Turko-Mongol

The Turco-Mongol or Turko-Mongol tradition was an ethnocultural synthesis that arose in Asia during the 14th century, among the ruling elites of the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate. The ruling Mongol elites of these Khanates eventually assimilated into the Turkic populations that they conquered and ruled over, thus becoming known as Turco-Mongols. These elites gradually adopted Islam (from previous religions such as Tengrism) as well as Turkic languages, while retaining Mongol political and legal institutions.

The Turco-Mongols founded many Islamic successor states after the collapse of the Mongol Khanates, such as the Kazakh Khanate and Tatar Khanates that succeeded the Golden Horde (e.g., Khanate of Crimea, Astrakhan Khanate, Kazan Khanate) and the Timurid Empire, which succeeded the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Babur (1483–1530), a Turco-Mongol prince and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur, founded the Mughal Empire, which ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent. The Turks and Tatars also ruled part of Egypt, exercising political and military authority during the Mamluk Sultanate.

These Turco-Mongol elites became patrons of the Turco-Persian tradition, which was the predominant culture amongst the Muslims of Central Asia at the time. In subsequent centuries, the Turco-Persian culture was carried on further by the conquering Turco-Mongols to neighbouring regions, eventually becoming the predominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of South Asia (Indian subcontinent), specifically North India (Mughal Empire), Central Asia and the Tarim Basin (Northwest China) and large parts of West Asia (Middle East).

Antecedence

Before the time of Genghis Khan, Turkic peoples and Mongols exchanged words between each other, with Turkic languages being more active than Mongolian. A much earlier Turco-Mongol tradition existed, as evidenced by the extensive lexical borrowings from Proto-Turkic in the Proto-Mongolic language from around at least the first millennium BCE. Turkic and Mongolic languages share extensive borrowed similarities in their personal pronouns, among other lexical similarities, which seem to date to before this era and already existed before the breakup of the Turkic people around 500 BCE. A still more ancient period of prolonged language contact between Turkic and Mongol languages is indicated by further and more fundamental phonotactic, grammatical, and typological similarities (e.g. synchronic vowel harmony, lack of grammatical gender, extensive agglutination, highly similar phonotactic rules and phonology).

In the past, these similarities were attributed to a genetic relationship and led to the widespread acceptance of an Altaic language family. More recently, due to the lack of a definitive demonstration of genetic relationship, these similarities have been divided into these three known periods of language contact. The similarities have led to the proposal of a Northeast Asian sprachbund instead, which also includes the Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic language families, although Turkic and Mongolic display the most extensive similarities. According to recent aggregation and research, there are doublet