Togarmah (Part 1/3)
Unraveling the persistent nightmare of Turkish ancestral propaganda
Finally we arrive at the third son of Gomer, Togarmah. According to various medieval sources, particular of note the Jewish Khazars, Togarmah is identified as the ancestor of many Turkic tribes; among them Bulgars (Bulgarians), Alans, Pechenegs, Oghuz (Turks), Oghurs (Hungarians). Each of these tribes is often linked to movements of Indo-European groups which correlates to Togarmah’s descent from Gomer. Despite each of these people being much later groups this identification is quite interesting since it shows Togarmah may represent quite an odd mix of Slavic, Germanic, Turkic, and Ugric (Hungarian) peoples rather than being a specific ethnic grouping. However all of these people did speak related Turkic languages, perhaps showing how they merged into Togarmah’s tribe.
When it comes to Togarmah it is highly likely that in addition to this later Khazar identification of Togarmah with Turks; the fortified city of Tegarama located in the Luwian speaking Neo-Hittite state of Kammanu - centered inside the old Hittite state of Kizzuwatna - is a likely candidate for Moses’s contemporary identification of Togarmah. The Luwians, like their relative Hittites1, were an Indo-European speaking people who migrated from a homeland around Thrace in 3000 BCE. These people, like all of the peoples associated with Gomer, are distinctly equestrian horse riders with a heavy emphasis on nomadic traditions not too dissimilar from Turkic culture.
While one may end their search here for the identification of descendants of Togarmah, it should be said that individual names are not limited to a single tribal nation, and often cities are founded by people who do not come from, or reside in said city.2 While it is feasible the Luwians themselves did not give their name to the city of Tegarama - possibly being given during one of Togarmah’s campaigns in the Syro-Hittites city-states that were generally the location of foreign military incursions - what is likely is that the Luwians had some sort of tribal contact with those who did dwell in Tegarama and were themselves affiliated with a broader “Togarmah” ancestor that the Tegarama natives shared.
As briefly mentioned prior, one of the major models of migration in this period is one where nomads would often have contacts with family members who would live in the city for economic benefit, and over the Bronze Age we see an increase in these nomads deciding to move entirely into the city.3 It is very possible the Luwian families outside Tegarama had familial connections to the city which is consistent with other Syro-Hittite states from the bible. Indeed, the notable example of Abraham and the city of Harran, itself within the Syro-Hittite region, leads credence that the cities in this area often shared familial contacts across the near east.
Incidentally in 278 BCE, the previously mentioned Celtic Galatians invaded Macedonia (Thrace) and made their way across the Bosphorus into central Anatolia, settling in the city of Ancyra, better known today as Ankara, the capital of Turkey. The Galatians are slowly Hellenized during the Roman period, and are referred to as ‘Gallo-Graeci’, indicating a familiarity with other Japhetite peoples to the point where integration can occur within a generation, or two. It would be of little shock then that genetic studies on Greeks and Turks4 put them much more closely aligned with Greek Hellenes, Celtic Galatians, Tegarama Luwians and even Riphath and his Paphlagonians who historically settled in the north of Anatolia, directly above the Galatians.
While there is a tendency to not group these people together culturally, modern genetics and linguistics clearly defines them as all part of an interrelated group even if we are unsure by which method. Even within Greek mythology the Celts, Gauls, and Illyrians are all placed closely together with the brothers Celtus, Galas and Illyrius respectively founding these three groups.
What should become clear at this point is that while often each son is distantly related to the father, each son forms their own recognizable ethnicities that even in modern contexts would be seen as entirely distinct. Slavs, Celts, and Turks typically might not be seen as relating to Germanics in any way, but a shared distant genetic ancestry and socio-religious cultural heritage tends to be represented in the records.
The attached chart of eastern Mediterranean Haplogroup genetics shows very little differences between Greek and Turkish populations, but also shows varying levels of different genetic admixture for Turks from different regions. This shows “Turk” is far from a singular identity, and again like Celtic, or Jewish is more of a mixture of identities that became “Turkified” through a process of “Turkification”. To varying degrees this process occurred in the region throughout a 500 year period during the dominance of the Ottoman Empire, who forcibly Turkified Greeks, Romanians, Albanians, Cypriots, as well as many Levantine populations including Kurds, Armenians, Alawites, Jews, and the Druze.
Further confusing this identity of “Turk” is the fact this process was a much later continuing of the Turkification process that had begun in the Central Asian steppes as early as the 6th century AD. The trigger for this original “Turkic” identity were the East Asian Gokturks who arose out of Mongolia near the border of China. The usage of Turkic as the empire's primary language came after early official texts and coins were written in Sogdian showing they clearly understood the language.5 Most of the cultures across the old Sibero-Scythian cultural zone are subsumed into this broadly “Turkic” identity following the Gokturk Empire’s rise making “Turkish” and “Turkic” far later post 6th century identities than the Bronze Age time period when the Table of Nations was written.
Turks may indeed be descendants of Togarmah, but are a much more complex fusing of identities over a nearly 2000 year history. Attempting to trace the Turkic roots back to their origin we can decipher the Gokturks evolution in order to understand who these “Turks” actually might be identified with prior to the 6th century.
The term Gokturk comes from the ruling clan of the First and Second Turkic Khaganates, the Ashina, whose name likely means “Deep Blue”. The original term Ashina is most plausibly a Saka term, helping tie this group into the Saka-Cimmerians, or at the very least showing close contact linguistically. This Saka term was translated directly into Turkic where the root cognate ‘Gok’ means “Blue”. The original implication of the term “Deep Blue” is with a heavenly sky, or “celestial” sky giving rise to an alternative translation of the term Ashina as “Celestial”. Interesting with this identification is the importance of the color blue in East Asia oftentimes representing the cardinal direction of East.6 In this context, the term might be viewed as “Eastern Turks” showing a demarcation between the more Westernly Scythian-Saka branches that over time merge into a broadly Turkic identity.
What is tricky is the fact these Turkic Ashina are not actually “Turk” in later senses of the word. The Gokturks did not call any modern Turkic groups Turks, and only referred to their own group as “Turk”. The previously mentioned Jewish-Turkic Khazars did claim some form of descent from the Ashina, but this link is never emphasized by other Turkic groups like the Seljuqs, Uyghurs, or Karakhanids. What can be said is they were all indeed “Turkic” - possibly resulting from the Turkification in Central Asia - but the appellation “Turk” is a bit of a later misnomer used to refer to anyone who was a subject of the Gokturk Empire.
Looking further back in history, the Gokturks themselves were originally vassals of the Rouran Khaganate which lasted over 225 year's between 330-555 AD and controlled nearly all of the territory the Gokturks later conquered. After the rise of the Gokturks, these Rouran pressed west toward Europe making up a majority of the Pannonian Avars and Tatars, both of which contain a large East Asian sub stock.
Fitting with this East Asian origin for the Avars and Tatars, it is recorded in the Chinese Book of Wei that these Rouran traced their origins to the Donghu “Eastern Barbarians” that raided the earliest Chinese states between 800-200 BCE.7 Helping to differentiate the Donghu Eastern Barbarians/Rouran from the Gokturks is the fact that the Donghu were essentially proto-Mongols who spoke a non-Turkic para-Mongolic language.
The term Donghu contrasts with the term “Wuhu” meaning Five Barbarians. These “Five Hu” were the ancient non-Han Chinese people who immigrated into northern China during the Han dynasty circa 4th-5th centuries. These people were: the Xiongnu, Jie, Xianbei, Di, and Qiang and did not include the Donghu, but the Xianbei are often considered proto-Mongolic peoples like the Donghu. It is assumed that the Donghu splintered into the Xianbei and Wuhuan making the Xianbei later Donghu representatives of the Mongolic component of the Five Barbarians. The term “Wu-huan” morphed from the original Chiense “a-yuan”, itself morphing from “A-wan” which came from Awar which is remarkably similar to the term “Avar” used by related groups. We will return to the Proto-Mongols later, but what is clear for now is that these Donghu Proto-Mongols are separate from the Gokturk Turkics.
One related people to the Gokturks were the Dingling centered around the Yenisei river in Siberia. Like the Gokturks, the Dingling spoke a proto-Turkic language that eventually formed the basis for Eastern Turkic.8 These Dingling are probably the same people as the Tagar culture that descended from the Afanasievo - representing the furthest most eastern Scythian group - and were related to the Turkic speaking Kirghiz further north on the Yenisei. Genetic testing on these Tagar people has corroborated records of a European appearance for the Dingling, and other Turkic groups showing that they were often blue-eyed and light-haired prior to the onset of an increasing East Asian admixture.9 Unlike the Gokturks who successfully formed their own Turkic empire, the Dingling became a subject group of the Xiongnu in later centuries.10 Eventually these groups settled in the Tarim Basin between the 5th and 7th centuries just as the Uygher people start to show up in historical records - presumably the similarly Turkic Uygher’s were some component of the Dingling.
Continuing with this theory, most scholars do agree “Ashina” descends from an Indo-European source rather than specifically “Turkic”, potentially part of the Saka or Wusun people.11 Other scholars affirm this and posit the Ashina ethnic core was likely Indo-Iranian speaking some form of Sogdian (Saka), or Tocharian.12 During the section on Riphath, we briefly touched on Tocharian and Anatolian branches being the two “furthest” branches from the rest of the Indo-European language tree and this connection between the Ashina speaking a possible Tocharian lines up with these Gokturks being some later subgroup of Togarmah. This also fits together with the confusing identifications of Togarmah as an Anatolian group such as the Luwians, or Hittites since both of those groups spoke languages closest to Tocharian.
For now we will end this section here, and continue unraveling the story of the Turks and their associated Eastern Siberian people groups. We will look at the Sogdians, Tocharians and other Indo-European groups, and continue tracing back the identity of the Gokturks and their proto-Turkish identity.
There will be at least two more parts, with a planned second part to be released this coming Sunday. The final section on Togarmah, and thus Gomer’s descendants, will be released on the following Wednesday. After which we will move onto the section on Magog which will be a little less in-depth since much of the framework for Magog is laid out in Togarmah.
Once again I hope you gained something from reading, and deepened your own understanding of the subject matter, as well as potentially reinforced your faith. Please leave any comments below, and don’t be afraid to share if you know anyone else who might be interested reading.
Not to be confused with the Hatti peoples, the native inhabitants of the Hittite region prior to the Indo-European migration
Alexandria was founded nine times by Alexander, none of which were in his homeland of Macedon.
A trend that continues until the Bronze Age Collapse
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Roux, Jean-Paul (2000). Histoire des Turcs (in French). Fayard.
Golden, P.B. (1992) Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Series: Turcologia, Volume 9. Otto-Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden p. 117
Golden, Peter B. "Some Notes on the Avars and Rouran", in The Steppe Lands and the World beyond Them. Ed. Curta, Maleon. Iași (2013). pp. 54–55.
Hyun Jin Kim: The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2013. pp.175-176.
Keyser, Christine; Bouakaze, Caroline; Crubézy, Eric; Nikolaev, Valery G.; Montagnon, Daniel; Reis, Tatiana; Ludes, Bertrand (May 16, 2009). "Ancient DNA provides new insights into the history of south Siberian Kurgan people". Human Genetics. 126 (3): 395–410.
Lu, Simian (1996). A History of Ethnic Groups in China. Beijing: Oriental Press. pp. 111, 135-137.
Sinor, Denis; Klyashtorny, S. G. (1 January 1996). "The Türk Empire". In Litvinsky, B. A. (ed.). History of Civilizations of Central Asia: The crossroads of civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750. UNESCO. pp. 327–346.
Ratcliffe, Jonathan (2020). Trepanier, Lee (ed.). Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought. Lexington Books. p. 114.
Good stuff---keep it up!