Military Ranks and Titles From Old Turkic to Middle Turkic

Abstract

This study determines the military-administrative ranks and titles in Old and Middle Turkic texts beginning with the Köktürk Inscriptions, monuments bearing the first known Turkic written alphabet and the Old Uighur documents created afterwards. It also aims to demonstrate how this system of military ranks and titles was transformed in Karakhanid, Khwarezm-Kipchak and Chaghatayid Turkic as the idioms of the first Islamic period of Turkic. In this context, it is established that in Old Turkic, the majority of the ranks and titles were of Turkic origin and only a limited number of the related vocabularies were of Chinese, Sanskrit and Iranian. This situation changed as Arabic and Persian words appeared in Kutadgu Bilig (11th century) for the first time as the first literary Islamic-Turkic work and as their number grew and replaced many Old Turkic ranks and titles in the following Khwarezm-Kipchak period during the 1415th centuries. In addition to Arabic and Persian loanwords, many Mongolian words were also used in Chaghatay Turkic, which became an advanced literary Turkic idiom in the second part of the 15th century, and all these lexical items consequently created a rich military terminology in that period.