongnu) whose mother was a lupine season goddess. Shemo and the Deer Tale: The Ashina descended from a skilled archer named Shemo, who had once fallen in love with a sea goddess west of Ashide cave.Youyang Zazu, vol. 4 Youyang Zazu, "vol. 4". Siku Quanshu version, pp. 119, 120, 121 of 161. Historical Account: The Ashina were mixture stocks from the Pingliang commandery of eastern Gansu.Suishu, vol. 84
These stories were sometimes pieced together to form a chronologically coherent narrative of early Ashina history. However, as the Book of Zhou, the Book of Sui, and the Youyang Zazu were all written around the same time, during the early Tang dynasty, it is debatable whether they could truly be considered chronological or rather should be considered competing versions of the Ashina's origin.Xue, Zongzheng. History of Turks (1992) 39–85