Turkic tribal confederations

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. With the Mongol invasions 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 Kul Tigin stela has the earliest instance of the term in Old Turkic epigraphy: 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
• Uyghur
• Saragurs

The stem uq-, oq- "kin, tribe" is from a Proto-Turkic *uk. The Old Turkic word has often been connected with oq "arrow";^[1] 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 [of these ten leaders] was 'the ten she', but they were also called 'the ten arrows'."^[2][3] An oguz (ogur) was in origin a military division of a Nomadic empire, which acquired tribal or ethnic connotations, by processes of ethnogenesis.^[3]

See also

• Turkic peoples
• Oghur Turks
• Oghuz Turks
• Huns
• Xiongnu
• Khaganate
• Turkic migration
• Orda (organization)