The Turkic term ''oğuz'' or ''oğur'' (in z- and r-Turkic, respectively) is a historical term for "military division, clan, or tribe" among the

Turkic peoples The Turkic peoples are a collection of diverse ethnic groups of West, Central, East, and North Asia as well as parts of Europe, who speak Turkic languages.. "Turkic peoples, any of various peoples whose members speak languages belonging to ...

. With the

Mongol invasions The Mongol invasions and conquests took place during the 13th and 14th centuries, creating history's largest contiguous empire: the Mongol Empire (1206-1368), which by 1300 covered large parts of Eurasia. Historians regard the Mongol devastation ...

of 1206–21, the Turkic khaganates were replaced by Mongol or hybrid Turco-Mongol confederations, where the corresponding military division came to be known as '' orda''.

Background

The 8th-century Kül Tigin stela has the earliest instance of the term in Old Turkic

epigraphy Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the w ...

: ''Toquz Oghuz'', the "nine tribes". Later the word appears often for two largely separate groups of the Turkic migration in the early medieval period, namely: * Onogur "ten tribes" * Utigurs *

Kutrigurs Kutrigurs were Turkic nomadic equestrians who flourished on the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the 6th century AD. To their east were the similar Utigurs and both possibly were closely related to the Bulgars. They warred with the Byzantine Empire and ...

* Uyghur The stem ''uq-, oq-'' "kin, tribe" is from a Proto-Turkic ''*uk''. The Old Turkic word has often been connected with ''oq'' "arrow"; Pohl (2002) in explanation of this connection adduces the Chinese ''T'ang-shu'' chronicle, which reports "the khan divided his realm into ten tribes. To the leader of each tribe, he sent an arrow. The name

f these ten leaders F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''. Hist ...

was 'the ten ''

she She most commonly refers to: *She (pronoun), the third person singular, feminine, nominative case pronoun in modern English. She or S.H.E. may also refer to: Literature and films *'' She: A History of Adventure'', an 1887 novel by H. Rider Hagga ...

'' ', but they were also called 'the ten arrows'." the "arrows" connection was first reported by Édouard Chavannes, ''Documents sur les Tou-kiue (Turcs) occidentaux'', 1900.Walter Pohl, ''Die Awaren: ein Steppenvolk im Mitteleuropa, 567-822 n. Chr'', C.H.Beck (2002), , p. 26-29. An ''oguz'' (''ogur'') was in origin a military division of a

Nomadic empire Nomadic empires, sometimes also called steppe empires, Central or Inner Asian empires, were the empires erected by the bow-wielding, horse-riding, nomadic people in the Eurasian Steppe, from classical antiquity (Scythia) to the early modern era ...

, which acquired tribal or ethnic connotations, by processes of

ethnogenesis Ethnogenesis (; ) is "the formation and development of an ethnic group". This can originate by group self-identification or by outside identification. The term ''ethnogenesis'' was originally a mid-19th century neologism that was later introd ...

References

*Karoly Czeglédy, ''On the Numerical Composition of the Ancient Turkic Tribal Confederations'', Acta Orient. Hung., 25 (1972), 275-281.

Background

References

Further reading

See also